YYC930

From the "how to **** off loyal customers and decrease your annual revenue" files.............

Got a phone call yesterday from my AUTOTRADER corporate sales rep that I have been dealing with for the last......ohhhh.....5-6 years......really nice guy, works hard for you and gets things done. I feel sorry for him actually as he's going to get hooped on sales commissions from all the cancellations he said he is getting......

Says to me that he hates what he has to say next, as the Canadian corporate head office has arbitrarily and without notice increased our "contracted" ad rates by 50%.....yes that is right......50% !!!......everybody who does not also financially support the rapidly dwindling paper based publication that they put out is getting their rates raised, and there is no arbitration or recourse. They mailed out bills last week and never told anyone, they just went ahead and did it, so he is calling his clients voluntarily to warn them in an attempt to preserve the relationship.

So I politely tell him that as a friend I cannot support these corporate actions and cancel my annual contract "outright" effective immediately.......POOF.....there goes $7,200 out their corporate door......and IIRC about $1,500 out of his annual income.

Called up a client's website designer 30 minutes later from a referral I had, and my own site (which will be 25 times better visually than their hosted site) will cost me a one time $2,500 fee........end of story. The exposure (site hits) from their ads has been great, but not quantifiable on the sales side, so onward we go.

Is there a lesson here to be learned ?

Could any of you who run businesses get away with this ?

Would you even try in the manner that they did ?
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lowside67

Do you advertise on the Buy and Sell? We use it as opposed to the Auto Trader and have had good luck. It's also quite a bit more reasonable pricewise.

jumper5836

Thats too bad, greedy bastards. I am sure a lot of dealers will drop them as well and that sucks for the people who use the site.

I sometimes check out this site but it defiantly doesn't have enough people using it.
usedcars.autonet.ca

skruggs964

I always thought their dealer websites looked kind of cheesy anyway. I'm sure your techy guy can do a way better job of designing one for you.

Good luck!

skruggs964

YYC930....will Auto Trader allow you to advertise on their site with a link to your own website?

YYC930

Technically no they will not.......but my rep says I can put my website address in the body of the regular text and hopefully people will see it and go there.......this itself is not also permitted he said, so I am not holding my breath on it either.....because he said is if someone in editing sees it, they will delete it, and frankly it's not worth the trouble as it also goes against the spirit of their regulations.

Insofar as the quality of the Trader inquiries go however, I am doubtful that the 30-40K people a month hitting on my site are worth the expenditure they are demanding. Pretty much everyone I retail a car to has said that they came to me from my daily CALGARY HERALD ads.......I have yet to be in the position to say that the Trader is that effective.

Advertising is a curse......isn't it ?

Lowside 67.........

No I do not........I haven't heard of them, but that doesn't mean anything, I'll look into it and see what's up. Thanks for the tip.

skruggs964

I somehow doubted that they'd allow it....oh well, worth a shot. What Lowside67 is referring to is this site......your competition advertises a lot there, but I've never seen you there. I have no idea how effective it is.....will someone wanting a late model P-car look there?? I don't really know.....

http://www.buysell.com/root/search/k...1/Porsche.aspx

shuang

I am actively looking for a 993 and these are the non-dealer Canadian sites I check on a daily basis:

autotrader.ca
vancouver.craigslist.com
buysell.com
globeauto.com
pca-cwr.org

None of these sites are very good and IMO are really lacking in terms of features relative to, say, autotrader.com (US site). Although I still go to these sites daily, I don't have high hopes of actually finding a car on any of them and have resigned myself to importing one from the US myself. If I was a dealer (I have toyed with the idea of becoming one just to facilitate getting a car for myself) I doubt I would bother advertising on these sites if the fee is more than nominal.

Steve

Crazy Canuck

Trader Media was bought by the Yellow Pages last year. I'm not surprised those monopolistic bastards are raising rates to this degree.

NOBLEGT3

yellow pages probably looked at the revenue generated and the EBITDA and said this pricing sucks and therefore we need to charge appropriately.
nothing wrong with asking for the price you want in a free market.
also, if they suck so bad then why do you care if they raise their rates double or 1000%??
seems to me it worked well for you at the price you likes but not at the price maybe it should be

YYC930

Crazy Canuck....

Interesting......those guys keep calling me every 6 months to advertise and I keep telling them to take a hike. Even said that they can pick up my "mint condition uncirculated" yellow pages book from last year as I have still never used it......I look everything up online......kinda choked their sales rep up when I said that. Then they said, well, don't you want any additional business from advertising in the yellow pages.....to which I replied why ?.....I cannot handle what I have now. If you've ever seen their rates......$$$$$$$$

NOBLEGT3......

If never said that I have a problem with charging what you think you can get away with.....I do it for a living. But I also keep my word even if I screwed up and it costs me money........

I didn't know that Yellow Pages bought Hebdo Publications however.....that explains their "style" of going about the price increase perhaps. I was upset because of the manner in which they went about doing things when I had a written contract for a 12 month period. There is no point in litigating over it in small claims either.....

As for their perceived results in terms of the Autotrader's advertising effectivness.....well the jury is out on that as I also commented. 30-40K hits a month on their site is 360K hits a year at the low end....direct mail marketing gets a 1% return on mailout numbers.....and I didn't even come close to selling 360 cars last year.....kind speaks volumes.

Crazy Canuck

I have seen their rates . . .

Over $4000 a month gets charged to my Visa card by Bell for Yellow Pages ads and telephone service.

Unfortunately for the two businesses I run attendance is almost mandatory in the YP (one we have to be there no question as it is used by most customers as their initial point of contact, the other business I'm not 100% sure just how effective it really is).

I have tried to limit what I could but it is damn expensive for sure. The guy comes in once a year . . . "Well you should do this . . . " My reply, "No, we'll do this." "We've had to raise prices 2 or 3% this year so since we've been so reasonable I think you should increase the size of the ad to the next . . . " My reply, "No we'll do this..." and so on.

I've been seriously questioning our advertising expenditures. There are so many radio stations in Ottawa now, not to mention iPods and satellite radio, the newspaper is beyond expensive if we were to go after any type of frequency that is required, TV we can't afford and there are so many TV stations, mass mailouts only get about a 1% response rate. . . We do attend a couple of retail shows. We sell there and we get a pile of leads to work afterwards so it is worthwhile. One show is worthwhile, the other one we're there because our competitors attend but both are extremely expensive to put on and staff.

To be honest, our website and sign on a 4 lane highway (with over 25,000 cars a day passing by) are better, less expensive and, in the case of the sign - paid for than all the above we have tried in the past.

YYC930

You're kinda like me in a way with your billboard.......my shop frontage faces the LRT line........I am literally 25 feet from the subway rails with 300,000+ suits, etc, ripping to and from work every day......and I have a big yellow and black (corporate colors) sign out back that runs across the roof of my place with my website address......not to mention a few P-cars parked there as well.

I hate advertising reps.......they are the most obnoxious sales people I have ever met for the most part (my ex-Trader guy and Herald rep excepted) short of real estate agents. It's an intangible product that really takes effort to quantify (and I think they like it that way).......for my business and client demographic though......the newspaper works wonders (I spend $30K a year there).

Advertising is a necessary evil to some extent, but I am getting to the point where it's becoming less and less important as the company grows directly from repeat and referral business.

NOBLEGT3

spending 7,000 a year for 5 or 6 years for something you say "Pretty much everyone I retail a car to has said that they came to me from my daily CALGARY HERALD ads.......I have yet to be in the position to say that the Trader is that effective."

i dont see the logic to your anger from either side of this discussion.

Crazy Canuck

I agree with you to a large degree. We have built up a customer base that returns (provided we do our job) and services with us, buys parts from us etc. to the point that in the summer we have a hard time keeping up. Our growth is largely from positive work of mouth.

Our real-estate business on the other hand requires YP advertising but that's about all we do. That and do what we are supposed to do to keep clients coming back again and again if they leave and for long periods of time if they end up staying with us.