Expanded VIN Performance
Media Placements

Putting the right VINs in front of the right shoppers in more places

Earlier this year, we launched VIN Performance Media: our dynamic inventory advertising solution that leverages your VINs, our Cars.com audience, and machine-learning AI to promote the right vehicles to the right shoppers throughout their journey. 

When local shoppers search for same or similar vehicles on Cars.com, your most relevant VIN in-stock is dynamically promoted at the top of their results. And then after they leave the marketplace, your brand stays in front of them across websites and social platforms until they buy.

The early results proved that we were really onto something, so our team began engineering more key placements for dealer inventory to be dynamically recommended to relevant shoppers throughout their Cars.com experience.

In this latest update, we added an additional placement at the top of the vehicle search results page. Now, shoppers may see promoted vehicles in the top two results, if their search matches with two highly relevant VINs from local dealers with VIN Performance Media. What’s good for the consumer experience is good for our dealers’ results — so we are making sure this increased exposure of promoted inventory is also helping shoppers find the right vehicle for them, faster.

We also integrated VIN Performance Media into the big stage: the Cars.com homepage. In the “Trending searches near you” section, our AI will recommend a vehicle in the first position if it matches the currently trending search query selected, and is from a local dealer leveraging VIN Performance Media. This is a powerful placement to engage shoppers who may not know exactly what criteria they want to search for yet, but are interested in checking out what’s popular that Cars.com recommends for them to explore.

We’re closely monitoring results from all angles of this update, but we already have a pretty great success story. One of our partners in upstate New York was able to significantly decrease the average age on their used and CPO inventory with VIN Performance Media and its recently expanded placements for broader exposure.