If you are a dealer on a Base Plus, Advanced or PRO package, and you receive a notification from SimplePart CSC or Dealer Strategy teams or your Google Ads have stopped running, you may be experiencing a domain conflict. Let's break down what's happening and why it matters to your business.
How your parts website is connected
When you partner with SimplePart for your online parts sales, we create a specialized website just for your parts department. This typically lives on a subdomain of your main dealer website. For example:
Your main website might be www.yourdealername.com
Your parts website would be parts.yourdealername.com
This setup helps maintain your brand consistency and drive traffic to your parts site while giving your parts department its own dedicated space online.
The challenge
Things can get complicated when dealers can choose to work with more than one marketing agency for different services.
The lost URL claim problem arises in Google Merchant Center (GMC), a crucial platform for running shopping ads. When another agency sets up Vehicle Listing Ads (VLAs) for your dealership, they may claim your main dealer domain (www.yourdealername.com) in GMC. Unfortunately, this can create an unexpected domino conflict:
- The agency claims your main domain in GMC
- Google automatically invalidates any claims on subdomains—like your parts site
- Your parts website advertising suddenly stops working
The impact on your business
This technical issue can have real consequences:
Your parts website ads stop running
You lose visibility in Google Shopping results
Potential customers can't find your parts listings
Your online parts sales may decline
What you can do
Once (SimplePart) receives a notification from Google that another GMC account has verified and claimed the exact URL or a parent URL domain, our CSC or Dealer Strategy team will notify you. There are a few ways to resolve this issue:
Help release the claim on the higher-level domain by the other agency
Shift to a new URL that is not a subdomain of the claimed domain
But ultimately, you should connect your marketing representative to our team so that we can coordinate to resolve this and get Google Ads running.
Moving forward
If you have questions about preventing this issue, reach out to our CSC team or your dealer strategist immediately. While the resolution might take time, understanding the problem is the first step toward fixing it. Keep in mind that your digital marketing ecosystem is interconnected; changes in one area can unexpectedly impact another.
Working together with clear communication between all parties will help ensure your parts department's digital marketing efforts continue running smoothly, keeping your online parts business growing and thriving.
