CarsGuide overhauls website as it plots IPO

It looks like they’ve done a shoddy mash-up of RSVP and Tindr. It remains to be seen whether the market will go for something like that against the acknowledged superiority of Carsales.

It’s not the classifieds model that is broken down. It’s Carsguide. The Carsales juggernaut is powering off into the distance in listings and revenue, and CarAdvice will soon be in the overtaking lane on content and has already won the race on display advertising. Carsguide seems to be rolling to a stop, and with News Ltd probably reluctant to offer any more breakdown assistance or a towing service. It’s interesting that News Ltd Carsguide content has not taken on the new branding.

Chris, it’s not just about Carsales and the classified side of things. Caradvice has grown massively over the past couple of years, and with a bit of time could overtake Drive and Carsguide in the editorial race.

“CarsGuide is half owned by 35 major dealer groups, who have been closely involved in the redevelopment”. And that is exactly the problem. Dealers think that they are more important than the actual cars, and consumers only care about the car – not which dealer has it. This will not work

Do you really thing the dealers actually give a toss about editorial content, OEM? In fact, they’d probably prefer not to have editorial content at all, because that way the buyers wouldn’t be deterred by unfavourable reviews. Perhaps that’s why Carsguide’s redesign has removed content from the home page, although I’m surprised the editor thought it was a good strategy.

Chris: I suspect the editor didn’t think it was a good strategy at all. She exited Carsguide a couple of months ago. The timing speaks volumes.

A Car Guy: Fair point. This press release is signalling Carsguide has lost direction. But if Carsguide is going down the tubes, who is left as competition against Carsales for the classifieds? All CarAdvice now has to do is add listings and it’s game over. Pretty well everybody in the industry knows there have been huge internal problems at Carsguide, which is probably why the editor left. But if this will not work, as you say, then maybe we’ll see CarAdvice buy out Carsguide.

Engine Room: Want a job as a copywriter? 🙂

Nobody’s mentioned the elephant in the room. Or perhaps that should be the 500-tonne koala in the room: Gumtree.

While Carsales has built such a big moat around dealer classifieds that even the dealers who OWN Carsguide still list their cars on Carsales; the private party classifieds from members of the public have been hoovered up by Gumtree, who have also invested in considerable advertising and in adding editorial content.

The ‘big boys’: Carsguide, Drive and Carsales, ignored Gumtree, thinking it would never be a competitor for them. Wrong.

They ignored Caradvice as well, not ever imagining it would become the powerhouse it has. Wrong. Caradvice last year took in more revenue than Carsguide and Drive together. And without having the benefit of any classifieds revenue stream. All the money was from advertisers who are smart enough to see the writing on the garage wall.

It’s a habit with Big Media. Exhibit A: Fairfax and the lost ‘rivers of gold’ when digital classifieds arose. Exhibit B: Rupert Murdoch’s similar reluctance to embrace digital until it reached a stage where NewsLtd had to play catch-up.

OEM: Thanks, I’ll mention that offer in my next agency review.

You’re all analysing this rebranding, but it’s like standing around a deathbed analysing whether the dying man’s last words were spoken in a pleasant voice.

They could well get 500,000 readers on Carsguide every month. But advertisers will get those same 500,000 people, plus another 2,000,000, every month on Carsales.

It’s great to see CarsGuide mix things up.

Both the consumer/user and dealer facing strategies have a great point of difference and CarSales should be worried as brand or channel loyalty doesn’t really exist and people go to where the best UX is and the best results…. be very interested to see how this plays out for them – full marks for having the balls to be different.

Wow Keithy. Have you actually ever looked to buy a car online? Or anything else for that matter? Have you seen Gumtree’s UI and growth? UI and UX mean nothing – INVENTORY is the king of classifieds. Carsales for used cars above $10k and Gumtree for used cars under $10k – it’s not that hard to figure out. Trying to assail these big players with purple maps does not a winning strategy make.

Keithy: “people go to where the best UX is and the best results”

Really? Have you seen eBay and GumTree’s UI?

If it was content you would be right, but its about classifieds and the one with the largest inventory wins, wouldn’t matter if CarsGuide’s UI could come out of the screen and kiss you, it would still do little to rattle CarSales.

Having a look at the traffic figures from neilsen since CarsGuide’s new site launch, the page impressions have crashed to a point basically unrecognisable. Might have to look closely at our campaigns.

Drive needs some serious investment if it wants to survive against CarSales and as for CarAdvice, those guys just stay quite and keep getting bigger. No one seems to notice them, blinded by they hatred of CarSales classifieds no doubt.

News and Fairfax have lost the content war to CarAdvice and classified war to CarSales.

@Actual car buyer & @Quartz – that’s my exact point CarSales model has worked for a period of time but CarsGuide is prepared to mix things up and offer a difference experience…JUST like Gumtree and eBay, they are alternatives to the CarSales UX and UI and are proving to be a great point of difference.
We don’t know if the CarsGuide change up will have the same effect, but at least they’re prepared to try something else

@Keithy, changing colour is not really trying something different. Their business is in a mess and @Quartz is right about the Neilsen figures for Carsguide showing they are sliding into oblivion. I’m betting more campaigns will be re-evaluated and moved to where they’ll get more value: Carsales and Caradvice.

@Carsguide traffic figures crach, did you read the article?… tad more than new colours!
● Location-based search
● New pay-per-view mode
● Free listings for private sellers
Plus…
“We are sacrificing our lead revenue to deliver a better consumer experience and deliver more qualified buyers to dealers”

Kinda more than colours…

@Keithy, they’ve had free listings for private sellers for years, and it hasn’t drawn the sellers away from Carsales and Gumtree. Location-based search is irrelevant when people are happy to take a $70 plane ride to save $2000 on a car. Nobody these days buys a car just because it’s around the corner, and the dealers know that. As for the pay-per-view, nice thought if they can get enough views to make it pay. The industry is yet to see evidence of that. It’s Carsales and Caradvice that are getting the views. And they’re getting the campaigns.

@carsguide traffic figures crash…
“People will take a $70 plane ride to save $2000 on a car” – worst generalisation I’ve read in ages!

There’s no way that your generalisation has any accuracy to the buying behaviours of car buyers. Including myself, I know A LOT of people who’ve bought cars privately and NONE have spent $70 dollars on a plane ride to go interstate, save $2k and drive it home. No saying that doesn’t happen as it obviously does but using that as grounds to refute their model is hilarious

Actually you’re wrong. I sell so many cars to people that are not in my area, they will happily travel hundreds of kilometres and occasionally interstate to come and buy a car. The carsguide site is totally pointless. But I wish them luck.

I actually hadn’t looked at carsguide de for years, I’ve just been reading drive and Caradvice, forgotten carsguide even existed.

I’m sorry, @Keithurban, but @Cardealer is right. And many people don’t even drive the car home if they’ve gone insterstate — they’ll have it trucked or railed to them. Of course, it’s a shame he and others have forgotten Carsguide existed, and maybe turning purple will remind them it’s still hanging around. But @Engineroom is also right. If even the dealers who own Carsguide are listing their cars on Carsales, it’s because they actually want to be able to sell them.

@Engineroom also points out that Caradvice has already won us over for the campaigns. I know where clients’ money is best spent, and it’s not on Carsguide. The Neilsen figures speak for themselves.

The other strange claim in the press release is that “Carsguide has 95% of the dealer inventory of its largest competitor in most states”. It would be interesting to find out just which states those are, since Carsguide has only 95,000 dealer cars and Carsales has about 160,000 which is nearly double. And we’re assuming that with Carsales having 220,000 cars overall, again nearly double that of Carsguide, that Carsales must be considered ‘their largest competitor’. Or perhaps they were talking about some other mystery competitor.

It probably doesn’t matter how hip the purple is, because let’s face it, Gumtree is far from being the slickest site, but it’s harvesting the classifieds.

People think Gumtree came out of nowhere, but in fact they’ve been campaigning hard for a long time, and marketing to the people who matter in the end: the car buyers.

@Key Account: That’s true. Guntree have spent up big, but it doesn’t alter the fact that their UI is pretty crappy, but people are still flocking to it. That’s the underlying problem with Carsguide’s idea, which is the proverbial (purple) lipstick on a pig. And a dying pig, at that.

Carsguide needs to succeed for the sake of all in the industry , Carsales misuses its monopoly power over dealers, manufacturers and consumers , Gumtree is all pretty much junkyard cars and Caradvice has zero audence outside of enthusiasts ….BTW they tried adding in classifieds once with Carbuddy , spectacular fail . Most of these coments are obviously written by people that work at carsales or caradvice and are totally pointless and irrelevent . Some people will travel to buy cars , some prefer not too , even the most one eyed Carsales employeee can see that what consumers really want is the choice.

@Carsguide traffic figures crash: It’s pretty simple – conduct a Dealer Used search on both sites and you can see where the inventory is. Carsguide has 70,000 Dealer Used cars compared to Carsales’ 78,000. The major difference is the Private Party market – Carsales has 80,000 listings compared to 13,000 on Carsguide. No real surprises there given the vast amount of advertising Carsales does…

The thought of that colour lipstick on anything is “chew yer arm off” territory. Maybe its the kind of colour that bogans love, but you wouldn’t think they’d go for the cutesy hipster grafitti approach. Might appeal to bronies, but do bronies buy cars?

What are Bronies ? Is this post being trolled by schoolkids ? Well, it is school holidays
.

It’s pretty clear that most of the people commenting negatively on this are Carsales/Gumtree employees. Sounds like they’re a bit threatened by someone in the industry actually doing something DIFFERENT. Like actually making things easier for consumers buy putting cars on maps? Don’t worry Carsguide – keep doing what you’re doing. Haters gonna hate but at the end of the day you guys are making things quicker & more simplified for us consumers. THANK YOU!

@Charles D. Bronies are dudes that like My Little Pony, and tend to dress in purple and pink. If you think Caradvice is only an enthusiast audience, you haven’t looked at it lately. But the car brands have and that’s where they’re putting their advertising. Caradvice might have been a bogan site once, but these days it’s the main place for car buyers to get reviews of cars. Carsguide used to do well with that, but it looks like they’ve ignored reviews now.

At the end of the day Carsguide is doing something different to the rest of the industry and sounds like other players in the game are getting a bit edgy because of it.
They must be because they are clearly all commenting on this article.
Haters gonna hate but keep on it Carsguide – you’re making my car buying experience quicker and easier with the whole mapping thing. THANK YOU!
ps. I like purple. The site looks a lot fresher than others that haven’t been updated in years!

Here are current Stats for Inventory – Dealer Used Car Inventory Only.

Carsguide has been stating that in some states they hold up to 95% of Dealer Used Car Inventory

NSW Carsguide 17,904
NSW Carsales 21,963
81.52%

VIC Carsguide 17,191
VIC Carsales 21,633
79.47%

QLD Carsguide 14,835
QLD Carsales 16,959
87.47%

WA Carsguide 10,048
WA Carsales 10,440
96.25%

SA Carsguide 7,478
SA Carsales 7,944
94.13%

NT Carsguide 213
NT Carsales 499
42.69%

ACT Carsguide 1,025
ACT Carsales 2,329
44.01%

Nationally Carsguide displays 75.08% of the Dealer Used Car Inventory that Carsales displays – FACT and not too far from the information shared.

And audience-wise, there is no competition. According to Neilson MI, Carsales had average daily UBs of 292k last month, Drive comes in second — but a long way behind – at 66k, Carsguide @ 58k and CarAdvice @ 49k. Irrespective of inventory levels, Carsguide and Drive have a LONG way to go to dissuade carbuyers that Carsales is THE place to go to buy a car.

@Feeble Effort and @Carsguide traffic figures crash – have either of you even looked at Nielsen to back up your claims? I looked at Nielsen today and Carsguide has more than double UA’s than Car Advice..??! Traffic figures sliding into oblivion? Errr ..no actually, they were right where they a week ago. Any hard facts to back up your opinions people?… No, I didn’t think so.

You’re comparing apples with oranges, @GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT. Your figures are for dealer used inventory, but Carsguide made their claim on dealer inventory, which includes new cars. The figures for dealer inventory show Carsales have closer to twice that of Carsguide. Fudging the figures

@minnie, you’re right , I don’t think anyone disputes the market share carsales has, but that’s not great for the industry unless you’re a shareholder or employee at carsales? The point is that CarsGuide is the only site positioned to do anything about that so let’s hope they do for everyone’s sake .
@feeble effort- thanks for explaining the my little pony thing … I hadn’t heard of them since my sister had one in 85, bottom line is Caradvice has zero brand awareness with consumers … True some manufacturers spend ad money there but that’s mainly to ensure they get good reviews…. It’s not to attract in market car buyers.

@Jessica, I think it’s actually pretty clear that most of the commenters here are NOT from Carsales or Gumtree. And they certainly don’t sound edgy. But it does sound like you’re from Cars Guide. But good on you for defending what your business is doing.

@Charles D, I think you might be underestimating Car Advice’s consumer impact. We’ve seen better conversion rates there for our clients than we’ve seen on Carsguide or in fact on Drive. And those conversions are coming from consumers.

Yes @Feeble Effort, Bronies are a weird demographic subset, and there are others. Big challenge these days is how do campaigns engage those subsets?

@Carguide Crash – You misunderstand , I’m not underestimating their impact or relevance , there is definitely a place for them in the industry and the quality of their editorial is up there with the best around, however with no above the line marketing and very little consumer awareness they are never going to challenge Carsales, not in my lifetime anyway …the last time i looked they were struggling to break 1 million page impressions a month if you take out overseas eyeballs ? Explain how that makes them a ” powerhouse” ?

@Charles D. Do you mean Car Advice? It might be worth checking the figures again. They are doing closer to 4 million, and it’s all editorial. They’re transparent in admitting they’re also targeting international traffic, but it accounts for only 30% of their PIs. That still leaves a solid 3 million. It would be interesting to know what Cars Guide impressions will be on editorial this month.

We know that Drive does very well on editorial now too, and they admit their traffic is about 80% editorial. They seem to be losing interest in the listings altogether.

@Carsguide crash – The page impressions for Car advice for August where 2.3m?
Less overseas traffic its around 1.5m domestic page impressions, according to Nielsen …. not sure where your pulling those figures from.
Again , a good enthusiast Audience not much more.

A car driven over state borders has to a have a comprehensive police inspection and pay hundreds of dollars in extra taxes. The idea that a $1000 car bought off a dodgy geezer in trackies and uggs who advertised on Gumtree would go through this is ridiculous.

About 5% – 10% of people would travel excessively to get the car they want , especially if its a niche model or a vintage car …Most people will buy a mass market new car from the dealership closest to them that has the right model and colour in stock ….it suits Carsales to say that people will travel hundreds of kilometres or even interstate to buy a car they can get around the corner because they can save a few dollars . Its mostly nonsense.

Well I’m definitely from CarAdvice. Great discussion – although do want to set the record straight on CarAdvice’s domestic traffic @ Charles D.

So while Nielsen only tracks domestic traffic and we only report on this figure, happy to share that our international traffic is around another 26% (for August).

So August Nielsen Market Intelligence figures on page impressions for domestic audience only were 5,968,157 for ourselves, and 6,675,091 for Drive. Our session duration leads all competitors (4:41min) apart from Carsales. Obviously 100% of our audience is new car editorial, with no used car content, nor classifieds which makes our consumers highly relevant for OEM’s and their agencies wishing to engage solely with new car buyers.

In fact CarAdvice (Nielsen August 2014) is now the only pure new car content site in the top 10, which is thanks to our great users and industry customer support.

Cheers,

Andrew Beecher
CarAdvice CEO

Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the clarification , Nielsen Mediaview reports Caradvice for August –
UA- 217,000
PI – 2.85m
Thats where i was taking the information from , I didn’t realize anyone still used market intelligence?

Hi Charles,

Yep us publishers do for market analysis. That said I was not aware there was a discrepancy between PI’s in Mediaview. Let me follow up with Nielsen as there should not be one that I can understand…stay tuned.

Andrew

@Andrew Beecher, thanks for weighing in, and congratulations on Car Advice growth. It looks like you are giving Cars Guide and Drive a real headache. Are you able to add comment on your conversion rates?

Oh ok , I didn’t realise anyone used market intelligence anymore, but if the figures are that highly inflated then I don’t blame you for quoting them .
However most agencies use Neilsen mediaview?
Which interestingly show both CarsGuide and drive at roughly three times the size of Caradvice? I’d be interested if market intelligence says the same ( we don’t have access to it anymore)

@ Charles D. Yep have asked the question from Nielsen – stand by. I’m very interested in why there would be any variation whatsoever as a tagged imp is a tagged imp. We run NNR, ComScore and Hitwise plus of course GA. Ping me if you want any of it.

@ Your Kidding. CTR’s or actual conversions at the OEM level for transactional events (i.e test drive, brochure request, etc)

Also forgot to say that good on the Carsguide team for the relaunch and changing their business model. It’s a bold move.

@Andrew Beecher. How does that session duration time compare with Carguide and Drive. Can you give us the actual figures?

@ Carsguide crash. Sure. All Nielsen Market Intelligence August 2014
CarAdvice ASD: 4:40min
Drive ASD: 2:13min
Carsguide ASD: 3:51min

and average page duration:
CarAdvice APD: 1:27min
Drive APD: 0:46min
Carsguide APD: 0:39min

Interestingly if you look at all the 3rd party audience views of the market the figures for August 2014 look like:

ComScore Unique Audience:
CarAdvice: 436,000 audience reach
Drive: 341,000 audience reach
Carsguide: 320,000 audience

Experian/Hitwise Audience:
CarAdvice: 2,008,913
Drive: 2,257,016
Carsguide: 2,402,155

Nielsen UA:
CarAdvice: 217,000
Drive APD: 537,000
Carsguide APD: 515,000

We know that as a standalone site CarAdvice has to work harder in terms of UA as we cannot harvest unique-rich clicks via car related stories on general news mastheads. However that is that way the world works and other players are absolutely entitled to do this, however from an advertiser value proposition POV at least buyers know that consumers are not stumbling upon CarAdvice from a news feed – they are categorically seeking new car reviews.

Cheers and thanks for asking,

Andrew Beecher
CarAdvice CEO

@Andrew Beecher; both CTR and OEM conversion rates, if you’d be good enough to share them. I know a couple of OEMs were very happy with their conversion rates, but it would be great to get an overall average for how well Car Advice is doing.

Caradvice looks to have superceded Carsguide in similarweb stats…

http://www.similarweb.com/webs.....ide.com.au

This is as clear as mud! Three different audience measurement systems – Experian/Hitwise, Comscore and Neilson — all show completely different results, not only in absolute numbers but in rankings. What gives!

Neilsen mediaview is the standard measure and what the industry should all use.
Until we have one standard measurement tool it will always be as ‘ clear as mud’ unfortunately .
I’ve never even heard of similar web ? What’s next? family fortunes said ‘ we surveyed 100 people and guess what they said?”
it’s quite comical.

One metric that is unassailable is display advertising revenue. And it’s clear when you look at the sites that Carsales is well ahead, followed by Car Advice in number 2 spot. Carsguide is trailing by a large margin.

@ Carsguide crashes. Firstly sorry for delay on response – travelling plus had to ask the team. OK so Sept on CarAdvice saw an average CTR of 0.25% across all OEM campaigns and all impressions served . Below is the top 3 performing manufacturers for September;

1. XXX (0.44%)
2. YYY (0.30%) & ZZZ (0.30%)
4. BBB (0.28%)

Pleasingly these numbers are significantly higher than the DFA Australian Automotive Benchmark of 0.15% for September 2013 and 0.14% for April 2014, which shows why manufactures that decide to spend with us tend to stick around.

In terms of OEM conversion rates I would love to share them however they really belong to our customers and to be fair they vary based on so many factors (product, price, campaign, brand perception, form complexity, number of hops, landing page design, etc) that they are tough to generalise. Grab our team anytime if you want a press.

Thanks again for asking.

Andrew Beecher
CarAdvice CEO

Stumbled on this post due to the number of comments it has provoked. It’s great to see so many vested interests championing their causes. Keep it up guys – loving the entertainment.

CarsGuide – keep up the industry shakeup – clearly getting everybody talking.

“One metric that is unassailable is display advertising revenue. And it’s clear when you look at the sites that Carsales is well ahead, followed by Car Advice in number 2 spot. Carsguide is trailing by a large margin.”

@carsguide crahses: how do you know this? What numbers are you looking at to come to this conclusion?

@ Carsguide Crashes – I would assume SMI data , although Carsguide has only recently split away from News Corp sales so unless you work at News Corp you cant access that data as SMI doesn’t break it out by masthead?
It will be very interesting to see how that develops over the coming 6 months .

The one thing they have done is generated commentary in what has been a very dull and dominated category

60% of potential car buyers l deal with every day cannot search carsguide on there mobile phone while driving around looking for cars with the new system. unless they have a iphone. Have notified carsguide and fallen on deaf ears.great win for the other web sites. But bad for us. The old site was very cost effective and lead to 60% of our sales.has anyone else experienced the same problem ?