Everyone will always have their own opinions on the state of the industry...causes of problems, whether problems even exist, etc. I agree that consumer panic is a large part of the problem, if not the biggest part. I still believe there are a lot more signs than that though which point to validity in the crisis claim. Not sure if it's going to be anything long term or not, but I just heard from an inside source that Autotrader.com laid off 100+ outside reps yesterday. I know a lot of people are going to speculate on other (internal) reasons for the layoffs, especially given the small number, but I think the fact that a large auto industry company like Autotrader who has never had layoffs just laid off part of its B2B driving force speaks volumes.

Thanks Nick!

Jon, Can I send my 500's your way?

Thanks Nick!

"The consumer is afraid to spend the money"

Bingo.

I have to throw in my 2 cents on this.

I speak with dealerships everyday and have asked a few the question:

Is it the economy?
Is it the inability to get the consumer financed?

The answer is: No it is not the economy & No it is not that they cannot get them financed.

"The consumer is afraid to spend the money"

The one dealer explained he would see 28 to 32 sets of people come into the dealership on a daily basis. Since last Monday only 5 to 8 sets of people. OUCH!!

But keep in mind! When times are tough the Internet business does increase with more traffic.

Sure it's gotten a little bit harder on financing and some of the banks that were buying the sub 600 Beacons have gone away or are not buying that clientele any more, but we are still getting these customers bought, they just qualify for 35% loans instead of the 20% they would have got a year ago.

Given the current climate, this is a really good time to start rebulding relationships with some of the lenders you have let go to the wayside, the banks we considered our go to lenders a year ago are different than the banks we are using today.

I think if a dealer makes the effort to work on building and rebuilding their relationships with their lenders they will not only make it through this slow time, but thrive while their competitors drop around them. A great example of this is Nick's comment treating a 500 as a negative, with a great lender relationship, the right structure, and a little ass kissing, this deal is completely doable. I think dealers that survive this market will be working smarter, with a little more thinking outside the box than they have in the past.

Just imagine what a dealer that gets all these things dialed in and working while it's slow could do once the market rebounds.

At our dealership, we're not really seeing credit problems so much as people aren't coming through the doors in the first place. It's possible that many of the people who aren't coming in wouldn't have gotten credit but it's so hard to say given all the other variables. We're just seeing way less traffic. The people who I haven't been able to get approved recently had such bad credit that it wasn't a matter of what the economy was doing. A 500 is a 500.

Great article. I think Mike Jackson is looking for a permanent spot next to Becky Quick on Squawk Box (btw, I love it when he's on there!).

Let's face it: in any shakeout period, the strong get stronger and the weak go away. Fewer car dealers mean more car sales per rooftop. 11 million car sales is still a massive opportunity. Keep the faith!

If consumers are told enough times that the sky is falling (they can't get home loans, they can't get auto loans, etc.), they are going to start believing the sky is falling. We are just seeing the manifestation of consumer irrationality.

Dude -- you're one funny-looking dude!

I believe that consumer confidence (or lack thereof) has more of a direct impact in low unit sales numbers than anything else. If a customer is worried about their ability to maintain their current employment (potential layoff coming their way?) and not cross thru the dealerships doorway in the first place, their beacon score has nothing to do with it. One thing I'm sure of is that alot of dealers are going to go out of business in the next year from the weak demand, when we see Toyota numbers down over 30% it's pretty bad out there no matter what the beacon scores are that come into the showroom

I watched the entire presentation and had the prickly sensation that there was some other intention of this besides just an education process about Analytics.

I would not go so far as to say that a guy with Avinash's credentials would sell out for Automotive News or for GM, but I can definitely say that all of the presentation had a specific odor to it. I wrote an article on my site concerning how far the manufacturers are venturing into becoming Internet or service providers. If you want to read it, it is here:


No problem if you do not want to link outside away from your site Jeff- feel free to post it on your site if you would like with proper mentions to PureDealer of course

Overall, I'm fine with a push for Analytics, ALL sites should have them, and heat maps too. It just seemed strange how wonderful some manufacturers were supposedly doing online, and how awful others were doing. Watch the presentation and you can see the same patterns. I'm not one for conspiracy theories but you can judge for yourselves.

-Michael

I'd have to agree with Joe. The presnetation was not geared towards dealers at all. Some of the challenges that dealers go thru with paid search can become very tricky when competing against OEM's and other 3rd party sites. My biggest take away was how important the bounce rate is to monitor.

That "HIPPO" effect is not limited to just selecting website hosts... As for using Google Analytics, I really think you need to be able to trend and compare your month to month and year to year analytics to be able to identify patterns and make useful decisions. That meant making a HUGE MS Excel spreadsheet where I enter my monthly analytics for each of our sites and they now automatically graph for me in each category so that I can see where we are doing well, and where we are falling short. It took some time to put together but it works great. Google Analytics is an amazing tool when you make it work for you...

I was bummed about missing it but now not so much.
I am sure they will have a podcast soon?

IMO, Avinash was poorly prepared. We're all sitting there waiting for him to drill down into our world, but he never made it to us.

At the beginning of the presentation they mentioned that 2400 people were logged into the presentation. IMO, with a count that large, a great number of listeners were dealers. I can't be sure, but it’s a logical conclusion.

I don't believe he had any idea of what his audience makeup was. If it's 90% dealers, then craft the presentation to your audience. If it was a big mix, he could pre-announce to us all how widely diverse the audience is and how he'll need to "keep it fairly generalized" to apply to all. An Example to clarify: If he presented to the Pool Table industry and based his presentation to the manufacturers, what good is it to the retailers that sell the tables?

His presentation was aimed squarely at auto manufacturers and was of little help to auto dealers. The auto dealer has unique search difficulties and unique search opportunities because of their local presence. Dealers cannot do competitive marketing intelligence using Google trends because our traffic counts are too small. He has long tail as a Paid Search solution and long tail is a no-brainer for non-paid search.

I can go on and on, I don't have time to break out all of the details, but IF the audience was mostly car dealers, then Avinash did not have any idea what his audience consisted of.

Avinash had some excellent points. I like using the bounce rate and visitor loyalty as excellent metrics of shopper satisfaction. But his 60 min presentation was simply a 1,400 word per minute caffine induced race around the planet.

I can't help but think that Avinash's presentation was no different than having a junk landing page for a PPC search term. My "visitor loyalty" score for him will be not good.

just my $0.02
Joe

YES! This guy is so awesome! Take advantage if you can.

Kevin,

Thanks for the kudos!

To all that attended my presentation... thanks for a fun interactive session. The response has been truly unbelievable. Three dealers called me today just to say thanks and tell me that they already have videos landing on page one of Google. For those that would like a copy of the presentation, go to: www.dealeradvisornation.com and sign up. Then look in the forum where you will find a post including the ppt. Shameless plug? Maybe but, it's actually just the thing that the dealers in the DR community need.

Mission accomplished! I came to deliver something of great value for dealers that need some results oriented cool stuff with a tiny price tag. It's always great to see so many friends and hang out with folks that are focused on pushing our industry forward.

I was able to hang with Jeff out in Vegas a bit too and he will probably kill me if I don't write some DR posts soon.

With encouragement,

Shaun

Great post and would like to comment on "Text is becoming more and more preferred with folks as a primary source of communication".

There is no way that I can see that this will ever be a useful line extension in communicating with customer's with regard to the selling process.

Service? A ++++ on keeping customer's informed on a vehicles status. That is a great fit.

Who out there wants to be the first in playing text tag with customer's in price quoting?

The selling model is so diluted as it is with automated e-mail inquiry reply responses and what happened to relationship building?

Customer's are not "managed", only the the information is.

That's all my ramble and hang in there because there will always be a retail automotive industry.

Dealers who still don't "get it" and make the commitment to innovate and spend the majority of their ad budgets online and stay with the "look at me I am acting crazy on tv and discounting everything $$$'s of dollars" will be gone soon...good riddens!

I am a little salty because I was talking to a dealer that just spent $50,000 on such and ad and 8 out of 11 of his salespeople made minimum wage last month and could care less and told me "no problem" he's running a job and better if they quit so no comp claims.

Ahhh...

Absolutely the best part of the excellent coverage:

"Many dealers are afraid to get into this online arena, as they are afraid that folks might leave negative reviews about them. We need to get over this fear and work to encourage our satisfied customers to leave positive reviews for us, and to honestly deal with those who were not happy and work to solve any problems."

'Nuff said...

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Kevin, nice write-up on the conference. It was great hanging and sharing ideas once again.
Chip it was nice meeting you Matt and Heather as well.
Bill me for the .40 cents...LOL.

Awesome write-up Kevin! Now I feel like I was there.

Kevin, I think you captured the 3 days perfectly - and it was great to get to hang out with you and Alex Jefferson. The Wyler Group is a true testament for inhouse video creation and marketing (Shaun Raines showcased them in his presentation).

Speaking of Shaun Raines, he definitely put on a very interactive seminar; he is quite funny. The only other seminar I made it to was Ralph's and I'm glad I did, I picked up a really good SEO tip there in his UGC/Social Networking talk.

Alex Jefferson, you owe me $.40 for those 2 text messages you sent me.

I think if a company like TomTom was selling GPS devices there, they'd have sold out from all the lost people I saw walking around the resort. It was gigantic.

Chip-