Although the inclimate weather delayed tens of thousands of CES goers at various airports across the Midwest and east coast, the international automotive collective is pushing forward at full speed to deliver us into a world of autonomous vehicles and “connected, smart cities”.

In fact, the term “automotive” is effectively being replaced with the term “mobility”.  The automotive industry is now transitioning into the mobility industry and change on a grand scale is afoot if you take what you see at the CES show at face value.  The combustion engine is an endangered species as visionary engineers are burning the midnight oil trying to extend the range of EVs, perfect electric drive trains, while festooning the roadways with charging and hydrogen fill up stations.

Companies are challenged to reinvent themselves so they don’t become irrelevant in perhaps the fastest moving “mobility revolution” we’ve seen since the car was introduced.  The race is on  to see who can create the most effective and cost efficient radar and lidar systems, autonomously driven vehicles, and integrations of “human with car” reminiscent of the Borg in Star Trek.  Everyone is redefining themselves in this new market.  Companies that worked in avionics specializing in integrating and securing complex operational systems in fighter and commercial jets are now competing to offer OEMs the same service as embedding technology becomes more complicated during this transitional period.

Even Continental Tires is bouncing out of its 150 year history of selling tires by entering into the autonomous vehicle race. Ford is waxing excitedly about fully connected “smart cities”, and Toyota is in full future mode with e-palette which has fleets of electric “minibuses” cruising around town delivering cuisine, consumer goods, and necessary services.  Both Ford and Toyota base their visions of the future on a yet to be built utopia where city councils,

bureaucracies, tax sucking politicians, and criminal syndicates, and labor unions don’t exist.  I suggest they try setting up at Universal Studios City Walk or Disneyland, two of the more popular locations where fantasy is competently put on display.

Truth be told, CES is a true automotive spectacle.  Giant audio suppliers, mod gods, wheel manufacturers, entertainment integration, and concept designs are all there in spades.  There is something fascinating in the “mobility” industry in virtually every mobility-related booth at CES it just depends on how deep you want to dig, and then correlate the information.  Still, the prevailing buzz is that the future is going to be gasoline free.

Ultimately, if all of this technology can be affordably integrated en masse into the new cars of the future, the entire automotive landscape as we know it will change.  Car accidents will be rare and far less fatal, automotive exhaust pollutants will be replaced by 99.9% pure water, streets will be far quieter, there will be little need for expensive auto insurance, body shops and lube joints will go the way of the blacksmith, and stealing cars will be near impossible.  I like that future.

The 2017 Ghoul Pool is complete. We have compiled the list of vehicles that will no longer be continued in 2018. If you bought any one of these phase outs at any point in the last few years, be assured that you’ll still be able to get parts for them should you need repair for the next several years. You’ll just have a heck of a hard time finding buyers when it’s time to.

Here is the list of our 4-wheeled friends who will go the way of such infamous clunkers as the AMC Pacer, the Gremlin, and the VW Dasher of yesteryear.

Volkswagen CC. YTD Sales down 76%. This 4-door sedan will be replaced by the Arteon in 2018 which looks like a fantastic style upgrade over the CC.

Chrysler 200. YTD Sales down 82.4%. The 200 will now follow its former stable mate the “Sebring” into history. Fiat/Chrysler went hard trying to promote this model but lo and behold, t’was not to be.

Mitsubishi i-MiEV. YTD Sales non-existent. Tiny electric car that never had a chance.

Jeep Patriot. YTD Sales down 87%. Meanwhile, it’s more successful semi-twin brother the Compass, is experiencing an 81% increase in sales. The two relatively cheap SUVs were just too similar for both to survive, hence the Patriot was given a 21 gun salute.

Smart ForTwo. YTD Sales down 66%. Easily the smallest car on the market will keep the electric version on the market.

Dodge Viper. YTD Sales down 73%. For a good long time this muscle car had serious bite, and invenimated Dodge with some great numbers, but eventually the venom ran out. The factory will be closed as well.

Hyundai Azera. YTD Sales down 55%. This vehicle was actually a beautiful sedan and provided a lot of bang for the buck for those 162 people who actually invested in one . Sadly, it was a lost soul, confused and out of place in the Hyundai lineup when it seemed best suited to be on the esteemed Genesis roster.

Chevrolet SS. YTD sales down 73% in the US. The muscle laden SS was hamstrung by bad sales in the US and the closing of its factory in Oz. Worldwide sales were up but US sales were anemic.

Infiniti QX70. YTD Sales down 59%. At some point Farrah Fawcett hair became outdated. So did the QX70 “look”. It was hot at one point, but the thrill is gone, as is the QX70 from the 2018 lineup. "We have an all-new QX50 midsize crossover … that goes on sale in early 2018, and we also have a significantly updated QX80 full-size luxury SUV" which is arriving into Infiniti dealers, spokesman Kyle Bazemore said.

Nissan Quest. YTD Sales down 98%. There are 3 mini-vans in the marketplace; Honda Odyssey, Toyota Sienna and Chrysler Pacifica. Everyone else buys an SUV.

Buick Verano. YTD sales down 85%. General Motors announced that it was eliminating the compact Verano but still has the larger LaCrosse and the Regal for 2018.

Lexus CT 200h. YTD Sales down 98%. Hybrid hatchbacks do well when they’re a Prius. Only 10 people bought this vehicle last year. Enough said.

Mercedes-Benz B-Class. YTD Sales up 1.7%. This car was introduced to So. Cal only as a compact hydrogen-powered vehicle, called the B-Class F-CELL. An electric version came next but frankly, special order cars aren’t really long-lived, rather failed experiments. Unless your name is the Toyota Mirai, a hydrogen powered electric car up 142% in So. Cal only sales.

Mitsubishi Lancer. YTD Sales down 33%. Car and Driver gave the AMC Pacer a better review.

Volkswagen Touareg. YTD Sales down 7%. TBT, I drive a VW Tiguan and love it. VW focus is with new crossover models now, such as its three-row Atlas SUV and a new Tiguan that seats 7 with a lot more storage space.

Kelly Kleinman

Dealership News

www.dealershipnews.com

Office: 818-817-6343

There are a heck of a lot of vendors serving the automotive industry and a lot of really good ones to boot.  We’ve done our research, compared reviews, and made a few calls to determine customer satisfaction. We decided that our top 2 picks for 2017 are truly the cream of the crop, medium-sized operators.  So without further ado, here are our top 2 vendors for 2017 in no particular order!

Social Ordeals:

This vendor is not specific to the auto industry but provides a long list of dealerships with an inexpensive package of off-site SEO services that get serious results.  It’s impossible to to find anything less than a 5-star review for this company.  Chris Montgomery, the President of Social Ordeals brags that their rate of client retention is an astounding 97%, which not only sounds impressive but is impressive because it’s factual.  

They offer listing distribution updates to over 300 listing sites which basically guarantees that your store will always be listed with the proper contact information online, where it counts the most.  Most dealerships have incorrect info on dozens of listing sites and don’t realize that they get penalized by Google for such infractions.  Social Ordeals also offers social media management for a fraction of the cost of most other vendors, and that includes managing FB ad campaigns as well. They focus primarily on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Social Ordeals has in-house ppc account managers, all of whom are former Google employees and certified Google AdWords specialists.  Chris’s staff has seen it all and done it all within the Google platform as they manage hundreds of thousands of dollars of daily AdWords budget.  WTS, perhaps the most intriguing service they offer is their reputation management/marketing suite of services.  

They employ a software that automatically surveys dealership customers, filters out any reviews that are less than 5-stars, and prompts those who write 5 star reviews to post those good words on a variety of review sites from Yelp to Google Plus, to Facebook, DealerRater and more.  Their account managers respond to all reviews that are internally generated in order to make sure that all customer concerns are addressed, be they favorable or not so favorable.  After 5 years of operation, and running one of the tightest operations in business today, Social Ordeals wins for itself and its customers.

Social Ordeals: 5-Star, 1st-time winner of the Dealership News: Vendor of the Year!

DealerLeads

The entire concept of DealerLeads is to provide as much organic traffic to their dealership base as possible.  Essentially, they do things to deliver superior results that tend to be beyond the ken of dealership level SEO talent.  Steve Tackett, the owner of DealerLeads has an understanding of SEO garnered over 20+ years of working with dealerships that is very hard to rival. For example, the shear volume of backlinks he generates for his clients would astound the late Carl Sagan it’s so astronomical.

By July of 2017, the company had literally over-delivered some $,1,650,000 worth of lead traffic it will never collect on.  That problem has apparently been solved.  According to Jennifer Knight (Business Office Director/DealerLeads, "I can't imagine there are too many companies who take pride over panic by over-delivering a million and a half dollars worth of leads"!

Leads that dealers receive are actually enveloped within a flow of organic traffic that consists of a higher percentage of “likely” buyers based on legit conversion metrics.  Those leads are aggregated via a stack of practices that include research pages, on-site SEO, tens of thousands of backlinks, and placement on up to 350 behaviorally targeted (O&O) classified sites with domains based on popular “exact match” search engine queries. Serious buyers are much more likely to click on domains that match what they type into the search engines.  For example: Used Cars Near Me as a domain would be www.usedcarsnearme.com.

DealerLeads also builds websites that are harmoniously in-tune with Google’s best practices and rank much higher in local searches than their competitors do. The company also offers ppc management for those who are seeking instant visibility or page dominance with no management fee attached.  In the bang for the buck and customer satisfaction categories, DealerLeads is definitely in the lead.

DealerLeads: 5-Star, 1st-time winner of the Dealership News: Vendor of the Year!

Kelly Kleinman/Content Director

Dealership News

www.dealershipnews.com

818-817-6343

DealerLeads: An Exceptional Exception to the Rule of Automotive Marketing Online

    As I search the web for positive reviews about outstanding vendors serving the automotive industry, I tend to have a hard time finding legitimate 5-star reviews about anyone.  It’s not that outliers don’t exist, it’s just difficult to identify them through a miasma of bogus review sites, poorly written press releases, and company-generated hyperbole.  With that said, difficult doesn’t mean impossible.

    One such company is DealerLeads (www.DealerLeads.com).  This company approaches lead generation in a completely unique fashion and in essence, doesn’t really sell leads at all.  Rather, they provide state-of-the-art SEO optimization on a level no one within the scope of my research can even come close to matching.  

    DealerLeads builds websites that are harmoniously in-tune with Google’s best practices. Because of that, their sites frequently rank high and attract a great deal of organic traffic, thus displacing other competitive dealerships and publicly traded classified sites that would otherwise box the DealerLeads client out of the local organic rankings.

    Leads that dealers receive are actually enveloped within that organic traffic consisting of a higher percentage of “likely” buyers based on legit conversion metrics.  Those leads are aggregated via a stack of practices that include research pages, on-site SEO, tens of thousands of backlinks, and placement on up to 350 behaviorally targeted (O&O) classified sites with domains based on popular search engine queries.  They also run highly efficient ppc campaigns for dealers with such needs in more competitive markets seeking maximum visibility.

    This next anecdote may sound like an advertisement but to those at DealerLeads, it’s a real problem. By July of 2017, the company had literally over-delivered some $,1,650,000 worth of leads in the form of dealership web traffic it will never collect on.  That means dealers most likely sold cars on traffic/leads emanating from DealerLeads at under a dollar.  Some quick math also suggests some dealers are selling as many as 10-15 cars based on DealerLeads traffic for free!  

There are clearly two scenarios at play, one bad and one very good:

A) DealerLeads had a serious issue with over-delivery

B) Their system is extremely effective at delivering qualified traffic and dealers love it

Here is a sample of DealerLeads reviews from actual car dealers taken from DrivingSales.com

1) DealerLeads is great to work with

Reviewed by an Internet Director November 15th

Recommended:  YES

Pros: Have been working with DealerLeads for 3 years, would recommend Tracie and her team to anyone who wants to drive leads.

2) Best ROI Vendor we have. Hits our Google Analytics Goals more than any other vendor.

Reviewed by an Internet Director November 14th

Recommended:  YES

Pros: We signed up with Dealer Leads a little over two years ago. These guys are the one vendor I don’t have to worry about. Nobody else performs month in, and month out, so predictably. We actually hired an outside attribution company to come in and assess all our vendors. Even they were amazed with the results delivered by Dealer Leads, and if you’ve ever hired one of these companies, you know it takes a lot to impress them.

3) Great product! Crushes SEO and Great for Google Analytics

Reviewed by a Dealer Professional Sep 30, 2016

Recommended:  YES

Pros: I am a huge fan of DealerLeads! Their reporting is through Google Analytics so you know there are no shady statistics. They are the champs of backlinking as well. They are great about meeting each month to go over the stats and even helped us set up Goals in GA!

Cons: none

    You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please everyone all of the time and that goes for DealerLeads as well.  Customers come and customers go, and some like to get snippy with bad reviews.  Still,  vendors have ways of filtering out bad reviews via reputation management software but DealerLeads has no such implementation in place.  For those who may not have had a successful experience with them, or had a management change that cleared the vendor cache, none apparently felt it necessary to voice their displeasure with DealerLeads.

So here’s to www.DealerLeads.com, a true industry outlier, and the first subject of my “best vendor” All-Star reviews.

Kelly Kleinman/Content Director

DealershipNews

Kelly@dealershipnews.com

818-817-6343

SEO aficionado and prodigious automotive domain collector Steve Tackett has just launched yet another automotive classified listing site. Says Taylor Buchanan GM of Automotiveleads.com; “Usedcarsnearme.com promises the consumer a very satisfying experience, this new site is the perfect platform for local used car dealers to list on, the listings look fantastic and it’s a very easy navigation for the consumer, best looking new classified site I’ve seen by a long shot.”  

Tackett, the owner of 350 classified listing sites and 5,000 automotive domains has modeled all of his sites on popular search queries in order to drive organic traffic (buyers) to those sites.  Says Tackett, “The key is in drumming up enough real inventory for the sites to rank in the search engines. The exact number of vehicles needed on a site to goose Google into ranking it isn’t exactly known, but it’s a heck of lot of iron”.  Once his sites become searchable, they tend to achieve a fairly high organic rank and attract a lot of car shoppers which puts smiles on the faces of his listing dealerships who tend to pay a lot less for leads than they would on other sites.  

Usedcarsnearme.com’s sister site is Usedcarsforsale.com which was recently launched as a  free listing site available to any licensed used car dealer in the industry in the US and Canada. Usedcarsforsale.com actually gets up to one million exact match search queries per month before any advertising even kicks in and is projected to sign close to 30,000+ dealers when all is said and done.  

Having two classified sites launching at the same time may seem to some as being in conflict.  According to Tackett, the key to selling a car online is visibility, “we have 350 listing sites and I’m more than willing to accommodate any dealer who wants to get his or her inventory as visible as possible on our sites...which by the way, are sites that have carried zero conquest or dealer advertising to date. Paying to list on a classified site is a pure advertising investment, why would I pay for listing fees and lead fees and advertising and then have some other dealer’s ads distract a potential customer from my listings?  It makes no sense”. 

He went on to state that he sees no conflict in getting dealer inventory  loaded up for free on usedcarsforsale.com, and offering them high visibility on the new site as well.  “It’s all good, we like the model of a basic referral site option, that’s why Craigslist outperforms all of the major automotive classified sites hands down when it comes to making car sales...and that’s the bottom line to our ever-growing client base.

Kelly Kleinman

Content Manager/Dealer News

www.dealershipnews.com

Office: 818-817-6343

Kelly@dealershipnews.co

Historically, there’s nothing like Mother Nature to surge sales as well as flood waters. Remember Hurricane Katrina, up until now, the costliest disaster in US history? She wiped out nearly a half a million vehicles and consequently, automotive sales peaked at all-time record volume in 2005 which is no surprise considering the need to replace the water-ravaged wrecks. As fodder for another story, 10,000 of those totals ended up in Bolivia being sold as low-priced dream cars turned nightmares when the corrosive nature of the saltwater eventually totaled those vehicles for a second time.

Vehicle replacement sales in September and October continue a rally in car sales that is expected to continue into November and creep into December. As one would expect, the best performing brands in Q3 were representative of the three manufacturers historically favored by those geos hit hardest by the weather such as Texas, Florida, S. Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia. Here’s the scoreboard; GM has experienced an 11.8% increase in sales, Ford at a 14.9% lift, and Toyota at an 8.9% spike.

GM and Ford pickups led the sales salvo with the Toyota cranking out record transactions as well. Nissan reported that its popular Rogue also set a record, selling just 4,000 units less than the Rav4.

Overall, it was a killer quarter for Nissan that set a wind-related record for September enjoying a 9.5% increase in sales, with a total of 139,969 units finding new, drier homes led of course by crossover King the Nissan Rogue. Toyota’s Rav4 continues to get raves from the public and continues to be the big T’s top seller into Q4.

Even new used car sites Usedcarsforsale.com and Usedcarsnearme.com have reported a prodigious increase in dealer listing activity for replacement inventory.

Will the trend continue with the absence of another natural disaster or is the industry rallying up on an upsurging economy? Perhaps Asteroid TC4 will decide to make an unexpected crash landing and bring on a whole new of car sales opportunities that are out of this world! Only time will tell!

Kelly Kleinman Content Manager/Dealership News www.dealershipnews.com 818-817-6343

Steve Tackett’s “Carweek.com” has it’s big 20th anniversary coming up in November. “As a big thank you to the industry that’s been great to me and my team, I thought I’d give back by making www.usedcarsforsale.com absolutely free. I like the trade-off, dealers get great leads, traffic, and sales for free, we get to see which emerging technologies are the most effective at driving car shoppers to their sites, it’s a win-win”.

Tackett is taking the entire automotive listing concept back to its roots and is creating an environment where a dealer can list their entire inventory for free, forever as part of his rather unusual, if not eccentric gift to the used car industry.  The consumer can shop on a clean, user-friendly listing site and the car dealer will never have to hassle with billing issues or their leads being shared among other local dealers.  Tackett will have the only automotive listing site that is completely free to the industry and so far the response has been as expected, off the charts.

Used Cars for Sale has been a search engine query keyed in by millions of car shoppers every year. It is now a classified automotive listing site that will be driving millions of car buyers to used car dealer’s websites absolutely free, forever according to Mr. Tackett.  Once the advertising campaign kicks in, traffic to the new site will increase substantially as will leads, and sales to the dealers who have listed their inventory on the site.

Tackett, an upper 1% Google SEO expert who has collected over 5,000 search engine-based domain properties, has a plan that will help used car dealers increase sales while he drives traffic to them utilizing technologies and strategies few have the ken to imitate and or initiate. Says Tackett, “Dealers who have used car inventory now have a platform that charges them nothing to list their inventory, generate leads, or drive traffic.  We expect to make many car dealers very happy and the pay for lead sites very upset.  When you can get quality leads for free, why would you pay for it?".

Used Car Dealers Rally en Masse for Free Leads, More Visibility, and Increased Sales at No Charge.

Classified listing sites used to be basic referral sites with an ad revenue model.  Now, the big classified listing sites charge for leads, ad position, traffic, and listings.

The bottom line is that this free approach creates no ambiguity between vendor and dealer, allows car shoppers the necessary comparables all of the paid sites do, and the only ones making money are the used car dealers.  Used car dealers have long been clamoring for an affordable listing site and now they have one that provides exactly what they’ve needed for years along with a 0-cost CPA.

Kelly Kleinman

Dealership News/Content Manager

www.dealershipnews.com

818-817- 6343