Changes to the Auto Trader product page
To support the launch of our new Co Driver Smart Advertising features, we are making some changes to Auto Trader adverts to improve how we display vehicle information.
These changes require no direct action, but they may influence how you implement Co-Driver features and controls in your system and how this impacts retailer adverts on Auto Trader.
Vehicle Highlights
We are introducing a vehicle highlights panel to our adverts which displays the top 3 most sought after features of a vehicle as identified by Co-Driver using Auto Trader Intelligence. From here, consumers can understand more about how we get these highlights as well as navigate to view all spec and features of the vehicle.
As part of these changes, we are now also displaying a similar panel in Portal in the area where retailers manage their vehicles to help them see which highlights will appear on their adverts. When implementing Co Driver features in your system, this is an approach you may wish to consider and here is an example of how this appears in Portal.
Descriptions
Vehicle descriptions can now be expanded to see both the Vehicle Description and Dealer Description in a pop-out side panel. We have taken this approach as many of our retailers were using the Vehicle Description to also talk about their Dealership and were often duplicating content.
To support this change in Dealer Portal we are now introducing a view of a retailers “Dealer Description” alongside the “Vehicle Description”. While Dealer Descriptions are not editable via Auto Trader Connect, it is viewable and you may wish to implement a similar view in your system to support retailers in avoiding duplication of content.
Feature Grouping
Previously, the supplied features on the vehicle and the standard features for the type of vehicle, were surfaced in 2 different executions on the product page. Now on Auto Trader adverts, spec and features have been consolidated in a new area below the vehicle overview. Now any supplied features that are on the vehicle, as long as the advert is powered by Auto Trader vehicle data, will be grouped into relevant categories.
In addition, when viewing the stock or advert records via either the Stock or Search APIs, Partners should now see the categories that each feature will be grouped by in the response.
Features can still be added manually, however where the advert doesn't use our vehicle data (or cannot be matched identically), those features will be given the category of “Other”.
Line Breaks for Vehicle Description
We have also added support for line breaks in the Vehicle Description field to help retailers better structure their vehicle information. Again, no action is required here and any previous workarounds for line breaks do not need to be removed.
