Tracking your new-car internet advertising performance

We've gotten great feedback on our site changes and enhancements to our franchise ad package so far (although more feedback, pro or con, is always appreciated). The new-car shopping experience on the site will continue to evolve through the rest of the year and into 2013, but in the meantime, we're focusing on our reporting, particularly when it comes to the new vs. used shopping and selling experiences.

Before we get too far into this, everyone - do me a favor. If you work at a franchise dealership, open up your email and find your last email from dealernews@email.cars.com. If it’s not there in your Inbox, check your Spam folder. I’ll check for new #WWE #RAW1000 tweets while I wait.

Ok – assuming you found something, you’re looking at the Market Intelligence Report. If you didn’t find it and you’re a dealer that lists new cars on Cars.com, please contact your Cars.com rep right away.

Now, let me pose a hypothesis: for the dealers reading this who sell both new cars and used cars, I would guess that you run these two aspects of your business very differently. You acquire new cars differently from used, price them differently and manage your floor plan differently. You probably also merchandise them differently, and I suspect that your strategies for marketing them and maximizing profit per vehicle differ between the two as well. Your dealership’s location, value story and reputation also matter more – I’m sure many of you would tell me that your new-car shoppers care a lot more about your service department than customers shopping used.

So I ask you, in today's online world, why are we still using used-car metrics, like SRPs and VDPs, as the primary method of measuring new-car advertising performance when the way you measure success overall is more about your make, your market and your share in that market? Why does our industry focus so intently on metrics specific to an individual vehicle on your lot when car shoppers – new-car shoppers especially – are also basing their decisions on your dealership’s brand and reputation?

We here at Cars.com wanted to find a better approach, so we set out to create a report just for new cars – one that is specific to the way you sell them, and one that offers more insight into how your prospective customers are shopping for them. The result is our new Market Intelligence Report.

Let’s break things down and take a look.

Shopper activity

Shopper activity provides insight into new car market trends for a particular make, which can be influenced by national or local advertising by the manufacturer. By including information about search volume specific to the manufacturer brand both nationally and locally, we hope to provide info that can help fuel conversations with your OEMs. Knowing that 6% of the local search activity on Cars.com focused on your brand when it received a 10% share nationally could be a good reason to talk to your OEM rep about incentives and other marketing support locally, for example.

 

Exposure and engagement

The metrics here represent a focus on your dealership’s overall exposure to Cars.com shoppers, as well as those shoppers’ interactions with your dealership’s information compared to the rest of the marketplace. Roughly speaking, this gives a dealer insight into how often their dealership’s brand and inventory is seen on Cars.com, as well as the level of interest their store generates with those shoppers. The idea here is that as dealers market and merchandise their store’s brand and reputation more progressively, such as by actively managing their Dealer Reviews and creating a pretty awesome Dealer Profile, their overall share of exposure and engagement will climb higher.

 

Turn, days’ supply and share of inventory

These stats are likely ones you measure in “real life” and inform pretty important decisions around everything from inventory management to marketing budget allocation. Our goal is to share how these stats translate on Cars.com with one key difference: we’re able to benchmark these stats against the rest of your market and nationally, which we feel is even more valuable than the numbers on their own.

 

Trend activity

You’ll also note new, forward-looking and actionable information about key new-car market trends. To get this information, we’ve partnered with Dataium, a leading aggregator of online shopping behavior and a pretty darn good predictor of consumer demand, as many of you who work with them are aware. The data in this section includes predicted consumer demand and trend forecasts for selected makes and models, provided at the national, regional and DMA levels. Our goal is to give dealers the ability to plan marketing decisions, such as incentives, promotions, merchandising and other elements, based on forward-looking data.

One thing you see repeated often in my explanation above is that the stats provided in the Market Intelligence Report include comparative information at the national and DMA levels. Ultimately, this is where we hope the Market Intelligence Report will shine. We want to provide a report that can not only tell you how you’re doing on Cars.com, but also tell you how you’re doing compared to other dealers who sell the same cars, both locally and nationally. We do realize there’s room for improvement, however, so before I return to tweeting about Zach Ryder...

I'll pose this question:

What metrics should Cars.com be providing both to communicate advertising performance and also to help dealers make more informed new-car business decisions?

I’ll also share that we’re working on revamping our used- car metrics as well – any suggestions there?

Have a Tracking Cookie

Dealership websites that track online shopping behavior

If you have purchased goods on Amazon.com recently, take a minute to go back to their website. Did you notice that it recognized who you were and even made recommendations for you to consider purchasing today?

If you book travel online, sites like Expedia and Travelocity are designed to use your shopping behavior to trigger special promotions and offers. Would it surprise you that travel sites mighty offer you a $20 a night room rate discount on the third visit to a particular hotels reservation page?

Personalization of website pages by online shopping behavior is common practice in the larger ecommerce industry so it begs the question, why should dealership website be a “one size fits all” design? Would conversion and engagement INCREASE if automotive web designers used online consumer shopper behavior and cookie data to personalize the shopping experience?

The answer is simply yes. A personalized website experience has proven to be effective in other verticals yet the automotive industry has just scratched the surface in personalization. The first vendor to knock personalization out of the park will gain significant market share.

Personalized Dealer Websites

TK Carsites a few years back introduced a website feature that changed the home page banner based on the search keywords used to land on the dealer’s home page. This feature was slick but the rest of the website shopping experience was “one size fits all”.

Today, the opportunities for personalization are endless. Let’s say a consumer visits a Chevrolet dealer’s website for the first time and clicks on the used car inventory search page. During their first visit the consumer searches exclusively for used Chevrolet Silverados. The consumer leaves the dealer’s website without submitting a lead or calling.

On this consumer’s second visit to the dealers website personalization could present a home page with three used Silverado’s featured and/or on sale. It could change the used car search page to default initially to display Silverados. Personalization could also change the home page banner to include a slide on new Silverado lease specials.

I use this simple example as a means to illustrate the potential of personalization. Of course consumers will search for a variety of used car models on a dealer’s website, but patterns can be distilled from the consumer’s click activity. If it is determined that the consumer is looking at cars under $13,000 then on a return visit, the dealership website can morph to showcase cars in that price range.

Taking personalization to the next level would be to integrate off-site consumer shopping behavior. Dataium introduced a data model that would capture consumer shopping data and search history that could be used by dealers and industry vendors to personalize CRM systems, website design, and engagement tools.

Dataium is not the only player in the market that has vital shopper data. VinSolutions for example, could be in a unique situation to benefit from consumer shopping behavior on KBB.com and Autotrader.com. I wrote about this potential back in September of 2011 on DealerRefresh.com: “Will Autotrader Build An Exclusive ZMOT Data Network?”

For example, a consumer searches for a used Ford F-150 on Autotrader.com and then decides to open another browser tab to visit the local ford dealer listed on the Autotrader.com Vehicle Detail Page (VDP). If this dealers was using a VinSolutions website, in the future the site might “morph” on the FIRST visit to showcase Ford F150 trucks on the home page, truck incentives, or trucks on sale.

This functionality does not exist today for VinSolutions customers but the potential is there based on VinSolutions being part of the Autotrader Companies. As an industry watcher and commentator, I see many exciting possibilities in the years ahead.

Another example would be Cobalt’s website platform leveraging shopping behavior on General Motors OEM websites. A consumer visiting www.Chevrolet.com and searching for information on the 2013 Chevrolet Impalas could be presented with a “Impala” morphed website when they visit a local dealer the following day that had the Cobalt platform. Again, this functionality on Cobalt websites is not publically available to dealers but could be a personalization outcome.

Personalization is the next big step for automotive retailing. After that would come better CRM integration with the shopper’s online search history. You get the idea, the degree of information that is available could dramatically improve the customer experience and I believe increase conversion.

Question:

Do you agree that personalization and data integration will be a game changer for the automotive retail website experience?

 

I have got great news for all of the GMs, GSMs, Internet Managers, Corporate Marketers, and even all of those vendor partners out there serving the dealership. Did you know that 39% of the valuable phone leads that you drove to the dealership were left stranded on the phone?

Isn’t that great!!

Doesn’t it pump you up to know that more than 1/3 of all the hard fought, expensive phone leads you actually get to convert to a phone call are left hanging on the phone?

Our trained Humanatic call reviewers listened to almost 2M inbound sales calls (1,956,624 to be exact) over the past two months from 346 dealerships and tried to answer one very simple question:

Did the caller get to speak to a qualified person who could help them?

The study spanned dealerships across the country from several different dealer groups and independents. There were large dealerships and small dealerships included, and the result was consistently the same. Once the shopper takes the initiative to pick up the phone and convert, dealerships do a poor job of connecting these shoppers to someone who can help them. The biggest contributor to the 39% was callers asking for a specific employee and not being reconnected if that employee not available. News Flash People!!! - the requested employee is almost never available!

Believe it or not, this is actually really good news for a couple of different reasons. Let me explain.

You are driving calls!

The fact that you have calls that can be stranded is tangible evidence that your marketing efforts are working. In all but pure eCommerce, a call conversion is the most valuable conversion out there. In fact, according to an ATG/Oracle survey 67% of online shoppers will call for any purchase greater than $100. In a car deal where the number is 50 to 500 times that dollar figure, you can assume that number goes up to over 90%.

If your sales lines are ringing then you have inventory that people want to buy and perhaps even more importantly, a marketing approach and messaging strategy that displays your inventory in a way that people are responding to. So go ahead and pat yourself on the back for creating the calls that were stranded. But really think about what that number means. If your dealership is moving 200 units a month, just think about all of the opportunities that you are leaving on the table. Whatever your top line revenue was last month, think about what it might have been if this number was 91% instead of 61%.

This is a problem that is incredibly easy to fix!

This is only a problem because you couldn’t see it before now. You can’t fix something you can’t see. With our new answer the phone pod (below) you can see in real time what your staff is doing with those valuable leads. It’s simple; you want all green arrows up at the top. Whether you start at 52% or 82%, you want to see improvement week to week from your staff. We’ll also let you see how you are doing against your competition.

The report below is a Toyota dealership, so they can look at how they fare week to week, month to month against other dealerships using Dealersocket CRM, other Toyota Dealerships, or other dealerships within their own group. That is a feedback loop that drives improvement. People change their behavior when this is posted on the message board every day. People start craving green arrows. Green arrows = increased revenues.



Answer the Phone! - PLEASE

With all of the complex tracking and analytics tools available today, don’t lose site of the basics! The best way to improve your business is to improve the way that you handle phone leads. This begins with getting that valuable phone up connected with someone who can help them as quickly as humanly possible.

Our Answer the Phone! report will show you your success rate for connecting your leads in real time.
Step 1 – answer the phone. There isn’t anything much more important than that, but step 2 is close.
Step 2 – get them connected to someone who can help them ASAP. A pick up time of 3 seconds looks good until you realize that the call was answered by the receptionist and then got bounced around the dealership before being connected to the right person at the 2 minute mark. That’s not good.

Our reviewers listen to the call and mark the True Connection Time when that caller is connected to a qualified agent. This needs to be less than 20 seconds. Anything over 20 seconds and you start to risk a shift in the caller’s mood. From “I’m excited about a potential purchase!” to “I hate this hold music.” This is not a shift you want. Challenge your team to post green arrows on true connection time. People want to spend money with you, make it as easy as possible for them.

Once you figure out how to answer the phone, you can move on to the next challenge.

Did you know that out of the 61% of calls that did get to talk to someone who could help them, only 6% of the calls included an attempt to set an appointment? I bet that is some information you would like to know.

Questions:

What are you doing to make sure that you convert those phone leads that you fight so hard for and spend so much on?

Are you investing in call tracking products to give you visibility into the sometimes scary reality at your store?

What happens at your store when someone calls and asks for Steve, but Steve isn’t there?

It’s the second Tuesday in September and the phone rings at your dealership. Are you confident that you know what happens next?

 

*Note - Our reviewers also listened to 6,104,017 outbound calls. I think you might be surprised to learn what happens when you tie that data to what is happening on the inbound side. I will hit that on my follow up post. Spoiler alert – there’s lots of opportunity to improve.