Cars.com Partners with Edmunds.com and kbb.com to Drive More New Car Leads to Dealers

CHICAGO, March 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Cars.com announced today partnerships with Edmunds.com and Kelley Blue Book's kbb.com through which it will deliver more, high-quality, new car prospects to its NewLeadsPlus customers.

"In addition to quality leads generated directly from the top search engines, we will provide NewLeadsPlus customers with leads submitted by the millions of unique, ready-to-buy car shoppers who visit Edmunds.com and kbb.com," said Mitch Golub, Cars.com president. "By working with select, premier destination sites in the automotive category, we continue our commitment to only deliver leads from the highest quality sources."

Unlike other companies that aggregate leads from myriad sources that range in quality, including spam, contests and pop-up ads, Cars.com generates all of its leads through top search engines and the automotive industry's best destination websites. Dealers receive the leads, which are scrubbed by Cars.com's LeadCheck process, within several minutes of submission. In many cases, they can follow up with prospects while they are still online.

"Dealers recognize the quality of prospects we deliver with NewLeadsPlus," Golub said. "These car shoppers have carefully researched the make and model they plan to buy and have raised their hand to take the process to the next logical steps -- a test drive and a purchase. In fact, a 2006 Experian Automotive study found that more than 60 percent of NewLeadsPlus lead senders purchased a vehicle."

After piloting its New Car Lead program in 2005, Cars.com officially launched NewLeadsPlus at NADA 2006. Today, more than 2,300 dealer franchises rely on NewLeadsPlus to deliver qualified new car prospects to their inbox.

About Cars.com

Partnered with more than 200 leading metro newspapers, television stations and their websites, Cars.com is the most comprehensive destination for those looking to buy or sell a new or used car. The site lists more than 2 million vehicles from 13,000 dealer customers, classified advertisers and private parties to offer consumers the best selection of new and used cars online, as well as the content, tools and advice to support their shopping experience. Recently selected by Forbes.com as a Best of the Web site for car shopping, Cars.com combines powerful inventory search tools and new-car configuration with pricing information, photo galleries, buying guides, side-by-side comparison tools, original editorial content and reviews to help millions of car shoppers connect with sellers each month.

Launched in June 1998, Cars.com is a division of Classified Ventures, LLC, ( http://classifiedventures.com/ ), which is owned by leading media companies, including Belo , Gannett Co., Inc. , The McClatchy Company , Tribune Company and The Washington Post Company .