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I had the opportunity to participate in a two hour review of the latest features in the Dealer.com platform in August and it is clear that the Dealer.com development team in Vermont has been busy.  Last year Dealer.com was a 2009 ASMA Awards dual award winner so this year they had big shoes to fill.  They did not disappoint our review team.

This summary is not a full review of the SEO architecture and search strengths of the new platform.  A full review will come when PCG Digital Marketing presents the 2010 ASMA Awards and Study Report on October 13, 2010 in Las Vegas. 

It is hard to improve on a product that has so many strengths but Rick Gibbs, CEO of Dealer.com, has managed to inspire his team to greatness.  One of the highlights of the presentation was the demonstration given by Eric Mayhew who is the chief architect behind their TCD Platform (Total Control Dominator).  The Dealer.com TCD platform is truly one of the most important automotive advertising tools that car dealers can utilize for digital marketing success.

TCD is best described as a car dealer’s personalized digital advertising dashboard. TCD directly communicates with Google, Yahoo and Bing paid advertising networks so car dealers can adjust Pay-Per-Click budgets and targets without being a Digital Marketing Geek. 

TCD is Google Adwords on steroids! 

(If I had to rename the product I would call it Total Competitor Domination.)

Dealer.com TCD digital advertising platform takes business operating rules and translates them into actionable tasks in Google, Yahoo and Bing’s paid advertising network. One rule could be to advertise all off-make used cars as soon as they come into stock.  

Another rule could be to start a weekend advertising campaign which offers a $2,000 reduction off of MSRP on select new models starting at 5:00 PM on Friday. Google Adwords out of the box is not designed for the average Internet Sales Manager to operate proficiently and in many cases, self-managed Adwords campaigns can be very costly to dealers.

In the screen shot above, a dealership executive or Internet Sales Manager can easily see their current cost per lead and current balance.   Need to make a change? Slide the $ button to increase or decrease spending.  The Marketing Focus panel allows high level adjustments of spending by marketing focus.   Do you want to increase the distribution of spending in your current budget to include “Used Vehicles”?  Simply click on stars 1 - 5 to activate those keyword goals.

Innovative Phone Number Tracking

Dealer.com has integrated phone number tracking with all Pay-Per-Click campaigns.  You may not be impressed by that fact since other companies offer similar services.  However, Dealer.com takes it to the next level by scraping all pages on the dealer’s website that has a phone number and replacing it with the PPC tracking number.  This includes all custom text content pages created by the dealership staff or advertising agency that may have embedded different phone numbers.

This creates more accurate PPC campaign metrics so more calls can be attributed to their true source of visitor engagement.

What is brilliant with TCD is that once campaigns are setup, these high level executive controls can really keep the dealer engaged with digital advertising success.  I could write a 20-page report on the unique benefits of TCD but that is not the focus of this overview.  Suffice to say that Dealer.com clients have a distinct advantage in automotive digital advertising if they choose to leverage the power of TCD.

Automated Integration of Dealer Inventory

TCD is the leader in integrated car inventory management that is seamlessly connected to Google Adwords as well as Yahoo and Bing PPC services.  Pay Per Click advertisements can utilize information in the dealers DMS about any new or used car in stock.  (See graphic below) Dealers who use PPC campaigns for used cars will save significant setup time if they compare the time it takes to create campaigns for individual used cars.

Behind these well-designed executive level controls is an amazing drill down user interface that can control every detail of a Google Adwords campaign from inside TCD.    In the graphic above, dealers can decide what time slots to allocate their paid advertising dollars.

This panel also provides check boxes to turn on or off their powerful integrated inventory advertising features. Other automotive website providers can operate Google Adwords from inside their administrative panel but offer little in terms of user interface and integrated business intelligence rules.

Dealer.com has even enhanced the Google Adwords platform by adding new geo-targeting functionality that even Adwords does not provide.  Dealer’s ability to create custom advertising “bands” could not be easier with the custom interface provided by TCD.  What this means to potential critics is that TCD does not “dummy-down” Adwords so proficient PPC experts will not be held back.

It is hard to capture my excitement for the TCD platform because there is nothing on the market more perfectly designed for car dealers who believe in paid digital advertising, aka Pay-Per-Click (PPC).  I tip my hat to Eric Mayhew, TCD’s chief architect, because not too many people can claim that they reinvested Adwords functionality for the automotive industry.

One more kicker that Eric added to TCD put a smile on my face.  Dealer.com looks at the top organic search phrases that bring consumers to a dealer’s website and that produce leads.  If these keywords are not in the current Adwords campaigns, they can be automatically added.  Slick!

 Those that don’t believe in the benefits of PPC will be out of business shortly.  Why?  Because Automotive SEO strategies cannot place a car dealer on Google Page One for broad search terms like “Toyota Camry,” “Used Cars,” or “BMW Dealer.”  As long as consumers continue to use broad search phrases, dealers will need to invest in Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns to stay on Google Page One.

Managing OEM Incentives

Dealer.com announced a new integrated Incentives Manager package after the 2009 ASMA Study was completed. This month we had the opportunity to drill down into the features of this add-on product.  Car dealer websites are notorious for having “specials” pages blank and clumsy integration of manufacturer incentives.  Normally, these incentives are not listed on inventory pages where consumers spend the majority of their time on a car dealer website.  Go figure!

With Dealer.com Incentives Manager, dealers can leverage direct incentives data streams to their dealership website.  These incentives can be controlled to integrate with car inventory listing pages as well as car detail pages.  Attempting to integrate incentives manually is impossible and that is why this feature is a great value to Dealer.com customers. Since consumers “shop price” as part of their online purchasing decision, having the lowest price in real-time can make a big difference in lead volume.

Not to dwell on the TCD platform again, but Dealer.com can also take the real-time OEM incentives and create PPC campaigns that advertise their current programs.  This is another innovation that is ground-breaking and a time saver for dealers who like to advertise OEM incentive programs and be first to market.

Automotive SEO Architecture

Once again, the Dealer.com administrative management tools show careful consideration to the skill levels of car dealer employees. The user interface to change SEO Page Titles and META tags continues to be a breeze.

One of the nicer elements of editing pages in Dealer.com is that once you are in editing mode, you can navigate through the website using the same menus that visitors use.   This may not seem important but it is a time saver. Try matching website pages to cryptic back-end file naming conventions and before you know it, you can waste hours of your time.

The Dealer.com Page Builder tools continues to grow with more widgets (see graphic on right) to create pages on the fly.

The Page Builder tool is intuitive and customers do not need to call technical support to create a blank page to edit. 

One limitation in the current version of the software is that custom pages cannot be placed more than two levels down in the navigation tree.

Content is King

Consumers search for answers and recommendations for the questions that are top of mind and car dealers need to build content on their websites to meet this need.  Dealer.com has a multi-pronged approach to adding content; video blogging, integrated car reviews, and consumer reviews. 

The video blogging feature creates optimized blog pages for each car in stock with unique text and META tags based on the audio script for the vehicle.  This feature creates a large number of content pages that are indexed by Google which has many benefits from an SEO perspective.

Consumers who purchase a car from a Dealer.com dealer can add their comments on the car that they purchased.  Dealer.com will compile and leverage these positive consumer comments on similar cars in stock.  Over time, this feature will allow car inventory pages to have more content and targeted keywords to increase the authority of their website pages.  This is another example of Dealer.com’s leadership in applying proven Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies.

Dealer.com offers a blog with their base platform which is a customized WordPress installation.  This was also added after last year’s ASMA Awards.  This move further reinforces the automotive industry’s growing love affair with content building tools.  I’ve been preaching that all dealers need to have content writers as part of their advertising budget.  Dealer.com’s latest platform offers many ways to leverage content writers and third party SEO companies.

Fixed Operations Marketing

Lastly, Dealer.com and DriverSide made an announcement in April 2010 which an excerpt has been included below:

The two companies are partnering in an exclusive agreement to launch a series of products for new and used car franchises, the first of which will add robust fixed-ops content to Dealer.com’s industry leading platform. A full line up of further Fixed Operations and service marketing products will follow in coming months.

We agree with Dealer.com that the next area of opportunity for car dealers is in Fixed Operations SEO and digital marketing. Dealer.com has tightly integrated customer data into their product offering for targeted direct marketing.  The Fixed Operations package can also be integrated into TCD to drive more service revenue via PPC.

Summary

We look forward to testing the new content management features in the latest Dealer.com platform as part of the 2010 ASMA Study.  The product development team at Dealer.com should be recognized for not resting on the laurels and delivering a cutting edge product.  Bravo!

Dealers searching for a well integrated digital advertising platform that masters Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing and integrates a powerful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) infrastructure should get a demo of this stellar performer.

I may be sounding like a broken record, if anyone remembers vinyl recordings, but the largest companies that service automotive retailers have made major investments in rebuilding their website platforms in the past year.

This is a very promising trend and will make attending the upcoming October automotive conferences critical for any car dealership looking to significantly grow their business in 2011.

The XIGroup, owned by Dominion Dealer Solutions, is no exception. The latest XIGroup platform we reviewed showcased many features that will surely please their user community as well as attract new customers. This article is not meant to be a full review of the XIGroup website technology.  The XIGroup platform will be included in the 2010 ASMA Report that will be published on October 13, 2010 which recognizes and awards the leaders in automotive search technology.

Focus on Data Quality

I was impressed with Joe High, General Manager of XIGroup, who made the presentation because his focus was not the same as other companies that we have reviewed as part of the 2010 ASMA Study.  Joe started his presentation with a focus on the quality of data presented on car dealer inventory pages.

Inventory pages are the most popular pages used by consumers when visiting a car dealer website.  XIGroup has leveraged automotive data from Data One to create what Joe High considers the highest quality car detail data in the industry.   You don’t have to look hard to find car dealer website with inaccurate data for options and configuration data by VIN Number.

I was also impressed how easy the car detail pages could be configured to give car dealers the ultimate granularity in how their cars are presented online.  In the screen shot below, you can see that dozens of features can be turned on or off on a car listing page to make the consumer experience powerful.

XIGroup Administrative Tools

In fact, this degree of customization is integral in the entire platform.  I give XIGroup high marks for their back-end administrative menus on how easy it was to change website features. Some car dealer website platforms have so many features that dealers can get lost in finding configuration settings.

The XIGroup administration controls were clean and followed a user interface design that even novices could follow. The menu design is a hybrid between “old-school” menus that dealers like and new navigational aids that the next generation of dealership employees demand.  Shown below is one master menu that controls some of the user configuration options:

One of the most interesting features was their rules based engine.  Dealers can quickly update inventory  pricing, tags, call-outs, visibility based on business rules.  If dealers wanted to add a “special” tag on all cars in inventory over 30 days, that can be done in one click.  Dealers who want to take any car out of inventory without waiting overnight for a new feed can do so quickly.  The rules based inventory management features will save dealers a lot of time when compared to manual editing.

Consumer Friendly Car Listing Pages

Another feature of the XIGroup platform is that all car photos can have a custom overlay with the dealer’s information.  Photos on a car dealer’s website look so much better when a consistent photo overlay is used.  This is branding 101! The XI platform can automatically take plain photos and dress them up with the dealers phone number, website address and logo.

The integration of car photos and videos is very smooth and the car detail pages are very clean and attractive.  I like that consumers can bookmark cars, save them and create a side by side comparison.  This feature is useful when consumers find similar new cars in stock that have significantly different prices.  The tool can show them how the installed options change their delivered cost.

In the screen shot below, you can see where I highlighted in red the two visual navigation controls that are visible on car detail pages:

XIGroup SEO Functionality

The new XIGroup platform has one of the strongest page editors on the market and gives dealers full control over SEO Page Titles, META Descriptions and Keywords.  Their platform allows dealers to create unlimited content pages and these pages can be placed on multi-level nested navigation menus.

XIGroup is one of a handful of website platforms that offer specific upgraded packages for Automotive SEO.   Their offerings to car dealers who want managed SEO include Basic SEO, Enhanced SEO and SEO Elite, which are all priced very reasonably.   These packages are what I would consider “On-Site” SEO and on-site optimization is a very important part of the overall success of any car dealer’s website.

XIGroup Websites Summary

In conclusion,  XIGroup hit the bull’s-eye for dealer usability and consumer shopping tools.  Their new platform does a great job of providing a robust feature set that can be easily controlled by dealership staff; especially those that do not have a technical background.   With their mobile platform offering and a new website architecture, XIGroup  website technology demands a closer look.

We look forward to testing this new platform as part of the 2010 ASMA Awards and rating their search marketing strengths.  Results of our review of 46 automotive website platforms will be announced on October 13, 2010 and published on www.asmaawards.org.

I had the opportunity to review the latest enhancements to the DealerFire website platform this week with the presentation coming from company founder Eric Hoopman. 

Last year DealerFire was one of the nine award winning companies in the 2009 ASMA Study. (download a copy) It is clear that DealerFire has not been resting on their laurels with the amount of new products coming to market and their Engine 5 platform.

This is not a full review of their website technology however on October 13, 2010 their technology will be part of the 2010 ASMA Study.  This year PCG Digital Marketing will review 46 website platforms and recognize the leaders in a number of categories.

If we had an award last year for the best graphically designed websites , DealerFire would have been a frontrunner!  Our team universally agreed that DealerFire sites stand out from the crowd on their design merits. The consumer facing website controls are well thought out and reduce clicks. Dealers looking to break  away from the typical website interface, should take a look at DealerFire technology.

Some of the newest updates to popular automotive website platforms include the ability to change designs, colors and page layouts on the fly.  DealerFire already has the ability and they have improved on the flexibility of those changes this year. Their core technology has a number of design themes that can be selected and each theme has modules and components that can be used to create customized pages.  We were shown many of their new features on their demo site located at: http://www.customdealerwebsite.com

DealerFire Mobile Leadership

DealerFire has one of the strongest mobile platforms we have seen with SMS / Text to mobile integration and one of the cleanest presentations for the iPad.   Car detail pages allow consumers to save the car information to their mobile phone.  You can see the call to action box on the right column in the   screenshot below. The presentation on my iPhone was very clean.  When the dealer calls, this feature makes it easy to discuss the car with data handy in front of the mobile user.

The team at DealerFire has also embraced social media by releasing Facebook inventory and coupon tabs for Dealer Fan pages.  I like the idea that the coupons are synchronized on the website and Facebook. An active Facebook community  manager could leverage these coupons nicely online.

DealerFire SEO Openess

In regards to Search Engine Optimization, their backend tools allow full editing of Page Titles and META tags.  The administrative tool allows users to drop in Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics Code for full transparency of site data and traffic.   The company also strives for full W3C Compliance and has sitemaps for both the text pages and a separate video sitemap.

Since content is king, DealerFire has chosen to integrate a WordPress into their base website package which is a smart choice.  WordPress is the platform that I prefer and the WordPress blog can be configured either as a sub-domain or as a sub-directory.

There were a number of features that we thought created a better call to action, specifically I liked the ” adopt a car”  feature.  Cars in inventory can be assigned to different salespersons so that on a car detail page a photo and phone number appears offering assistance. See screenshot below in the green boxed   area.

 

Another feature we liked was the ability to show inventory counts by model in the drop-down navigation menus, which can be turned on or off with a click.  The website nicely integrates video and has some nice hooks for YouTube users. 

The team at DealerFire is clearly passionate about their automotive advertising platform and we look forward to putting it to the test with our ASMA  evaluation team. Dealer looking for a personalized website and hands on customer service experience, should call over the DealerFire and schedule a presentation.