General Faqs
Good news! Granting LotLinx Edit and Collaborate access to your website’s Google Analytics data takes only a minute or so to complete. Click here to access our easy step-by-step tutorial.
We supply our inventory to hundreds of digital automotive properties, to other properties with automotive content, and we dynamically display inventory to self identified car shoppers. We have direct relationships with lots of great properties like LemonFree, ISeeCars, Autolist and Speedlist, to name a few. In addition, we supply inventory to a large number of sites through partnership with aggregators, to ensure we achieve scale.
LotLinx puts your inventory on as many sites as possible. We specifically seek auto shoppers who have reached the point in their shopping journey where they’re searching for cars on a VIN specific basis (“VINtenders”). We do this by supplying feeds of your inventory to our partner automotive websites, and by following VINtenders throughout the web using sophisticated audience targeting methods.
Bot Faqs
A 2014 Wall Street Journal article quoted an IAB study stating that one-third of web traffic is bot based. Remember, though, some of those bots are good bots like those from search engines. LotLinx technology works to identify and block bots so that you are only billed for human car shoppers.
For more detailed information on understanding bot traffic and what LotLinx does to protect you, download our white paper.
The entire LotLinx business model is based on driving active shoppers looking for a specific make and model within your PMA, which we call VINtenders, to your VDPs. Bots don’t buy cars, so we take the following steps to ensure that we stick to human shoppers:
- We use a JavaScript Redirect that is impossible for most bots to navigate.
- We have an internal bot list that we use to eliminate known bot traffic from your billing.
- We use two independent systems to verify traffic as from humans. If either system suspects a bot, the traffic is removed from your billing.
- We subscribe to and use the gold-standard third party bot lists to stay up-to-date on the best international bot protection.
- We review all traffic data retroactively to further discover any remnant bot traffic.
If you ever believe we charged you for bot traffic, give us a call. If we uncover a new bot that did get past all the above steps, we’ll give you six months of free LotLinx!
For more detailed information on understanding bot traffic and what LotLinx does to protect you, download our white paper.
LotLinx Velocity Reports Faqs
While all of this data is in the public domain, we understand your desire to omit your data from our tool. Please send an email to info@lotlinx.com with the formal request, and we will remove your data from our comparison tool.
You can now compare your sales velocity with other dealerships in your area. You will be able to see the data that we have collected on your competitors but they cannot see your data because you are a customer of ours. For our current customers, this feature is not yet available but should be in the coming weeks. This will be available as a new tab at the top when you log into your dealer portal.
Register for the live tool and we’ll actively monitor your site and populate this tool with the appropriate data.
We count the first day on lot as the first day the car appears on your website, and track when that car leaves your site to get to the average days on lot number.
Rest assured, we do not share any data from our dealer customers. Upon typing your URL into the demo on LotLinx.com, you’ll notice that data from our dealer customers is restricted.
SEO Faqs For Dealers & Publishers
Bounce rate (or any aspect of analytics) is not used in SEO. According to Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam team, “Google Analytics is not used in search quality in any way for our rankings.”
To clarify, what is a factor for Google rankings is the bounce back to Google after someone visits your site from a search result. This type of bounce is measured by the search engine, and it is an important quality signal. LotLinx traffic is from active shoppers who have clicked on a particular piece of your inventory. They are likely to be satisfied by the information received.
To learn more about bounce rate, please see our video and white paper.
Unfortunately, we can’t control how our publisher partners optimize for SEO. We do believe, however, that given the strong content and SEO rankings of third party sites, should your listings appear within their SEO results, that drives you more inventory “facings.”
The good news for you as a dealer is that Google gives your dealership strong weighting since you are a local site. At this time, Google gives significant preference to dealer sites when a searcher is looking for local inventory.
One of the great benefits of partnering with LotLinx is being able to take advantage of our valued partnerships. That said, protecting our dealer customers, as well as our valued partnerships, is our utmost priority. Because of the sheer number of places your listings will appear on the web, embedding hyperlinks to dealer websites could put your site at serious risk for Google penalties, and we strive to make sure that is never the case.
Our goal is to make sure LotLinx Deeplinking drives targeted, highly relevant traffic to your website. We do not utilize the technology to drive SEO benefit, as it could be misinterpreted by search engines as spammy or harmful.
This is up to the publisher website, so it can vary. That said, the redirect that is in place with the LotLinx technology prohibits “link juice” from being passed on to local dealer websites. So any authority, whether positive or negative, will not be passed on to a local dealer website.
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