Does cost per lead matter to you?

[Matt-S]

Food for thought. Web leads are attributable by source; form submissions, chats and phone calls if you have the proper tracking in place. You know if these people walk into the dealership and make a purchase so long as they are in your CRM. But what about the non-converting share of website traffic. Does anyone here measure this, and compare against other KPI's such as walk-ins, or sales from those who did not submit a lead? Do you measure sales broken down by vehicle mix, and then compare to web activity by model? I.e. web interest in Honda Accords vs leads for Accords vs sales for Accords? This analysis can go much deeper, but I'm curious, does anyone here attempt to measure non-converting web traffic against non-attributable sales or walk-ins?

 

[Tallcool1]

The $64K question is, what is a lead? I don't mean that to sound silly. But is a walk-in that has the ATC printout in their hand a lead? It should be if it is sourced in the CRM properly, but that does not happen in a lot of cases. Right? It would be an important metric to me if I could get our phone and walk-in traffic sourced better. But to merely use it as a measurement for form fills and email leads, it could cause bad decision making to cut off a source IMO.

Bill, your comment is exactly what went through my mind when I first read this post yesterday. If I had to base any decisions on form submissions and tracked phone calls, I would simply curl up on the ground and cry because I would swear that nothing worked!

Sourcing is something that we work on very hard. The salespeople ask, and we keep asking right through the finance office. The truth is, many of our customers honestly don't know where they saw us, saw us in multiple places, or know they were on our website but have no idea how they got there. Without that printout in their hand, or a submitted form, there is no definitive answer. That makes it really hard for me to put much faith in Cost/Lead.

I do look at cost per sale, and go with the assumption that every customer we sell a vehicle to has seen us on the internet. I also look at Cost/VDP view within a 30 mile radius for all 3rd party sites.

I understand the idea behind factoring Time Spent, but for me it doesn't matter. Until the time comes that my lot is overflowing with customers or we are not able to handle all of the phone calls, I don't care how long it takes to sell a car. If that time comes, I will probably just add people.