Car dealers have an increasingly challenging task ahead of them as they have to continue to evaluate the latest digital advertising platforms, services, and related technology.

It is not uncommon for dealer principals to say that they are “sticking to what worked in the past” because they have no patience and specific strategy as they sort through the claims of automotive advertising partners.

Automotive Inventory Advertising

PCG has created a whitepaper that will be released today at the Automotive Marketing Boot Camp in Orlando and it will be available for download at http://www.automotive-advertising.net.

Also keep in mind that the keynote speakers will be live broadcast on www.DrivingSalesTV.com starting at 7:30 pm tonight. Sunday and Monday general sessions will also be broadcast starting at 8:00 am EST each day.

The PCG whitepaper is entitled "Evaluating Automotive Inventory Advertising Services" and its focus is on inventory syndication, advertising, and how to measure the ROI of these strategies.

Since many car dealers use platforms such as Autotrader.com, Cars.com, UsedCars.com, EveryCarListed.com, and Craigslist this is an important discussion on how to evaluate success with third party advertising strategies.

The whitepaper will be a living document. It will be revised periodically to include new entrants into the inventory advertising and syndication business. It will also be revised from data and commentary provided by the automotive community.

Consider the initial release on April 16, 2011 a starting point for many viewpoints and related discussions on dealer inventory advertising platforms and third party leads.

The goal of this whitepaper is to publish datasets and strategies to compare and contrast automotive advertising platforms. This information contained in this report will provide dealers with new ideas on how to evaluate their advertising and syndication choices.

As this document grows we will also include case study data from dealers who offer to share their results.

Dealer Centricity Scores

In addition to providing data on pricing models and lead quality we will also take a look at the way in which cars are displayed on the Internet. We will introduce Dealer Centricity Scores (DCS) as a measure of how many ads (potential brand leaks) are displayed on Vehicle Detail Pages (VDP).

We will also introduce one method of evaluating the ROI of popular inventory syndication platforms using a Cost Per Vehicle Detail Page Views formula created by Dennis Galbraith.

This approach is one way that Dennis suggests that a dealer can evaluate the benefits of upgrading from a basic advertising package to a premium package.

So if you would like to download the whitepaper, it will be available after 5:30 pm on April 16, 2011. After you have time to read the document, add your comments and suggestions how this whitepaper can be enhanced.

Sharing Your Data For Future Updates

If you would like to share data from your dealership to be added to future versions of the whitepaper, send me an email to: brian@pcgdigitalmarketing.com. We would love to get actual dealer data from ALL platforms listed in the whitepaper.