A trending topic in the automotive space is the VDP – Vehicle Details Page. By loose definition, VDPs represent the units within your dealership’s ever-moving inventory. On a granular level, the VDP is what sharp dealership owners leverage to make better purchasing decisions with both stocking and advertising. While the vast majority of US dealerships have VDPs on their website, who will be the dealerships to leverage them and win? As industry veterans in the automotive marketing space, Speed Shift Media wants to provide you with some tried and true methods in making winning decisions with your Vehicle Details Pages in 2022.

So what’s the big deal with VDPs anyway?

Simply put, VDPs on your website are typically the most important pages for your shoppers. As you already know, VDPs are where shoppers come to find all the specific details on the vehicles, once they’ve already zeroed in on the car(s) they like. They come to look at vehicle photos, check vehicle history, look at pricing details, etc. In most cases, shoppers want to engage with your inventory before they engage with your store and brand. Your dealership website VDPs represent your inventory, thus putting the focus on understanding your dealership VDPs can only help with boosting turn and reducing aged inventory. To be on the cutting edge of automotive marketing in 2022, one must develop a full understanding of the stories told by their dealership VDP analytics.

(Example of a Vehicle Details Page)

We all want leads and phone calls…

We can all agree that leads and phone calls are great signs of successful marketing campaigns. This is what we want to ultimately achieve when we spend tens of thousands of dollars on marketing/advertising every month. While the desire to focus on leads and phone calls is understandable, focusing solely on those two outcomes leaves opportunity on the table. Being in the automotive marketing space for 10+ years servicing thousands of dealers nationally, we’ve consistently found that leads and phone calls only happen after the shoppers decide on which vehicle they like. But what happens with a customer’s journey before they decide to call? 

VDP analytics is to automotive marketing, what qualifying is to sales…

Your dealership VDPs will tell you which units your shoppers are actually looking at. They will tell you what is clearly working and what is not, with your marketing efforts. In the same way which salespeople fact-find to make vehicle recommendations for customers, VDPs do the same for dealerships to make recommendations on which vehicles to advertise. For dealerships who don’t normally analyze VDP stats, they are often shocked to see the skewed amount of underexposure and overexposure on certain units within their inventory. This is due to the nature of advertising platforms – the eye catching units will be over-served to the audience, leaving the average units under-served. Many times, price slashes can be reduced, wholesale units can be retailed, and gross margins could be maintained, if only decisions were made based on VDP analytics rather than inbound leads and phone calls! Our team here at Speed Shift Media specialize in this field.

(Example of overexposure vs underexposure on units)

So which aspects of VDP analytics are most important to dealerships?

There’s no cookie cutter answer to this! Two prominent trends that typically indicate sales would be (1) a surge in vehicle photo views on a particular unit, and/or (2) a surge in Vehicle Reports (CarFax, AutoCheck, VehicleHistory, etc.) requests if it’s a pre-owned unit. Beyond these two factors, there’s a plethora of other indicators on VDP analytics which can greatly assist dealerships. To better assist you in developing this understanding, Speed Shift Media prepared this free webinar below as a resource! See below.

How can Speed Shift Media help?

As veterans in the automotive marketing space, we at Speed Shift Media have numerous solutions for our clients. From consulting calls, to full service VIN-level advertising campaigns, we help thousands of dealerships every year. As we believe in our skill sets and maintain an exemplary track record in the industry, we offer services with no contracts, retainers, or startup fees, to the dealerships that qualify. Click on Get Started to learn how Speed Shift Media can help your dealership today!