CarGurus shares customer shopping data with other vendors

CarGurus, an online automotive marketplace for consumers, is now allowing third-party vendors access to data about how customers are using the shopping platform. By sharing such data, CarGurus will allow participating dealerships to learn more about how their inventory is performing on the site.

Dealers that use one of three partner vendors — vAuto, Clarivoy and Vistadash, which all track sales leads — will be able to see how often customers submit leads after visiting CarGurus.

Marty Blue, senior vice president of business development at CarGurus, said the company is sympathetic to dealers relying on multiple dashboards for information about the effectiveness of their marketing outlays.

By viewing competitive data on one platform, dealers can receive a more complete view of which sites provide the best return on those investments.

"We have a strategy of getting as many eyes on our data as possible," Blue said.

How the data is displayed will depend on the vendor and how it uses the data. Companies such as vAuto already share this type of data with dealer clients, Blue said, and both Clarivoy and Vistadash are tools that dealers already use to examine customer shopping data across multiple digital sites such as CarGurus, Kelly Blue Book and Cars.com.

"They're really trying to help dealers have more visibility or a clearer vision about which sites like CarGurus have influence over consumers that are eventually purchasing a vehicle from these dealers," Blue said.

"Dealers need more than vanity metrics to prove [return on investment]. They need real proof of what is working, which doesn't happen without making the necessary investments in attribution. Our integration with CarGurus helps dealerships connect the dots from online traffic to the ready-to-buy shoppers in their stores," Steve White, CEO of Clarivoy, said in a statement.

With three partnerships announced thus far, CarGurus plans to integrate with other third-party analytics platforms in the automotive retail space. According to the company, more than 6,000 franchised and independent dealerships have participated so far.

On Thursday, CarGurus reported net income of $12.1 million for the third quarter, up from $2.4 million in the third quarter of 2017, and revenue of $119 million, an increase of 43 percent year over year.

In the quarter, CarGurus reported 37 million monthly users on average, an increase of 43 percent year over year.