Winning Sales with Automotive Internet Metrics – Dominate Your Market Using Marketing Intelligence
Web Analytics for Auto Dealers
Take control of your market using your own automotive internet metrics.
Successful profitable automotive dealers run their operations by the numbers. These dealers watch inventory levels with day’s supply and obsolescence reports. They monitor their cash flow through payables and receivables. They track their sales looking at “ups” and closing ratios. When it comes to their websites, ppc marketing campaigns and internet sales, they are faced with so much information that it can be overwhelming. Sometimes there’s too much data to be had. Marketing metrics come from factory websites, internet sales, online marketing campaigns, and phone tracking software; it all gets to be a bit too much to absorb. So what do you do?
An average internet depart has some software in place to track the leads and respond to customers. It may be something as simple as an email box, or as complete as lead management software such as AVV or Salesforce.com.
Average automotive online metrics come from many different sources such as:
- Franchise Website (Cobalt, Dealer.com, Dealerskins.com, factory website, personal website)
- Search marketing campaigns (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
- Third party lead providers (Edmunds, Autobytel.com, Cars.com)
- Internet sales department tool (email, AVV, Who’s Calling, Dealer Socket)
All of these sources provide their own metrics creating a large quantity of data points, but what does it mean to you and how do you use it? How does it relate to your dealership’s marketing plan, your Internet Sales Team, and your profits? Are you returning a positive return on investment?
Simply start at the beginning
First, you need to get a solid idea of what you know and what you don’t know, what you should be tracking and analyzing, and ways to use that information. Once you gather the data, the next step is to identify what’s important to your business. The metrics that drive success and profits are the ones that become the metrics to benchmark.
Establish your baseline performance using your own online marketing intelligence that you already have access too. Establish a baseline before you integrate any changes into your marketing or sales process with search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, sales training or other system enhancements.
Develop Your Online Marketing Benchmarks
Metrics you may have been tracking for 12 months or longer:
- _____ Number of unique visitors to your website
- _____ Amount of time average visitor remained on your website
- _____ Number of unique visitors that converted into a lead
- _____ Number of visitors that converted into an appointment
- _____ Number of unique visitors that converted into a sale
- _____ Gross revenue generated by online marketing efforts
- _____ Revenue earned per website sale
- _____ Cost per lead generated by online marketing efforts
- _____ Number of Top 10 organic search listings
- _____ Number of Top 30 organic search listings
These are examples of some the information that can be used to establish your baseline performance. Now that you have looked at developing benchmarks against which you can compare your future marketing initiatives, you need to review your overall online marketing approach to see how search engine marketing, pay-per-click advertising, and internet sales training factor in.
So the real question, who cares? Why is this important?
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. More importantly you can’t improve what you don’t measure. To demonstrate why monitoring your metrics is important, here’s an example of an average dealer’s web metrics using 50,000 impressions from a pay-per-click advertising campaign, the dealer’s website and Internet Sales Department. The dealer is average in all key metrics and delivers the following:
| SALES | GROSS PROFIT | COST PER LEAD | R.O.I. |
| 16 | $11,718.75 | $10.00 | 1,775% |
Now without increasing the cost-per-click or gross profit per sale, and only making a 5% improvement in the key metrics the dealership performance now looks like this:
| SALES | GROSS PROFIT | COST PER LEAD | R.O.I. |
| 20 | $14,956.42 | $9.07 | 2,179% |
While this doesn’t look too impressive, what this very small 5% improvement did was to increase sales 25%, increase gross profit 27.6%, reduced the cost per lead 9.3% and increase return on investment 22.8%! Not bad for a small change!
Taking it one step further, and improving the key metrics 10%, here’s what the results look like:
| SALES | GROSS PROFIT | COST PER LEAD | R.O.I. |
| 25 | $18,873.16 | $8.26 | 2,645% |
Again no changes to the cost-per-click or gross profit, but this 10% improvement in the key metrics delivers great results; increases sales 56.3%, increases gross profit 61.1%, reduces the cost per lead 17.4% and increases return on investment 49.0%!
In any economic climate changes like this are awesome results. It just takes a little time to set up your target metrics using the information collected from your current online marketing initiatives. To help you get started, Contact us today!