Measuring Your Car Dealer Website Success Rate
Every car dealer has priorities such as running successful website marketing campaigns and effective advertising. Marketing professionals who assist dealers rely on their own expertise and peer advice. In the world we live in today, there are so many myths about what works and what doesn’t, that it’s difficult to choose wisely.
In this article, we will list out a few of these common myths about the success-factors of your auto dealer website, and tell you how to more accurately measure the success rate of your car dealership marketing.
The Relationship Between Google Analytics and Car Dealership Marketing ROI
Even if Google Analytics does help car dealership marketing staff keep track of important sections of your marketing funnel, it can’t provide you with the full picture, since Google Analytics doesn’t have the capability to connect to your car dealership data to fetch your marketing success-rate and advertising expenditure.
Google Analytics only displays how much your brand exposure has increased online, and it provides insights to better understand your auto dealer website performance and how to optimize it. Without connecting to your dealership systems like the CRM, Google Analytics cannot show you if your marketing budget is actually resulting in a higher sales figure. You need a Data Analytics Solution to accurately analyze the data and give you a clear picture.
Lead Vendors and Closing Rates
A low closing rate may not always be an indication of a poorly performing lead vendor. The lead vendor may be focusing more on up-funnel sales, in which case the closing rate will be lower despite having a high conversion rate. If the vendor focuses more on buyers who are close to purchasing, the conversion rate will drop but the closing rate will be higher.
In reality, the overall closing rate depends on a lot of factors that include the tools you use, the quality of your auto dealer website traffic, processes used at your business development center (BDC), and so on.
As you can see, the closing rate alone cannot give you an accurate picture of your car dealer website.
Can Increasing Metrics Point to Higher ROI?
In general, if most or all of your car dealer website metrics are on an upward trend, it could indicate higher Returns on Investment (ROI) for your auto dealership. But the accuracy of this result depends on whether the data sources are unified, and if the metrics measure something that is actually of value to your auto dealer website’s operations.
Other metrics such as how well you manage your inventory, the sales processes used at your auto dealership, and how effectively the auto dealer CRM system is put to use also work towards boosting car dealer success.
What Drives Your Auto Dealer Website?
Car dealerships can usually be split into three categories depending on whether they focus on giving the best experience even if they aren’t the lowest priced, or giving better customers financing terms which their competition doesn’t, or offering the lowest prices for their cars.
Understanding which category your auto dealership fits into is very important. This is because what you measure needs to change with your operations model, and you have to decide which metrics to pay close attention to in order to correctly figure out the performance of your dealership.
Some may prefer to align their car dealer website metrics to just one type - experience driven, finance driven, or price driven - rather than align it with two or all three models. Focusing on just one model has sometimes shown to increase profitability and Returns on Investment (ROI).
For more information on measuring the success rate of your car dealer website, Contact Us.