What is an IMS?
All dealers use an inventory management system (IMS) to keep track of what vehicles they have on the lot. When a new vehicle is added to inventory, it is entered into the IMS. And when a vehicle is sold, it is marked as such in the IMS. vAuto is the most commonly used IMS.
How Homenet provides inventory feeds. . .
Homenet provides inventory feeds to agencies by pulling data from the dealer’s IMS. They have an API connection setup for almost every commercially available IMS. Once they receive dealer approval, they 1) connect to the dealer’s IMS, 2) schedule a daily fetch of the inventory data, and 3) restructure the data into a consistent format so that fields, column headers and such will always be the same no matter what IMS it’s coming from.
Homenet feeds and VDP URLs. . .
A dealer’s IMS most often is the data source for vehicles displayed on their website. But that data only moves one direction – from the IMS to the CMS (content management system a.k.a. website backend). Therefore, the IMS doesn’t know the location of each VDP on the dealer’s website. And since Homenet gets feed data from the IMS, they aren’t able to provide VDP URLs as part of their feeds. They can only provide data that is stored in the IMS.
We know that both Facebook and Google Ads require a VDP URL for every record in dynamic display ad feeds. How else would the user be able to click on a vehicle and land on the VDP? Therefore, feeds from the IMS or Homenet are not a good option to use for dynamic display ads.
That said. . . Homenet has devised some way to get VDP URLs added to their feeds for some records. Not sure exactly how, but it’s hit and miss. I know our client Naked Lime is using Homenet feeds with VDP URLs appended. I think the agency has to make a special request for this, and there might be additional fees for it. Brenton, might you have any more details on this?
Hope this helps when talking about our feeds vs Homenet feeds with clients and prospects.