Our strategy
in action
Bringing together our three strategic priorities to deliver the best,
data-driven digital retailing experience for consumers and retailers, alike.
Our three strategic priorities
are enabling future-focused,
data-driven digital retailing
We strive to be the best place to find, buy and sell a
car in the UK — on a platform that enables data-driven
digital retailing for our customers. These three strategic
priorities sit alongside our commitment to always being
a responsible business.
Marketplace
Be the best place
to buy a car
Our marketplace saw strong revenue and operating profit growth in the year, with double digit growth across all three revenue segments for the first time since our IPO in 2015. The largest area of revenue comes from retailer customers, where forecourt numbers were broadly consistent and we increased average revenue per retailer (‘ARPR’) by 12%. This growth came from all three levers: price, stock and product. Our annual pricing and product event, which took effect in April, included a further module of Auto Trader Connect as we look to embed our data and insight into customers’ businesses to enable them to make better, faster decisions. Our advertising packages continue to perform well with penetration above our standard package averaging 35% of retailer stock over the year (2023: 32%, March 2024: 34%).
Within our marketplace we remain committed to building our new car experience. Franchise customers have been able to advertise physical new cars for a number of years, and we ended the year with c.2,100 paying retailers on this product (March 2023: c.1,900). Alongside this, we have launched a product allowing manufacturers operating an agency model to advertise new cars directly to consumers nationally.
This revenue is included in the Manufacturer and Agency line. Critical to having the best new car buying experience is ensuring we are the research destination for electric vehicles (‘EVs’). To support this, we have added new EV content, tools and evolved search. We have also actively started to incorporate EVs into our marketing campaigns, launched new media partnerships to promote EVs, hosted live events, and continued our successful monthly EV giveaway.
We have continued to share our data and insight with retailers, the industry and Government to help inform public policy and regulation to support the mass adoption of EVs. During the period we continued our programme of political engagement, which included giving evidence to a House of Lords Committee, presenting our data to key ministers, and supporting Transport for London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (‘ULEZ’) expansion and the associated scrappage scheme.
13,783
average retailer forecourts advertising with Auto Trader
during 2024
Platform
Be the industry's data
& technology platform
In April 2023 we made our second module of Auto Trader Connect, Valuations, available to customers as part of our annual pricing and product event. This provides specification and condition adjusted valuations within our Retailer Portal and via our Auto Trader Connect APIs, enabling third parties and retailers to directly integrate these into their core systems. In April 2024 we launched a further module of Auto Trader Connect providing retailers with Trended Valuations and enhanced Retail Check functionality.
Combined, these tools help retailers confidently understand the past and present trends in terms of pricing and demand so they can make better decisions when buying or retailing vehicles.
Making our platform accessible also enables our customers to benefit from the multi-year investment we have made in our data platform and data science capability. Over many years we have improved the quality of our data, most of which is proprietary. We acquired Kee Resources for vehicle taxonomy, have integrated build-level data from manufacturers, collated many observations on our platform and more recently have sourced granular vehicle data to provide our own provenance checks. As part of our platform strategy, we continue to integrate with lenders to enable a full digital automotive finance journey on Auto Trader. While we are not directly impacted by the current FCA investigation into discretionary commission arrangements, we believe it should lead to a more consistent and transparent car buying journey for consumers, which we are well placed to provide on Auto Trader.
Digital retailing
Be the enabler for all
retailers to sell online
To strengthen our marketplace, we are looking to provide a deeper car buying and selling experience on Auto Trader, allowing car buyers and retailers to extend beyond some of the constraints of a physical forecourt and sales process.
Our main focus has been to develop and scale our Deal Builder product for used cars, where car buyers can carry out as much of the journey as they want on Auto Trader, completing the rest of the transaction on the forecourt, over the phone or through a combination of channels.
Find out more about how we're helping consumers and
retailers adapt to this quickly evolving landscape and
embrace the exciting changes on the horizon.
c.1,100
Deal Builder customers live in
March 2024
c.16,000
deals in March 2024
40,000
cars live at the end of March 2024
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