Our vision

Our vision is to be the number one marketplace for motorists

Our strategy

1. Migration to digital platforms
Our transition to a digital business has been a major part of our strategy in recent years. Though the magazine remains strong (reaching 89,000 car buyers a week), our main focus is on continuing to drive our digital platforms. Our website, for example, now attracts almost nine million unique users a month, making it by far the UK’s largest automotive classified website (with an 87% share of page views).

We are also investing heavily in new digital platforms, most recently with the launch of our new mobile offering - both a new mobile site and new mobile app. The mobile site alone generates just under one million unique users, providing dealers and consumers with an effective search tool designed both for general use and for use closer to the point of purchase (since much of our mobile usage is driven by consumers refining their searches on dealer forecourts).

Auto Trader was the first classified brand in all sectors to launch as a website (in 1996) and is now truly a digital business, with a strong history of delivering innovation. Along with our determination to drive the greatest amount of high-quality leads to our dealers and provide the best return on investment for their advertising, this evolving commitment to digital ensures that we maintain our market leading position.

2. Investing in innovation and technology
We continue to invest in new advertising sectors for dealers. A recent example of this is our launch of Razsor - a separate brand focused on providing dealers with the best website to gain direct consumer traffic. We have also launched the New Car offering, which will ensure our consumers can come to Auto Trader for all car buying needs.

We are introducing several new products focused on generating more response for dealers, a better search experience for our consumers and further development of products that enable our consumers to make more informed choices about the cars they want to purchase and the dealers they visit. Our goal is to make the buying and selling of vehicles as easy as possible for both consumers and trade customers.

3. Focus on our customers
The success of our business is dependent on the success of our customers. One of our priorities is therefore to ensure that we keep the customer at the heart of our organisation. What this means in practice is a clear and consistent focus on ensuring that we consider the customer at all levels of decision-making.

For our trade and dealer customers, this means an unrelenting focus on driving the best response and ROI for their advertising. We invest considerable time and effort in providing new tools to demonstrate value, new products which enable dealers to manage their businesses more effectively, and new platforms for them to reach all consumer segments. In fact, we measure our customer satisfaction every single month (via our Customer Satisfaction Index, CSI).

The CSI score permeates the entire organisation, engaging all functions in collaboration to overcome any customer issues that arise. We also have a Customer Excellence Board, whose priority is to ensure that we deliver on our customer promise. Ultimately, our focus on CSI ensures our investment in innovation and resources is focused on providing better solutions for managing our dealers and consumer advertising budgets.