New trend for Showroom Traffic vs. Internet Leads?

[Ryan Pesin]

I was hoping the DealerRefresh community could help with some insight on this and maybe additional data around a possible "growing trend".

I received this report from Autotrader and what stood out most to me was the data around showroom traffic vs. Internet leads. Internet Leads are trending down (Emails & Phone Calls) and the percentage of consumers coming into the dealership unannounced or unscheduled, is going up.

Are you seeing this trend at your dealership?
Would anyone have additional data on this or trending reports beyond a 2013 snapshot? Maybe a trend from 2007-2013?

 

[joe.pistell]

growing? IMO, what's changing is how few dealers shoppers are visiting.

 

[yagoparamo]

Autotrader claims that almost 70% of the people that buy a car from the dealer just show up with no previous contact.


I can say I agree with Joe that this seems like a far fetched number but each individual dealer can check whether this is true for them or not IF they use their CRM correctly.

 

[BHavican]

Maybe it's just me but the question seems misleading. If I was a customers answering "How did you initially contact the dealership you purchased from?" I wouldn't associate filling out a form (ex. Request a Quote, TrueCar, etc.) to calling or emailing and would just put walk-in by default.

Then again like Yago said, it depends on how well your salespeople source. For a good month after we cut AutoTrader we would still see it as a source because alphabetically it was one of the first sources listed. We now have ***I was too weak to ask*** at the top

 

[yagoparamo]

Maybe it's just me but the question seems misleading. If I was a customers answering "How did you initially contact the dealership you purchased from?" I wouldn't associate filling out a form (ex. Request a Quote, TrueCar, etc.) to calling or emailing and would just put walk-in by default.

Then again like Yago said, it depends on how well your salespeople source. For a good month after we cut AutoTrader we would still see it as a source because alphabetically it was one of the first sources listed. We now have ***I was too weak to ask*** at the top

But there is the strong possibility that customers check multiple sources and just remember the one with the most famous name.

So that is one of the issues with sourcing nowadays; customer goes to 5-7 websites, calls from just one, remembers that one, would have the customer called anyway if we had our cars in just one of those 7 websites?

 

[subi101]

In my dealership, we started tracking quite a bit to verify much of these "stats". This is what we found. only 33% of our leads were coming in having submitted a lead and no response back to our follow up every month (we started to refer to them as "blue birds"). 79% of our customers had done some research online prior to coming in regardless of submitting a lead. Of that 21% that had not done online research 77% were Buick customers.

Stats are just numbers that people extrapolate from a study. 5 people can look at the same study and extrapolate 5 different conclusions of that same study. I just find it so TERRIBLE that some companies find it okay to manipulate a study to spread information that tries to make their company look good and in the same breath move this industry BACKWARDS with the garbage they spew. Rant over.

Now back to the topic at hand, I think that number is nonsense and more dealers should track everything themselves. Lead providers (YES THEY ARE ALL REFERENCED AS LEAD PROVIDERS WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT), claim that no one can FULLY track everyone and all sources effectively. But I can say from my experience, that it is possible to get a full picture of your traffic. Every study has outliers that you remove and as long as you are aware that some customers will lie or not pay attention and you drop those from your statistics... you then have a great picture of what IS and what WORKS for your dealership.

 

[yagoparamo]

Subi,

I will say in defense of what ATC did that in the last couple of years knowing where the customer came became impossible. At the same time dealers were used to get a piece of paper, a report, of ATC phone calls, and that determined its success. As a matter of fact ATC for years discriminated against radio, TV, etc by showing the phone call reports. When that ended, a solution was needed.

The solution is not easy, it actually sounds like a trick, but I have seen the same happen to CraigList--less calls but customers that come to the dealer mention CraigsList. I even see that in the magazines for low priced cars, less calls but customers come with the magazine at hand. The reality is that customers research more and call less.

An effort to track better in conjunction with a good CRM was needed starting 2 years ago.

ATC somehow came up with this solution when it is not the answer, to have faith that customers come if we advertise here ?!

While I believe that ATC still a very valid source for many dealers in many areas what probably troubled the managers of the company is that traceability equals value to pay. Without proper proof the reality os that many other sources can claim to have affected the lead and that will have in turn and effect over how much dealers are willing to pay to be on ATC.

 

[yagoparamo]

The sign of times


http://www.autonews.com/article/20140421/RETAIL/304219959?template=mobile&X-IgnoreUserAgent=1

 

[joe.pistell]

Fact: Lead source analysis from CRM is a waste of your time. Here's the world as I see it:

Fact #1:
Pre-sale, neither your sales reps nor your customers benefit from your need to get true visibility into the lead source.

this sets up...

Fact #2:
Lead source assignment can only be trusted if it's fully automated (a form lead).

That being said...

Fact #3:
Consider that 50% of all shoppers are in market 90days or longer, and visit >20 automotive sites prior to purchase. Your not looking for the lead source, your looking for the MOST POPULAR paths to your store.

In other words, if you obsess about lead source, what of the 19 other sites the shopper was on prior to sending you a lead? Where did they go after they sent you a lead? Look into attribution modeling*.


*https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1662518?hl=en
*Multi-Channel Attribution Modeling: The Good, Bad and Ugly Models - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

 

[joe.pistell]

From my seat, I found the ONLY trustworthy TRAFFIC source data would come from a survey at delivery.

Here's a couple take aways from >20,000 delivery surveys I collected over 5 yrs.

INTERNET
80% consider themselves a "frequent internet user" (more than 30 mins a day)
22% of all of my buyers used Cars.com or Autotrader at sometime.
85% of all sales were on my site prior to purchase
...and 70% of these went to my site 3x or more

COMPETITION
43% of all buyers shopped never stopped at another store.
25% of all buyers shopped at just one other store

LOYALTY & REPUTATION
70% of all sales were to either a repeat buyer, or to someone who knew a friend or family that was a buyer.

TIME TO SALE
50% were in shopping 3 months or longer


TRADITIONAL AD PERFORMANCE
90% of all buyers saw my TV ads, but...
25% found these ads helpful



http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/survey-delivery-road-map-your-store-3751.html#post32318