Continuing to invest in bringing in-market buyers to your adverts
We’re committed to investing in powerful consumer marketing to bring in-market buyers to your adverts. We’ve reached buyers through nationwide advertising campaigns on TV, broadcast video on demand, as well as digital channels including YouTube, Connected TV, Facebook, and Snapchat, which has played a key role in being front-of-mind for young drivers. All to continuously drive buyers to site and your adverts.
Read on to learn about our current campaigns, from Britain’s Biggest Matchmaker, to our partnerships with ITV, Weekends on Dave, What Car? And Autocar. Plus see how we’re growing our social media channels and how we engage in-market buyers through CRM.
Britain’s Biggest Matchmaker
Our campaign platform Britain’s Biggest Matchmaker celebrates the diversity of today’s car buying public and showcases Auto Trader’s proud history and heritage in matching car buyers and sellers in Britain for over 45 years.
The campaign has been featured across television, radio, video on demand, paid social, and display advertising and is amplified through Auto Trader’s own channels, including email, organic social, YouTube, search and display advertising and the app. It has been viewed over 225 million times on television, and earned over 200 million views through our digital advertising.
There are a variety of adverts each featuring a different set of characters finding their match on AutoTrader, here are a few of them:
Buying online can be simple and efficient
‘3 out of 4 consumers are interested in buying their next car online’ and our latest campaign highlights the ease and simplicity of doing that on Auto Trader.
Our buying online campaign has already reached over 64% of the UK audience through hundreds of millions of impressions over the first three months of the campaign. It celebrates the transition many retailers made during the pandemic to operating a digital forecourt and showcases the exciting new way to buy a car and have it delivered to your door.
Exciting partnerships with ITV, DAVE, What Car? and Autocar
Our partnerships with TV channels ITV and DAVE, plus the What Car? and Autocar websites, have helped drive even more potential car buyers to your adverts on our marketplace.
They provide great opportunities to reach mass audiences across popular channels at key times and help keep Auto Trader front of mind as the first place for consumers to visit when looking for their next vehicle.
Powering used car search for What Car? and AutoCar
Since July 2022 Auto Trader has provided the Used Car vehicle listings on What Car?, and its sister site, Autocar.
Powering their used car search helps capture consumers earlier in their car buying journey when consumers are researching their next car on What Car? and Autocar.
The partnership widens sales opportunities by reaching a further 24.9 million highly engaged consumers each year on these sites and brings them on to Auto Trader to complete their journey or to view more new and used cars.
To further drive awareness amongst What Car? and Autocar’s audiences, Auto Trader branding appears on all editorial used car reviews and feature articles.
ITV2 Showtime
Auto Trader is the sponsor of ITV2 Showtime, the most-watched digital channel for 16–34-year-olds. A series of fourteen short ads show daily on ITV2 between 8pm-4am, reaching a large proportion of the nation.
The ads play out across some of ITV2’s most popular programming, including Hell’s Kitchen, Celebability and The Emily Atack Show. The ads also play on video on demand via ITV Hub, extending the reach even further.
Weekends on Dave
This year, Auto Trader also sponsored ‘Weekends on Dave’, a premium schedule on one of the UK’s most popular digital TV channels.
With eight Auto Trader adverts shown per hour, this sponsorship was viewed by over 25 million adults across peak and daytime hours.
Our social media following continues to grow
Auto Trader’s social following continues to grow. The purpose of Auto Trader’s social media is to stay front of mind for our audience by providing them with engaging content and interaction opportunities that sustain our relationship with them between car buying cycles.
At almost 1.8M followers and with 208% growth over the last 3 years, our social channels now have a following that is nearly six times more than Cazoo, Cinch and Car Gurus UK combined.
Are you an electric sceptic?
A social media campaign designed to increase the visibility of our electric vehicle content onsite and ensure consumers see Auto Trader as the one stop shop for all things electric.
Rory Reid invites five of our Facebook Petrolhead followers to a track day in an attempt to change their minds and convert them to an Electric Champion.
Reaching over 2 million consumers a month over email
We continue to grow our marketable database and now exceed 1.5million consumers that want to receive Auto Trader emails. These emails feature everything from advice and support, vehicle reviews, new car offers to handpicked car adverts, averaging 50% unique open rates and 5.5% unique click through rates month on month, rates well above industry average.
In addition to our email marketing support, we regularly engage with users through other programmes such as saved search, pulling in the latest adverts based on a consumer’s search behaviour, ensuring we regularly surface your car stock. A combination of our email programmes results in over 2 million unique recipients that we regularly engage with every month.