Continued Retailer Support from Auto Trader

By Nathan Coe, Auto Trader CEO.

I hope this note finds you, your family and your employees safe and well.

I wanted to start by saying thank you to all of you that have expressed gratitude, both publicly and to our people, over the actions we have taken to support our customers through these uncertain times. Our actions have been driven by our desire to demonstrate that we are a true partner to your business, and it’s our hope that this partnership will become even stronger in the future.

The government announcement on Monday was positive for our industry, with retailer forecourts in England now able to re-open on 1st June. Whilst it will take some time for life in the UK to return to some form of normality, this change represents a major step forwards on the road to recovery. We have also been encouraged by how quickly buyers are returning to Auto Trader. Audience performance is now well ahead of both prior year and pre-COVID-19 lockdown levels. Here’s what we’re seeing:

• Demand is strong - unique visitors to Auto Trader are now at over 1.1 million per day (1), and we are recovering faster than the wider market and our competitors (2).

• Buyers are spending more time than ever online, including those researching their next car. Over 280,000 hours are being spent on Auto Trader each day (3).

• During lock down we have delivered 750K leads (emails, text and chats), and leads are currently up over 70% year on year (4).

Given these strong levels of demand, the next phase of our support is focussed on helping you to sell as many vehicles as possible.

25% Auto Trader discount in June

We have shown over the past few months that we take supporting our customers seriously by offering free advertising packages and extended payment terms to help your cash flow. In line with our last communication, we will continue to be free until 31st May 2020 for all our customers. For those customers who operate in England, as a sign of further support, we are offering a 25% discount on advertising packages for the month of June*.

For customers with sites in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, we will continue to be free for these locations while your forecourts are required to remain closed in June.

Stock offer extension

We are now more than 3 x larger than all of our competitors combined (5), based on time spent on our platforms; and this position is growing faster than ever. That said, how this translates into sales for you is all that matters. Consumers have concerns about buying a vehicle safely, and social distancing measures will likely limit walk-ins. So it has never been truer that if your stock is not online, where the buyers are, it’s not for sale. 

Listing all of your new and used vehicles, at the right price, in front of the most buyers will give you the best chance of selling them.  That’s why we doubled your stock in March, and that’s why we’re extending the offer until at least the 16th July 2020, when the offer will convert to a 75% discount** (compared to the 50% that usually applies in stock offers).

This is the longest and most significant stock offer that we have ever run. We are confident that if you take advantage of this offer, use our tools and work with our people, you will drive better performance, giving you the greatest chance of coming back faster.

Helping to drive more buyers to your adverts

We’ve committed significant investment into consumer marketing activity focussed on driving awareness that retailers are back and open for business. This campaign isn’t about Auto Trader - it’s about you, our customers. We’ve heard from other countries emerging from lockdown that there can be a slow start due to buyers not knowing whether it is safe to visit retailer forecourts. The campaign will drive awareness of collection and home delivery services provided by retailers, with the goal to reassure buyers that retailers are open, and that they can buy a vehicle safely.

We’re also launching a series of changes that will ensure our platforms perform even better for you. These include removing external display advertising formats from the search listings and significantly increasing the size of your adverts. You can find out more about these changes here.

Helping you to get Retail Ready, Responsibly

To ensure that you are able to offer buyers visibility and assurance on the services you offer, we introduced a number of features on 20th May.  These include live video viewing and home delivery options as well as displaying on your adverts the COVID-19 safety measures you are implementing. Over 4,000 retailers have already engaged with these features and are therefore promoting the services on Auto Trader.

We recognise that sourcing and moving stock will pose challenges and so we recommend that you use Dealer Auction and AT Moves (formerly MTD). These products can help to digitise operations and reduce costs at dealerships like yours, which many of our retailers are already benefitting from. Your account manager will be in touch to explain these products further.

Finally, I wanted to reassure you that our sales and service teams are all back and fully operational, ready to do what they can to help you get back to business quickly over the coming weeks. Our other teams remain committed to sharing the latest data and insight with you, so please continue to visit our Retailer Support Hub and attend our weekly Wednesday morning webinars to hear the latest news.

I’m committed to making our partnership even stronger going forwards and will continue to work with the entire Auto Trader team to make that happen.

Best wishes,

Nathan 

Important information

*Free until the end of May excludes PPC and pay per usage products & applies to all customers who were live 19th March 2020. 25% discount excludes PPC, pay per usage products, Dealer Auction & applies to all customers who were live 26th May 2020.

**You can find full details of the Stock Offer here

Sources: 1: Auto Trader internal analysis of Google Analytics data, average number of unique users daily, 18th May to 24th May 2020 (inclusive). 2: SimilarWeb data, total time by session duration on desktop and mobile in a competitor set defined as Auto Trader, CarGurus, PistonHeads, Motors, Carwow, Cinch, HeyCar, 9th May to 16th May 2020 vs the same period in 2019. 3: Auto Trader internal analysis of Google Analytics data, average number of hours spent on Auto Trader daily, 18th May to 24th May 2020 (inclusive). 4: Auto Trader internal tracking, year-on-year increase in email, text and chat leads sent to retailers, 18th May to 24th May (inclusive) vs the same period in 2019. 5: Comscore MMX® Multi-Platform, Total Audience, Auto Trader’s total minutes volume vs competitor set’s total minutes volume, custom-defined list includes: Auto Trader, Gumtree.com, Motors, Pistonheads sites, Motors.co.uk & CarGurus, April  2017 to March 2020, UK