DETROIT -

Third-party car shopping sites are rolling out new features and technology as competition for consumer eyeballs and dealer and OEM marketing dollars heats up.

Edmunds, Cars.com, TrueCar and Cox Automotive’s Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book, are among the online marketplaces that are devising sophisticated digital tools to zero in on in-market car shoppers. They are also working to make sure dealers’ listings on their respective site rise to the top of online searches.

Seth Berkowitz, president of Edmunds, said the company is focused on promoting its dealers’ used vehicle inventory on digital mediums such as Facebook, Google and YouTube. The effort is a function of the economy, the market and what dealers want, he said.

“Dealers have told us that used-car sales is the bread-and-butter of the dealership,” along with fixed operations, Berkowitz said.

He said the company has 18 million to 20 million unique visitors per month.

Edmunds acquired texting platform, CarCode, in 2014, and what started as simple texting, has evolved to managed texting, chat, managed chat and Facebook Messenger, Berkowitz said.

Managed text and managed chat happens when dealers outsource responses to a call center.

Edmunds believes written conversations will eventually migrate to voice using digital assistant technology such as Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Home.

Seven thousand dealers communicate with customers through CarCode, and there is potential for growth, Berkowitz said.

Digital conversation

“I don’t think video chat is out of the question, either,” Berkowitz said. “We’re busy stitching together these various tools and including artificial intelligence so that we’re providing the platform for any digital conversation that happens between a consumer and a dealer and providing useful data to get them through the conversation more seamlessly.”

Cox Automotive is readying for the future of digital classified with two well-established names:

Autotrader, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this fall and Kelley Blue Book, which operates kbb.com and is over 90 years old, said Jessica Stafford, Cox Automotive vice president of marketing.

The two websites see over 38 million car shoppers a month with little overlap, especially during the beginning phases of a consumers’ online shopping experience, Stafford said.

Consumers depend on kbb.com for vehicle reviews and research and on Autotrader.com for its thousands of vehicle listings, she said.

“We found that for our dealer and our manufacturer customer, we’re able to offer differentiated audiences with two different mindsets,” she added.

Stafford said nine out of 10 consumers want to shop online for vehicles by monthly payment, and Cox Automotive is building its digital retailing platform to enable dealers to offer that feature.

She said Cox Automotive has “back-end tools” for financing online through Dealertrack, its provider of lending software for dealerships and Dealer.com, its provider of advertising and websites for dealerships.

“That’s what we’re seeing as the evolution of shopping and buying and a lot of it happening online,” she said.

Competitor TrueCar is also building digital retailing tools to enable dealers to offer customers the ability to get a vehicle price and actual monthly loan payment, said CEO Chip Perry, during the company’s second quarter earnings conference call in August.

The tool must include a vehicle transaction price and be able to factor in the actual price of a trade-in, incentives and taxes to get to a precise monthly payment, Perry said.

“Nothing on the market today offers a complete digital retail solution,” he said. “But we think, we are in best position to assemble the pieces in the way” that meets the needs of the both consumers and dealers.

TrueCar, in partnership with R. Hollenshead Auto Sales and Hollenshead’s subsidiary, Galves Market Data, began testing TrueCar Trade in July in the New York City and Philadelphia markets.

TrueCar Trade provides consumers a way to secure an online offer for their trade-in before visiting the dealership, Perry said.

‘Taking’ marketing dollars

“We believe we have a better value proposition, and we expect to continue taking share of both dealer marketing dollars and OEM marketing dollars from other online marketing providers and from the traditional media world,” Perry added.

Cars.com, which announced it spin-off from Tegna Inc. on June 1 and held its first earnings conference call in August, said it is working on several improvements to its site and building its product offerings.

In the second quarter, Cars.com CEO Alex Vetter said the site received 104.1 million visits, a 1-percent decline from the same period in 2016, but an improvement over the 7 percent decline in the first quarter.

The company’s visibility in search engine results were negatively impacted by a multiple-year website redesign, and that visibility needs to improve, he added.

“We still have more work to do to improve our SEO positioning and grow our overall traffic,” Vetter said, during the conference call.

The company also plans to enhance its mobile capabilities. Mobile searches represented 58 percent of Cars.com traffic in the second quarter, a nine percent increase over the same period last year.