When someone visits your website for the first time it’s the digital equivalent of someone walking into your dealership.
It’s your chance to make a great first impression, control your brand, and tell your story.
And, because it’s a digital visit it’s even more powerful because you can continue to retarget unconverted traffic as they browse other websites and their social media accounts.
Unfortunately, many dealerships don’t understand the value of owning their actual website traffic.
And, there are some automotive marketing vendors that will send traffic to third-party websites they host under the guise that they will send leads to the dealership. (Sometimes these sites even contain VDPs for other dealerships’ cars!)
The result is, it looks like the marketing agency is sending you all of your leads from the ads you’re running. This makes the marketing agency look great because they can easily take credit for any leads and sales that come from their own website.
In theory, this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Who cares where you get leads from as long as you get them, right?
Not exactly…
When your ads are sent to a third-party VDP your dealership is also missing out on all of the traffic that decided not to fill out a lead form on the agency’s third-party site.
These are engaged potential customers you could be showing your inventory ads to as they browse sites like Yahoo, CNN or Weather.com and use social media apps like Facebook and Instagram.
It’s how you can keep reinforcing your brand and keep your dealership top-of-mind through the consumer’s purchase journey.
If your marketing agency is not sending traffic to your own hosted VDP – ask them to.
Every single visit to your website is valuable and an opportunity to continue to market to unconverted traffic.
