Mormon site is marketing giant for Utah car dealers

For Kris MacDonald and for most auto dealerships in Utah, the most productive source of sales prospects is a local Internet shopping site owned by the Mormon Church.

Business from KSL.com accounts for half of all used-vehicle sales made at Murdock Automotive Group's two largest Hyundai stores near Salt Lake City, said MacDonald, the stores' Internet sales director. The site also accounts for 20 percent of new-vehicle sales.

"We get a crazy amount of traffic from them," MacDonald said of KSL.com.

The influence of this one local media source is virtually unparalleled in other major markets, said Oliver Young, marketing director of Young Automotive Group and son of dealer principal Spencer Young.

"It's a phenomenon. Everybody in the market knows KSL," Young said.

KSL.com is an online media site with a giant classified section, including cars, that resembles a Utah version of Craigslist. It grew out of another property owned by the Mormon Church, the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City, KSL-TV.

People within 500 miles of Salt Lake City use KSL.com to shop for everything from tools to farm equipment, Young said.

Each month the site attracts about 5.3 million unique visitors and 285 million page views, said Eric Bright, vice president of e-commerce at the for-profit unit of the church that manages KSL.com. The Mormon Church is known officially as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

About three years ago, auto dealers began in earnest to list used-car inventory on the site. And a year ago KSL.com began allowing dealers to list new-car inventory, Bright said.

It has been a bonanza for dealers such as Young and Murdock.

MacDonald said the large Mormon population around Salt Lake City is fiercely loyal to KSL.com and view it as a trusted source for doing business. Bright estimated that about 75 percent of Utah's 2.2 million people are Mormon.

Young, who is Mormon, said he believes that people flock to the site because they get results, and the site does a good job of policing scammers.

Bright said the site attracts about 700,000 unique car shoppers each month who look at an eye-popping 40 million pages of inventory.

Whatever the consumer motivation, MacDonald said he gets the best return of any media by listing inventory and advertising on the site. He said he started listing used inventory more than three years ago.

But MacDonald said he knew so many eyeballs were on the site that he couldn't resist adding new Hyundai vehicle listings among the used ones. At the time, new Hyundais were selling at prices that made them competitive with other brands' used listings, so the strategy worked, he said.

When KSL.com launched new-vehicle classifieds a year ago, Murdock Automotive Group jumped in with both feet, MacDonald said.

At Murdock's Hyundai store in Logan, Utah, KSL.com accounted for 60 percent of the 1,144 used vehicles sold through September, MacDonald said. That's 686 vehicles.

KSL.com accounted for 170 new-car sales during the period, or 15 percent of the 1,139 new cars sold at the store. In contrast, the Logan store's own Web site brought about 450 new and used car buyers in the nine months.

MacDonald said similar numbers were posted at the group's Hyundai store in Lindon, Utah.

Results have been so impressive, he said, that the stores this month dropped their listing subscriptions with Cars.com, a national online shopping site.

He said customers from as far away as Boise, Idaho, and Casper, Wyo., come into the store after seeing store listings on KSL.com.

Young said KSL.com is far and away the top source of prospects at the nine-store Young Automotive Group.

For instance, at Young Chevrolet in Layton, Utah, KSL.com is responsible for about 80 leads a month, compared with 20 for AutoTrader.com, another national online site, he said. For the group's Kia store, it's100 leads a month from KSL.com compared with fewer than 10 for AutoTrader.com, he said.

Young said he overlooks some of the site's shortcomings, such as limited analytics to track shopping habits on the site, because KSL.com produces results.

The subscription price increased from about $850 monthly per store to between $3,000 and $4,000 a month when new-car inventory was added. The total includes the listing of inventory as well as some advertising connected with that inventory, he said.

MacDonald said he pays about $3,200 a month per store for KSL.com compared with about $5,000 to list new- and used-car inventory on AutoTrader.com. Bright at KSL.com also notes that the company recently improved analytics.

Young, for one, said he is willing to pay. "If you're not on it, you're not getting in front of customers."