CarGurus to acquire motoring website PistonHeads
Exciting acquisition will expand our audience for UK dealers!
Dear valued dealer community,
Today we announced that CarGurus has agreed to buy the motoring website PistonHeads from Haymarket Media Group. The acquisition is another step in our plans to accelerate growth and expand our consumer audience here in the UK.
PistonHeads has built one of the UK’s most trusted and influential digital motoring brands, and we see it as a perfect fit with our own customer-centric model and pioneering ethos. We look forward to applying our technology expertise to unleash the full potential of the PistonHeads platform, while staying true to what makes the brand so special to millions of motoring enthusiasts and shoppers in the UK.
Use CarGurus resources to connect with customers after their car purchase and stay top of mind
People have become information-obsessed, even over the small stuff. And car buyers are no exception. They’re spending more time than ever—over 6 hours in many cases*—researching their purchase options before ever making a decision.
But what happens to those car buyers after they’ve done their research and made their purchase at your dealership? Their need for information doesn’t end. As car owners, they need to know how to maintain their vehicles, where to go for service, what insurance to get, and more.
CarGurus helps Imperial Car Supermarkets expand their business
Last month, we caught up with Neil Smith, Operations Director at Imperial Car Supermarket, to learn how he uses CarGurus to keep his dealership competitive in today’s changing marketplace. We were delighted to hear that one of the main reasons he invests in CarGurus is because of our ambition to grow in the UK—and he’s not wrong!
We’re already #1 in the US, and now we’re the fastest growing automotive shopping site in the UK.* Because of our focus on technology, we’ve been able to scale high-quality web traffic to cargurus.co.uk, allowing dealers to stay relevant and in front of informed, ready-to-buy car shoppers.
What sets great dealers apart: key website metrics to track
Monitoring website performance is the cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy
Your website is the lifeblood of your business, and most of your digital marketing efforts likely revolve around ways of driving people towards it. In fact, according to Hubspot’s latest State of Inbound report, 54% of companies say driving more website traffic is their current marketing priority.
That’s a laudable aim. But for car dealers, as with all businesses, driving extra traffic is only useful if your website meets both visitor expectations and business ambitions. Nearly 40% of people will stop engaging with a website if they don’t like its content or design.
By monitoring a few key metrics, readily available on Google Analytics, you can more accurately measure the performance of your website and tweak it to be more user-friendly, compelling, and productive. Making this a continual process of improvement sets great dealers apart and creates the foundation for success—digitally-savvy small businesses are five times more likely to increase profits and operate more efficiently than less advanced competitors.
With that in mind, here’s what you need to know.
Dealer spotlight: introducing Imperial Car Supermarkets and their ambitious growth plans
At CarGurus, we believe our dealers have valuable stories and insights worth sharing. Today we’re launching a new series on our blog called dealer spotlights, which will highlight CarGurus customers and their success. Our aim with these profiles is to offer a platform for our dealers to talk about the history of their businesses, as well as to reflect on the used car market as they see it.
The profiles will be written in a way that appeals to dealer and consumer audiences alike, providing added value for dealers who work with CarGurus. From the history of a dealership and its current success, to future aspirations, or even just a unique car it is selling, we’re looking to cover a range of topics from a variety of dealerships. We have no fixed schedule for dealer spotlights – we’ll simply research, write, and publish them when relevant. And while we cannot guarantee if or when a dealership will qualify for a spotlight, any dealer with an interesting story to tell should let us know.
Read on for our first dealer spotlight, which features Imperial Car Supermarkets, a large independent dealership in Southampton.
A bad online review can be a golden opportunity for a dealer to shine
One day you decide to see what people are saying about your dealership online and you’re appalled at what you find: someone left a scathing one-star review! You immediately feel enraged and want to lash out at the reviewer because they’re giving people a false impression of your business.
But before you do anything hasty, take a moment to consider the best course of action. Bad reviews are a fact of life in today’s digital world where anyone can leave one on platforms such as Facebook, Google, Yelp, and Yahoo — not to mention auto shopping sites like CarGurus. There’s a smart way to handle the situation, and when done right you can improve your company’s reputation.
CarGurus announces UK Top Rated Dealers of 2018
It’s that time of year again — time to present the annual CarGurus Top Rated Dealer awards in the UK.
Now in their second year, the Top Rated Dealer awards recognise a select group of dealerships that have gone above and beyond to provide exceptional customer service. The awards are based on more than 11,000 reviews left by car buyers through the CarGurus platform, and the award-winning dealers being honoured have maintained an impressive star rating of 4.5 and above.
Dealers who set SMART goals for digital marketing meet targets and drive growth
The right goals motivate your team and give impetus to your efforts
For small businesses like dealerships, setting digital marketing goals can be so vexing that many simply don’t bother. Setting a goal creates the opportunity for failure, and failure is dispiriting and demotivating. What should your goal be anyway? What if it’s too ambitious, or not ambitious enough?
Though setting goals is nerve-wracking, targets are good for business. You have them in other areas — sales, supply, cost-cutting — because they give everyone involved something to strive for and measure success against. The same should be true for your digital marketing. Well-constructed goals give you impetus to innovate, experiment, and improve.
Research proves that timing is everything for successful dealers
Competitive dealers respond to queries quickly and personally
It’s true of comedy, and according to new research it’s true of selling cars too. Timing really is everything. Figures from automotive lead management company enquiryMAX show that speed is of the essence when it comes to closing sales. The research found that 78% of sales are made within 10 days of an initial customer enquiry.