Partnership & Revenue
The cheeky customer
Auto Trader’s Customer Success Slack channel was a goldmine for dealership and OEM insights. One standout moment was a major dealership listing a car straight from the Geneva Motor Show before it had even launched. The ad was removed, but in just three days it generated 40,000 views and 2,000 leads. It revealed a clear pattern: when manufacturers announce new models, user interest and Auto Trader search activity spike immediately.
This insight led me to develop a new creative product: a single-model landing page that gives users the information they’re searching for, strengthens Auto Trader’s SEO, and creates a new OEM revenue stream. It was something I wanted to tackle in our next hackathon, which I facilitated across design and product. When I pitched the idea alongside a few others, it quickly gained traction with both peers and stakeholders.
Ideas are easy, execution is everything.
The Monday after the hackathon, our concepts, Figma prototypes, and user journey were ready—but we hadn’t planned the build yet. That afternoon, I learned our rough prototype had been shown to Vauxhall’s UK Marketing Director, who wanted to buy it immediately to help launch the new Corsa-E. The deal was done—now we had to deliver, with no extra resources and an already stretched engineering team.
All by myself on this one!
This was a solo effort. My approach is simple: learn what’s needed to make it work, fast. It may not be perfect, but it delivers results with minimal resources so we can learn quickly. I used Squarespace as a CMS and fully recoded a template to create a branded experience that mirrored Auto Trader’s navigation and footer for seamless user flow. I then integrated our Tailwind design system and used my HTML, CSS, JS, and Python skills to move quickly. In just under four days (and no sleep), the Vauxhall Corsa-E landing page was live with Hotjar and Snowplow tracking, ready to drive traffic. CODEPEN prototype
And we secured £150,000 in revenue for the build and deployment, including end-to-end user monitoring through an integrated Snowplow API.
Overnight success
Auto Trader handles an enormous amount of traffic, averaging 55 million searches per month. In just one day, our new landing page received over 200,000 unique visits, marking one of Vauxhall's largest single lead generation campaigns ever. It even outperformed their Christmas Day television campaign. (Costing £3M).
After launching our first landing page, demand surged. Within 9 months, we created and sold over 40 landing pages. With each new page, our data and understanding grew exponentially. As a result, Auto Trader developed its content management system to handle the increased demand. In the first year, we generated £1.7 million in revenue, which grew to £3.5 million in the second year.
Measuring what matters
• First 12 months (56 Landing Pages)
• 36M Unique Users
• 1.14yrs Time on site (175 sec average dwell time)
• Working with 18 vehicle Manufacturers and their agencies
• 20% Highest converting landing page (resulting in sales leads)
• Business unit costs = £195k YOY
• Revenue gained = £3.5M (by year 2)