Matt Lawson, Vice-President; Dealer Software & OEM
Matt Lawson, Vice-President; Dealer Software & OEM
Benoit Laforce, General Manager, Advertising Solutions
—
This year TRADER showcased its expanded offerings at the NADA Show, investing more in the event this time around after a successful show appearance in 2019.
The company’s focus was largely on their vehicle listings marketplace and the investments they made in providing expanded digital services to dealers last year, along with helping dealers understand their response in terms of cars sold, according to Matt Lawson Vice-President of Dealer Software & OEM at autoTRADER.ca.
Benoit Laforce, General Manager, Advertising Solutions
“We have invested in technology that actually identifies offline transactions with online shopping behaviour, which enables us to directly pinpoint cars sold and the activity with those consumers upstream on our marketplace — which then gives us the ability to turn around and build them an ROI calculation,” said Lawson. “So we can actually get it right down to the dollar a dealer made on a specific vehicle.”
Last year, the company reviewed more than 1,000 dealer studies and said that, on average (nationally, across Canada), autoTRADER.ca and autoHEBDO.net have around a 40 per cent influence on retail sales inside dealerships.
“When you actually track that down to the dollar level, we’re seeing upwards of around 500 per cent ROI. So measurement in terms of cars sold is directionally where we’re headed instead of the sort of legacy-minded metrics, in terms of leads and things,” said Lawson. “Leads are just not a good measure of success in our opinion. We really want to be measured on cars sold and profit.”
As for their website platform for dealers, Lawson said they have re-engineered it.
“There’s a lot of enhancements that we have built into the new TAdvantage, which are unique to dealer websites and will really help to set it apart, and help it sort of perform at a higher level than what we’ve seen before,” said Lawson. “The other thing with our website solution is leveraging our core asset, which is our marketplace and some integration points across there. So passing things like our price guidance IQ functions into the website, and platform personalization.”
Return to NADA Show 2020
