Automotive Marketing

I was searching this morning to find some information I needed for a conference call about Craigslist today. I will discuss some of the things I learned later. While searching, I happened upon a neat group of sites that I would like to share. It seems that when Craig wrote the Craigslist terms of use, he nailed it.

The terms are so good, in fact, that when some other businesses read his terms, they immediately copy and paste them to their own website without replacing every instance of “craigslist” with their own name.

Websites that stole Craig’s terms of use

• http://www.indiaclassy.com/terms.html
• http://www.curdy.com/terms-of-use.html
• http://www.juliesbarn.com/home/?view=terms&cityid=-55
• http://www.dateilicious.com/Terms.php
• http://www.rockstarrecruiting.com/corp/terms
• http://www.worldpropertyservices.com/terms.cfm
• http://www.aiscolorado.org/termsofuse.htm
• http://www.campusmonster.org/terms/
• http://classifiedtree.com/rptcontentmgmt.aspx?inid=7
• http://www.yokepal.com/terms_of_services.php
• http://www.internationalgcl.com/terms.php
• http://iannouncethis.com/terms-of-use.html
• http://yodoleslist.com/terms.htm

The list goes on and on and on. I am stunned by the amount of half-assed companies that are too lazy to do a simple find and replace after taking someone else’s work.

Friend or Foe?

Craigslist is a game changer. Dealers that have never heard of CL are stunned to hear that it is a free service that can get 1,000 people to view a car classified ad in a single day. However, in its present form, craigslist will not change the automotive industry. Imagine a day where as many dealers that refresh their listings on Autotrader can do the same thing on craigslist. Mayhem. The (lack of) search features on CL prevent thousands of new items in a single day to be properly sorted and consumed by shoppers.

The wall that holds back this onslaught of ads is the terms of service. Dealers rely on third parties to distribute their ads, and craigslist does not permit third parties to create ads. This makes the craigslist terms of service a huge road block for a lot of companies like mine.

I see it differently. The TOU is what enables me to succeed on the site. It protects the listings I create from the onslaught of violators and spammers. If you take the time to read the terms and become a regular user of the site it is not long before you can make the posting process more efficient without violating the mighty posting agent section of the terms.

Take aways

I learned a few things today. First, there is always someone out there with a sloppy written program that gives me clues on how to automate tasks. For example, one of the people in the conference call today mentioned he can combat competitors that relentlessly flag your legit ads to hurt your business. I had not considered a flagging bot until this was said, but a simple search turns up Craig’s Flagger, a program that automates the process of terminating any ad posted by a spammer. It does not work. No surprise. Put a tool like this out in the open that can easily be identified after it starts flagging at the click of a button.

I also learned that keyword stuffing still works to this day. I see ads that have random chunks of other web pages at the bottom. Thomas Jefferson quotes, UNIX user manual sections, you name it and someone has surely used it to trip up the CL filters.

The most exciting thing about today’s conference was I found out that my tactics are still a cut above the rest. I was fairly convinced when I noticed a couple competitors redesigning their ad designs to be 90% copies of mine, but today I was stunned to see one of the most sophisticated craigslist programs I have demoed to date–one capable of completely automatic daily posting without the risk of detection as a single source–struggling with the filters (see previous paragraph).

Is the craigslist terms of use friend or foe? What does that tell you about your commitment to craigslist success?

This obscure bot popped up on my radar earlier this month. The complete user-agent string is

PRCrawler/Nutch-0.9 (data mining development project; crawler@projectrialto.com)

The description provided in the string contains several clues that this bot is a waste of my bandwidth. First, Nutch is an open source search engine written in Java. ‘Data mining’ is not an exercise to which I am interested in offering my assistance, especially in the form of my server resources. ‘Development’ and ‘project’ are both hints that this crawler is experimental and may do the world no good at all. Here is how the creators of this bot explain its purpose:

Corey,

Project Rialto is a new online security services solution provider that monetizes its infrastructure investment via relevant advertising for its users. We accomplish this in a very unobtrusive and anonymous method. Our bot is crawling in order to understand the contents of web sites our users visit to assist in serving more relevant content.

We are currently in our initial development phases. As Project Rialto approaches its market launch we’ll provide more information about our offering.
We hope this addresses your concerns; please let us know if you have any other questions.

Regards,

Kelvin Edmison
Software Architect
Project Rialto

This loosely translates to, “we scraped your site to serve someone advertisements based on its content.” I found traces of this bot in one of my error database tables, so we are certainly seeing evidence of a development phase. IncrediBILL agrees that this bot will do no good for your site, and has compiled an IP address list in his usual “get lost” fashion.

Here is some robots.txt love from me to you that will block the bot user-agent that hit me:

User-agent: PRCrawler/Nutch-0.9 (data mining development project; crawler@projectrialto.com)
Disallow: /

Using robots.txt exclusion only works for bots that behave properly. Bad bots do not care if you do not want them, and the only way to prevent them from crawling your site is to block the IP addresses the bot uses.

An american vehicle classified site that I run is receiving double the traffic from Vast.com when compared to data from only one month ago. I believe this is happening for a few reasons.

1. New partnerships every month, like this one with automedia.com
2. This one with overstock.com
3. Or this one with AOL Autos
4. Old partnerships were wisely chosen

Vast traffic beats the pants off any organic search traffic because the referrals are highly targeted. This makes my job easier because pure classified listings are web content of a temporary nature, and search engines are less interested in this type of data unless they find it on craigslist.

Vertical search engines like Vast are changing the game by opening the door to their data. Instead of trying to funnel everyone to their website homepage to conduct a search they operate as a vessel. Crawl the web and learn where the cars are, then help shoppers find them by providing this data wherever someone wants to put it.

When Vast launched people asked “How does it make money?”

1. By offering a service that gives the end user what they want
2. By forgoing requirements to charge for or advertise on everything
3. By tearing down walls between competitors and cooperating
4. By filling a hole that the major search engines have yet to address

Man, I love lists.

At 8:01 AM this morning, Kinh Bui of Dealer Specialties and Chante Velez of Dominion Enterprises sent out emails to every company that sends or receives a vehicle data feed to Dealer Specialties. Both of them forgot to use a blind copy, so now every company on the list has a contact email address for every other company that feeds inventory data to DS/GetAuto. Oops.

Thirty minutes later and I have reduced the list to about 120 unique email addresses. Each of these companies is capable of sending one of only a couple formats, and now I have a means to contact them. You do the math :)

Vast.com has launched a new web site design. I like the old logo a bit more, but this site design is clean, sleek and easy to navigate. Unless you are searching for a motorcycle. To be fair, the search was broken before the redesign. I wrote about it in October. The category structure prevents motorcycles from being returned in default search results.

I search for Buell Ulysses motorcycles for sale everyday. I fell in love with the way this bike looks when it launched, and after riding one at IronValley Harley Davidson, I am convinced this is the motorcycle for me.

Who cares

I think MyRide.com might care. This Autobytel site uses the Vast database instead of their own. AOL Autos might care now that they have dumped Autotrader and replaced them with Vast.

Here is a conversation that occurred today between Cars.com support staff and a dealership that pays them hundreds of dollars a month.

Dealer: Hi. I am calling to find out why only 28 cars are displaying on my 30 car advertising package.

Cars.com: You should ask the company that delivers your inventory to us.

Dealer: I just got off the phone with them. They send you all the vehicles that I have for sale once every day.

Cars.com: Ok, let me see how many we received from them on the last transfer.

Cars.com: Ok, it looks like they sent us 41 vehicles, 2 without any photos.

Dealer: Right, and I want to know why only 28 with no photos are showing on cars.com

Cars.com: That’s something you should ask them.

Dealer: Why? You just told me that you received 41 vehicles from them, and that all came with pictures except for two. Why are there no pictures on any of my cars?

Cars.com: You’ll have to ask them.

Dear Cars.com,
I do not lie about your company or your service, yet you will openly blame my company for your own shortcomings. Please accept any of our many invitations to discuss these persistent issues in a conference call. I will continue to equip our mutual customers with log files that verify the service that we provide to them. Unfortunately, said logs are not enough to keep you from training your support reps to blindly blame the other guy, even when these lies contradict what can be easily seen on the screen in front of them.

Strategies can not be templated. There is no substitute, no automated gimmick that can replicate what can be achieved by people that share a comfortable and open line of communication.

A local luxury-used outfit approached me two weeks ago because they were unsatisified with their website’s page 4 rankings. Today they are front-paging for half of the searches the dealer identified. The difference was no trick. Instead, a five minute conversation and less than five minutes of work on the site. The search engine, Google in this case, has recrawled the site and adjusted its rankings for the first time since the change.

A lack of communication was the reason for the previous positions, not any technical error. This business has an address in a small town that is not easy to spell. More people search for the county name, which is also the name of the closest large city. There was no mention of the county name on the website, and no links to the dealer’s website on the web contained or were close to the name of the county. Search engines do not volunteer this keyword association to websites; they organize information that already exists.

Machines and readymades will always be tools that are as good as they can be manipulated by a person. One of the most important questions that I can ask a dealer is, “What are you searching for?” Every search marketing campaign I begin has to start with at least one keyword phrase.

The February 2008 issue of Dealer Marketing Magazine has been shuffled around the office all month. Since I have settled into my new desk, this issue and I have become entangled in a love hate relationship.

The best article in this issue is on page 22. Mark Bonfigli of Dealer.com writes, “Five Simple Website Strategies You Cannot Do Without.” There are two ways you can read this article online. You may view the whole magazine online for free here, or read the text version here.

The overall message of Mark’s tips is to cater to the user; give them what they want and nothing more. I like the article especially because of Mark’s final tip. Tip #5, Forget the glitz, is valuable advice even for the likes of DealerMark and NIADA.

Market research is 100 percent clear: Customers do not care about fancy website effects unrelated to their car-buying decision.

Similarily, dealers do not care about fancy website effects unrelated to their car-selling-research decisions. Two of the major industry publications, Dealer Marketing Magazine and NIADA’s Used Car Dealer Magazine, have implemented fancy magazine viewers based on “page-turner” flash animations.

I first saw this approach to displaying online publications on the Arctic Cat Powersports websites. See one here.

The effect is neat, but I think the time and money sunk into these presentations could have been spent more wisely. Dealer magazines, it is time to take your own advice. Here is why these glitzy flash viewers are hurting the effectiveness of your publication and your business:

Flash animations require a browser plugin to be installed

Any extra steps required to access content increase the chance that individuals will never reach your content.

Search engines cannot crawl your content

Your magazines show case some successful and talented people. You owe it to them to increase their visibility online by promoting their writings in a manner that can be easily found and properly referenced as a magazine source. DealerMark does provide a text version of each of their articles, and I applaud them for that effort. Used Car Dealer Magazine’s flash version is the only place online that its content can be found in the aggregate. Some articles can be found elsewhere in the event that the author republishes them, but becoming the primary source for this content a missed opportunity for the association.

• Search engines help other people find your content, reference it as a source, or call you and inquire about advertising
• Search engines detect how often a website is updated, but they will not find 30 new articles each month if they cannot crawl the content that is updated because it is embedded in a fancy animation
• Search engines detect duplicate sources and attempt to eliminate dupes in search results, and only one site can be the authority

Other websites cannot link to your magazine articles

While I am typically negative (I’ll be nicer after you begin publishing me), you want people to talk about your articles and link to them from their own websites. The world wide web is based upon the hyperlink, the method that documents are linked together to create a virtual web. Search engines calculate website popularity based on the number of links to a website and where those links are coming from. This means that any publicity is good publicity as long as it contains a link back to your website. Also, linkable content increases the likeliness that it will be used as a reference in some other article. There is a substantial opportunity for these magazines to be used as sources in Wikipedia, a very large and very respected website in the eyes of search engines. Not to mention that Wikipedia ranks for everything.

Almost any solution other than the one you have chosen could greatly help your websites to gain traffic and your publication to reach are larger audience. The results would be more advertising dollars and more subscription dollars, and step one is to forget the glitz!

Ratan Tata unveiled the Nano at the Delhi Auto Expo on January 10, 2008. The Tata Nano is the $2,500 car that has been designed and built in India at the hands of more than 500 people from around the world. I was reading the english Times Online write up about the Nano and enjoyed all the comments left on the article. One of them was particularly interesting to me as it captured my opinion of this announcement almost perfectly.

“$2500 cars already exist, they are called “used cars”. Option A, new tin can with 33hp, Option B 5-8 year old real car, like a Carolla or Civic or Sentra. Which will last longer, be safer, and look better?

Maybe one positive of this car will be that it will drive used car prices down.”

~Mike S, Dallas

The idea of a car costing only $2,500 is not new. Plenty of depreciated vehicles fall into this price range, and lots of those used vehicles are not aluminum bubbles that top out at 65mph. I do disagree with Mike from Dallas that this car will drive used car prices down, and a few other ideas come to mind when I think about how the Tata Nano might impact the American market.

• it will not
• the Nano is not coming to America
• it is not allowed to come to America because of environmental and safety requirements
• the Nano is not of higher quality than $2,500 used cars in America
• driving in India is safer than driving in America†
• why do all highly efficient vehicles look like cartoon bubble cars

†Roughly 85,000 people are killed each year in India as the result of a car crash, and less than 50,000 killed similarly in America. The population of India is 3.75 times that of the US, but the number of people killed in car crashes is only about 2 times that in the US.