If you don’t know what a leak in online advertising is let me give you a short primer.  A leak is any action a surfer can perform that does not benefit the advertiser.  Case in point.  Cars.com and Autotrader.com have huge leaks in how your offers are displayed to the surfer.

The biggest one is the banner ads at the top and to the right of the listing.  I know that dealers can upgrade packages for it to be their banner on individual listings or to even remove them.  However banners for Netflix - Seen on Autotrader.com and Coke Rewards seen on Cars.com in the search results are a huge leak in what we spend our money for.  We are paying to advertise our offers not Coke and Netflix.

Cars.com and Autotrader.com receive compensation for this advertising either on a CPM or CPA basis.  They are paid for this!  Also there are offers on every dealer’s individual listings for insurance quotes and financing quotes, pushing our lead for our car to either another dealer, through their lead programs, or some offer that distracts the surfer.  This is a HUGE unpardonable LEAK.  If they are going to push affiliate offers using our inventory as the basis to attract the surfer then quite frankly their service should be FREE.   That is a pretty strong statement I know.  We sell cars based on this advertising that we pay for, but we are losing leads due to other advertising that they sell on their site.

However minor these leaks are in lost leads it is still not optimal for what we pay for.  Even if on a basic package with Autotrader.com at $900 per month you should not have other dealers ads appearing on your inventory listing.  The service they provide even in this price range could be duplicated using PPC advertising to your main site to generate targeted leads.  The only problem with this is most car people look for what is easiest and there is a HUGE learning curve in PPC advertising.  If you are not careful you can spend a lot of money with a poorly designed PPC program.

As an experienced online marketer I would never promote an affiliate offer that had a leak as HUGE as this unless it was on a PPC basis.  If they are going to continue to place other offers on our listings whether it is for Netflix or competitive dealers they need to restructure pricing where we pay only per lead/call or completely remove these leaks from their site.  Even free classifieds like Craigslist.org and kijiji.com do not have this problem.

Maybe it is time for another choice!

- Views expressed here are my personal opinion and I assume all responsibility for them.  They do not reflect the opinion of my employer.  This domain and hosting account are owned by SEGA Opportunities and controlled by Paul Rushing