A recent update to DriveChicago.com is resulting in a massive increase in the number of visitors that the web portal is sending directly to CATA member dealer websites. With this recent change, DriveChicago.com visitors who are searching for a vehicle are sent directly to a dealer website when clicking on a vehicle listing. This is resulting in 6,000-10,000 dealer website referrals from DriveChicago.com per month.
 
Until a few months ago, DriveChicago.com relied on traditional email leads, phone ups, and website clicks to send visitors to CATA member dealer websites. With this change, DriveChicago.com gets out of the way and sends that visitor to a dealer’s website, directly to the vehicle details pages.
 
"This is probably the most effective enhancement ever made on DriveChicago.com," said Richard Wickstrom, DriveChicago.com committee chairman. "By sidestepping the traditional vehicle details page and tired old email lead format, DriveChicago.com sends thousands of customers directly to CATA dealers. Many dealers are seeing more than 100 digital visitors per month as a result of this change."
 
For dealers, there was no setup necessary. DriveChicago.com’s technical partner, Automotive Internet Media, completed a setup for each dealership that deep linked directly from the DriveChicgo.com search results into each dealer’s vehicle details pages.
 
"Knowing that dealers spend tens of thousands of dollars optimizing their websites to generate sales, DriveChicago.com decided to cut out the middle man and drive customers right into dealers’ virtual showrooms," said Mark Bilek, DriveChicago.com general manger. "This one change instantly raised the relevance of DriveChicago.com to its dealers and is a sign of the CATA’s continued commitment to provide its members exceptional value."
 
To date, more than 90% of CATA dealers have been transitioned to this new process. To see how many visitors DriveChicago.com is sending to your website, simply view the referring sites within the Google Analytics report for your dealership website.