Well, I don't know. Sounds like Rob works for ‘a-la DS’. There’s a lot of folks out there pitching a deal to the dealer and in my opinion, DF surpasses most. I've never had a real-time problem and DF has been flying wing with me for several years now. Their heads-up attitude, always keep us compliant with Mazda's image and programs. I make it a point to review other sites often and most of the sites viewed are far less desirable. This field is changing daily and I feel DealerFire is up to the task. Take a closer look and get a greater return. Roger

Just a quick note on these guys. Having worked with Dealerfire in the past, I'll say that their support is absolutely, 100% top-notch, unsurpassed, excellent. I couldn't say enough about how great the support is.

As far as creating a mind-blowing, in your face, ultra-modern, amazing site, I would have to say they fall short. Not that their product is bad, because it's not... it's just not on the level of other companies out there. You also can't do any manual changes via an on-line interface ( a-la dealerskins ), which is annoying. If they can get things moving in this area, while keeping their support, DF will do well.

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I'm the Internet Director of a large auto group... we left Cobalt about four years ago, and literally spent a year looking into the best company that could provide us with the best in all the dealer Internet marketing services we needed... between the pricing, and the on-going personal support with this company, it is without a doubt on of the best decision we made to date.

Sadly however, great companies like this are getting phased out by ADP giant's subsidiary ‘The Cobalt Group’ which currently provides dealer solutions to more than half of all automotive dealers in the US through ‘partnerships’ with the manufactures who in-turn ‘mandate’ that all their dealers use Cobalt or i.e. lose their link to the manufacturer’s website.  This happened to us with VW, now again with our two stand-alone Hyundai dealerships.

It is such a shame… that Cobalt has to offer compared to what we were able to provide our customers before… is like going from 2012 and returning back to 2003.

If you are a dealer principle/GM/internet director, and you have not yet fallen victim to the Cobalt monopoly (far too big, they completely fail on improving existing products or helping dealerships 'take it to the next level', provide by far worst lead management solution in the industry called LMCC) ...I highly recommend you get in touch with Dealer Impact founder Brian Cox who will walk you through all they have to offer ‘personally’… no joke!  (not to mention their design, technical, graphic and customer support staff is unequalled). You think you’ll have that with any other company?  Keep dreaming…   Whatever you want… this company will go out of their way to help you to make it a reality.

Dealer Impact is a digital marketing company offering a complete suite of products: Social Media, Mobile Websites, Facebook Inventory Apps, Inventory Video, New Car Test Drives, Websites, SEO, SEM, and much more.

We build our websites with all the best practices, so they rank well. We do not build top to bottom flash sites like several other vendors do that cannot be indexed or be seen by Ipads or smart phones. Our sites and inventory are 100% indexible by the search engines spiders. We also set up a complete network around your website with micro sites and social media to maximize your exposure.

We dont just build a website, we build a Network!

Come check it out for yourself.

Brian Cox

President and CEO of Dealer Impact Systems

877.3334.9638
www.dealerimpact.com

These guys are a joke (or should I say this one girl is a joke?) They are nothing more than a reseller of Dealer Peak CRM and rackspace hosting. And they back that bouquet of B.S. up with a support level of close to zero. Not absolute zero, mind you, as that would take some ingenuity and effort. Just a lousy 2.3 out of 100.

I would like to mimmick Russ Johnson by saying the customer service you receive from Dealer Impact is awesome. They are easy to work with and very user friendly. They created both of my sites for me and I use their SEO, SEM and DMM tool. They have video, virtual notification and great auto follow ups on the DMM. A must have for anyone selling cars on the net. We went from 19 cars to 40 in 6 months and are continuing to grow.

Dealer Impact has been our vendor for about four years now and there is not another company out there that works as hard or as smart as these folks. Customer Service is always great, always I can call anytime with any issue and they seem to be glad to hear from you! The technology is perfect for a great looking and yet functional site and the tools in the back of the house system such as the DMM are wonderful tools that I use over my Autobase system everyday. In all the time we have dealt with Dealer Impact we have never had anything but unwavering support from them and I cannot say that about any other vendor we use large or small, I recomend Dealer Impact as often as possible!

Dealer HD is preparing to launch a series of new social networking tools in their next Service Update which takes place on May 31st. High on the list of updates is the use of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. The Automotive web design and SEO firm plans on coaching their car dealer clients across the nation to capitalize on the revenue bringing potential of these new marketing platforms.

One of the most unique features to Dealer HD’s Service Update is Auto Tweet, a product that uses Twitter to announce new inventory and specials automatically. Auto Tweet is built into Dealer HD websites and will automatically tweet car inventory that is added to the dealer’s feed. The relevance of Auto Tweet is paramount in today’s world of social networking. Tweeting car dealer inventory is a great way to expose the vehicles on their lot to anyone with a Twitter account and to those people who are searching Twitter for their products.

Once inventory is on Twitter, it can be viewed on almost any device that has an internet connection. Tweets can be viewed on an iPhone, a Blackberry, via text message, desktop, a browser’s address bar and twitter.com of course.

AutoTweet is free to any Dealer HD client. Dealer HD does major updates to its software every quarter to provide dealers with the freshest content and latest tools in the industry.

Car dealers can request more information by visiting DealerHD.com

Dealer HD means to us results on demand!
No waiting for upgrades or problem resolutions.
They are there for us 24/7 and we are treated as if we are thier only client.
After years of voice mail and no returned calls we switched to dealer HD and found Peace of Mind. We appreciate dealer HD and will continue to do buisness with them for years to come.
Our portal page is customized and changes made whenever we want. The weather changes on the portal page in real time. Amazing fun ideas!I have no attention of ever leaving Dealer HD!

Our dealership switched to Dealer HD a few months ago and the transition has been fantastic. They are understanding, compassionate, and always willing to help in any way imaginable. The customization options are helpful and can really make a website stand out from the competition. Everyone I've dealt with on their staff have been professional, friendly, and understanding to our needs. The customer service is second to none. The ability to talk to somebody, a human, not a robot, about problems or questions instantly is something that's seriously lacking in today's market, but Dealer HD makes it happen. Handling four dealership websites can be quite a task, but Dealer HD has made it easier than it ever should be.

I'm note sure these comments are EXACTLY on point, but it is my contention that any dealership which claims to have a closing ratio of 20% on floor/phone traffic has a staff full of sales people who are NOT logging all their UPS. Also, any dealership with an internet sales closing ratio of 10% of higher needs to change web site providers because I guarantee they are not getting enough leads, or from a wide enough geographical area.

I absolutely track closing ratios at our dealership, and review them on a regular basis with the sales staff. However, I'd rather have my people log ALL their leads and have a lower closing ratio than to sandbag and only log "good" leads so that they attain a higher closing ratio. The same goes for internet leads. I'm going to log them all, even if they're really weak, and I'm going to work them until they "buy or die." The dealer principal fully understand this, and totally prefers knowing that all leads are getting logged even at the cost of lower closing ratios.

I have to agree with Robert Sherman "Tracking conversion rates is critical" If you are not tracking this then what are you doing? I believe you can be over analytical and in some cases this is happening. I have used the conversion ratio formulas for many years and have improved the amount of vehicles we sell. OK you drive traffic to your site, now what? You see how many pages they look at how long they spent on your site etc etc etc, Gezzzz all that is good but what REALLY matters? "HOW MANY LEADS DID I GET TODAY" well that would be called a conversion. Let’s take it a step further “how many of those leads did I sell"? What is important is you convert the traffic into leads from your website, the more you convert the better you are doing your job. If you could possibly convert 30% of your visitors into some kind of lead would you agree you would sell more vehicles? So if you convert let’s say 5% of your visitors you will sell how many of those converted leads? So if you converted 30% wouldn’t you be a hero? Sure use the argument of blogs and social media but give me a break how much of that will bring BUYERS to your website and how much actual traffic? VERY LITTLE. I would say you better measure conversions and find ways to improve that # because if you do you will SELL MORE CARS. I will tell you one reason why, when you convert someone from your website into a lead and you get a “salesman “ on that customer within minutes then you have a great chance of selling that converted lead today. First one to contact is the first one to sell. So in essence if you have 3,000 visitors this month (unique) and you converted 5% or 30%, how many would you sell? From each metric? I rest my case.

Tracking conversion rates is critical! No lead provider, nor even dealer web site can do this accurately as they do not know what leads buy cars outside of your dealership. That is where the company I work for comes in.
Polk has registration data for all 50 states, including DC and Puerto Rico. We can determine what lead, bought what car, at what dealership! Give us a call, we can provide you the "real data"!

Joe - I agree totally, in fact I wrote almost the same comments verbatim last time I addressed this topic.

Seems like a lot of you are addressing the concept of "optimizing" your site for conversions... first of all, that's precisely my argument: website providers and third party plug-ins want you to think in these terms so they can validate their existence, but I can think of plenty of elements I'd like to have on my dealer site that don't convert well on their own... what they will do is build a value that brings people in the door, and that's where you have to be on top of your floor traffic sourcing, as Mike pointed out.

The other part of the argument is the marketing you do to bring people to your site... I don't care how great you think your site is at measuring conversions, it goes without saying that the farther your marketing reaches, the less effective it will be. That was the conundrum I was posing here: if you live and die by the conversion ratio, then marketing past 5 or 10 miles from your dealership (relative to geography of course) is bad, and you shouldn't do it. Would anyone be interested in marketing that way?

@Mitchell - You make some great points and your theory is well thought out. If you are drawing site visitors from a multitude of sources the conversion rate will inevitably go down since the traffic isn't necessarily as targeted as possible. I think the one problem with the argument is that your funneling all of this traffic into a single source (your dealer website). This poses problems because firstly dealer websites in general suck and there is no obvious call to action on the page. If you use a network of very targeted landing pages with concise calls to action to funnel those visitors into you may see a significant increase in conversion rate. We even have dealers foregoing a traditional website for a network of landing pages.

@Chad - Firstly, your site looks great and I might even have a use for your services. Secondly we have been offering very targeted landing pages and campaigns with A/B testing, lead forms etc for quite a while now. We are an ad agency catering to the NY DMA and offer this service for our full service clients. We have clients doing very very well with targeted landing pages. Conversion rates can range from 8%-30% on even very generic terms (We track both calls and emails). Some of the landing pages we have created have been for new car sales, used, special finance & service.

Source tracking all floor traffic accurately as much as possible. This truly seperates the ad sources that are working and those that are not.

If you have automatically scheduled follow up response mechanisms for email leads, it does not hurt to get leads from a wide area.

If you have to "quote" prices + payments to all on the vehicle they inquired upon (plus one with more equipment, one with less and the closest used one that you have), there is a very real cost to leads that don't close very well - whether due to source or customer location. Your time is not free.

You'll hear more about this at the upcoming Digital Dealer conference in Orlando, but the self-serve nature of a shopping cart for vehices + F+I can relieve this pressure; allowing you to automate everything except the late in the stage "need to / want to talk to a salesperson" part.

As for websites, don't junk them up (especially the home page) with a whole bunch of attention grabbers which don't move to a lead / conversion. Consumers do NOT read a website page. They glance at it and click on the first thing that grabs their attention that seems to be related to why they are there.

Do this test... be a consumer in your local market who wants to buy a car of the brand that you sell... go to your website... start counting to 4... In that much time, did orient yourself and see the call to action that as the site designer you want such a consumer to click on?

If not, what got in your way?

Where did clicking on that call to action take you? Every click a consumer has to take that does not satisfy their primary purpose of their visit results in a 35% drop in conversion. Frustrate me, confuse me, annoy me... Click. Gone.

Your website is not a goodwill / PR machine. Online consumers do not care about anything you have to say beyond their purpose + only want to hear any message like "we are good people" within the context of what they want to do in language relevant to what they want to do. Done any other way it sounds like blah, blah, blah and gets between them and the action you want them to take.

IMO... Click to lead generation as conversion is only one metric to study + is only a guidepost to the more qualitative questions about site design and user experience that you should be asking.

Total cost of activity by source versus gross generated from sales including total time, training and supporting software costs is the more important one. In CPA school we called this ROI and it always trumps activity measurements like impressions, clicks, visits, leads, calls, etc.

Mitch -

There is not one website vendor on the market that truly focuses on conversions or conversion metrics. Dealers always being behind the tech curve have not asked for this yet in mass, nor do they really know what site “conversion” means (except us really smart people who read DealerRefresh).

Conversion = consumer site traffic / consumer doing something intended

In the automotive industry “site traffic” aka “hits” is the name of the game today, but no one is focused on a desired action by a consumer.

“Doing something intended” could be:
- Filling out an embedded lead form
- Completing a contact form
- Completing a vehicle appraisal/trade-in form
- Engaging in online chat with BDC
- Calling the website toll-free number
- Completing a credit application

These are just a few examples of conversions, but not one website provider has good metrics on any or all of these. Let me prove that no one is focused on conversion:

- Who offers A/B testing for landing pages?
- Who has a conversion goal vs. actual conversions report?
- Who has a very inviting and warm contact/lead form(s)?
- Who has a mash-up report of web-to-form, web-to-phone, and web-to-chat?
- How many dealerships are running micro-sites to focus on highly targeted traffic?

The providers challenge: many times this data is in disparate organizations (AutoTrader, Cars.com, toll-free call management provider, chat service provider, BDC vendor, etc). For a provider to tackle this would require lots of integration efforts and everyone always has 100s of small projects such as these. The only thing that will drive this massive mash-up of data will be dealers in mass requesting this.

Chad Polk
AutoRevo.com

Nice post Mitch - and I follow what you are saying. Do you "sacrifice" high conversion ratios by expanding your market and pulling in customers further away that are harder to close, and therefore "lower" your conversion rates.. The bottom line will always be sales. Another analogy would be to compare keeping 3rd party leads in your strategy and have a lower closing rate than if you only focused on your own website and OEM leads and have a higher closing rate - but then which resulted in more sales? And Joe, I also agree that it is difficult to compare one's conversion rates against another dealer as there is not truly an "apples to apples" comparison. I find the greatest value in trending our key metrics against our previous year's performance. Bottom line: key metrics are a tool to making better decisions, but do not overrule sound business sense... Kevin Frye/eCommerce Director/Jeff Wyler Automotive Family/ www.wyler.com

Long Distance Marketing:
The geographical size of your "internet marketing sphere" and it's importance, are directly related to the size of adjoining markets, AND, competition in those surrounding markets.

If you have rich adjoining markets, the inventory, the branding and SEO/SEM to attack these markets, then the ROI from the "large internet marketing sphere" should payoff big time.

Joe

Metrics that are important are "time on site", "# of pages viewed", "visitor loyalty" (did they come back for more?), # of pages printed, etc...

The problem is that even these metrics are relative only to YOUR efforts. Your sites marketing metrics (above) cannot be compared to another dealers metrics, unless, your 2 stores have the same... franchise, market size, # of competitors, # of units in inventory, and on and on. The Internet metrics of a site with >1,000 used cars will have no relavance to a site with 70% new and 30% used and 300 units on the ground.

I've said it here before, in the new world order, Inventory is Advertising. Each inventory unit retains the shopper just a little bit longer, there by stealing shopping time from your competitiors. Mega stores internet competition is cars.com and autotrader.com. Small(er) stores need to out effort everyone on the block (better pics, personal descriptions, personal videos, etc..) to stem the tide.

Joe

Mitch - it will be an evolutionary process. It is mostly a matter of better tracking your advertising sources. This is done by managing people correctly along with an easy-to-use CRM tool. I believe any dealer is competent enough to view a report to see what is working and what isn't - it is just a matter of getting the right information into that report. We're just now starting to see good CRM tools that are easy to use, and envelope the entire dealership. This is why I say it is an evolutionary process - it will take time for dealers to discover which of the better, all-encompassing CRM tools works for them, and then develop things enough to get good information into them.

The biggest problem I have with conversion ratios is in comparisons. Nobody counts an Internet deal the same way.

Great post Mitchell. I agree with you wholeheartedly. We don't want our showrooms to be sloppy and uninviting, so why should we settle for less with our websites (hello website companies...).