An update from our CEO

I hope you enjoyed the festive period and that you’ve come back recharged and ready to make the most of 2023. While it is early days, I’m encouraged to hear from retailers that trading is good, even if supply is still not easy to come by.

 As always, as you’re setting your goals for the new year, if there are areas we can help with or if you’d like more information on anything we cover below, do reach out to your Account Manager who will have the latest data and insight ready to go.

An encouraging start to the new year

We entered the new year with the market in a strong position and with good momentum from December with sales, consumer demand and pricing all up year-on-year. This is all contributing to the positive start to the year that many of you have shared with me, our Account Managers, and the press. Auto Trader site visits are trending up 14.8% year-on-year since boxing day and used car sales data is showing that the first two weeks of January are up 9.2% on last year¹, with speed of sale following seasonal norms.

We’re committed to investing to do everything we can to engage consumers, drive them to your adverts and convert browsers into buyers. Our new marketing campaign launched on Boxing Day to capitalise on the strong viewing audiences at this time of year. In the first two weeks of the campaign, 67% of all UK adults have already seen or heard the ad at least once. This activity has driven an increase in searches for Auto Trader with over 4.46 million searches for our brand on Google since Boxing Day².

Evolving our packages to provide actionable insight

We’re making package changes in response to your feedback on how we can drive your business performance. Our goal is to empower our retailer partners with game-changing data and insight to drive their business even further this year.

2022 saw the average price of a used car grow by 17% with nearly one in five nearly new cars priced above the MRRP of the brand-new equivalent car³. We continued to see supply challenges, which as I discussed at the end of last year, will remain a key factor in 2023.

These trends highlight to me the importance of staying close to the data so that you are informed and can react to the ever-changing retail market. That is why, after feedback from many of you, we’re focusing our package review this year on ensuring that you have the right data when and where you need it to make actionable decisions and maximise the profit potential on every sale. We’re making significant changes to make our data more accessible and actionable, whether you use Portal or Auto Trader Connect to surface our data in your systems.

Portal customers can now see our Retail Valuation as well as Price Position alongside every vehicle in their stock list to enable pricing review at-a-glance.

We’ve also just announced an innovative new performance insight solution, Vehicle Insight. This will enable you to access our powerful market data in one simplified view, helping to improve efficiency, and maximise the profitability of every vehicle. Vehicle Insight brings together key performance indicators in one single tool, providing easy-to-read insights into any vehicle, helping you to respond quickly to the fast-moving market and improve performance across your digital forecourt.

Many retailers have had early visibility of this new tool over the last few months, helping us develop the solution. The feedback has been extremely positive with comments on how the solution will help save time and strengthen decisions around pricing strategy, market condition and advert performance: “Simple – love it”, “Market Insight data being included is excellent!”, “Getting all that information on one screen is excellent”.

We know that working through portal to access this insight isn’t right for everyone and so for those customers who use an external system to manage their stock, we’ve already introduced Auto Trader Connect - Retail Essentials to enable the creation and management of stock, powered by our vehicle data, in real-time. We’re now extending this offering and providing our powerful valuations through the Auto Trader Connect platform, via your chosen provider as part of your new package. By integrating our valuations, you will now be able to respond immediately and easily to changes in the market with the most accurate real-time valuations data available in your systems, where you need it.

We’re committed to making our valuations as accurate as possible. So, however you access our valuations, they are now even more powerful thanks to our teams’ work bringing you enhanced VIN specification data. This means we can now provide manufacturer-sourced specification data to ensure your vehicles are accurately described, so that you can maximise the profit potential on every sale. We’ve seen real benefits for Retailers where brands are already live, with the average margin impact running at £361 per vehicle, and as much as 5,587 for one premium vehicle⁴.

We can support you to find your focus for 2023

A new year is a great opportunity to reset and to establish new goals as the market and the competition evolves around you. In 2022, one in two customers had a Focus Finder review with their Account Manager. If you haven’t had yours yet, reach out to your Account Manager. If you did have one, how are you doing? We’d recommend tracking your performance regularly and reviewing this with your Account Manager at least every quarter. So now might be a good chance to do just that.

I look forward to developing our partnership further this year and wish you all the best for the year ahead.

Sources
1 Based on Auto Trader proxy sold data, January 1st – January 16th
2 Combined UK reach, 26th December 2022 – 8th January 2023, DDS (Donovan Data Systems) tracking
3 Auto Trader Retail Price Index
4 Based on a sample of 52,000 vehicles advertised on Auto Trader across the 10 brands providing VIN spec at the time of analysis