Car Dealer Industry Averages?

[Alexander Lau]

It would be great to hold all 3rd Party groups, like AutoTrader, Cars.com, CarGurus, TrueCar, Edmunds, etc. accountable.

Show the following:

1. Google Referrals
2. Calls
3. Chats
4. Leads
5. Appointments
6. Shows
7. Sold
8. Per Lead Cost
9. Closing Ratio
10. Monthly Cost
11. Current CPVS

 

[usedcarricky]

Re: Industry Averages?

NADA State of the Industry Report is a good one to start with. A lot of other material comes from larger companies doing studies and publishing white papers. Cobalt has done some cool ones.

Todd Smith from Active Engage is a vessel of knowledge when it comes to this stuff. Perhaps his Google Alerts will prompt him to provide us with a reply.

Jerry the link says "Page Not Found" just FYI

 

[usedcarricky]

It would be great to hold all 3rd Party groups, like AutoTrader (HUGE WASTE OF MONEY), Cars.com, CarGurus, TrueCar, Edmunds, etc. accountable.

Show the following:

1. Google Referrals
2. Calls
3. Chats
4. Leads
5. Appointments
6. Shows
7. Sold
8. Per Lead Cost
9. Closing Ratio
10. Monthly Cost
11. Current CPVS

I held them accountable - and the rep says "map views" - I said "I'm spending a lot of money" - rep says "I have groups that spend twice that" - I said "your fired" - rep says "Impressions" - I said "now your really fired"

 

[joe.pistell]

Fast forward two nearly two years and is this ever the case. Ad budget and inventory levels are significantly higher, but we have less phone and email 'leads' (% wise), and we're turning quicker and breaking our own sales records each month for the last year. More than ever I am preaching that each call/email/up is exceedingly valuable. You are talking to them because they've already done their research and now they're making a decision, they want to buy. Like my man Baldwin famously says "A guy don't walk on the lot lest he wants to buy." That statement seems to be truer than ever.

We hopped off of the CRM we had then a while back and now getting ready to jump back in with another vendor. Getting accurate data without it has been a challenge but looking forward to seeing proper reporting soon.

Jamie, you're a great player on a great team! Great team work!

If you can find time, I'd love to have you start a thread on your CRM journey, past, present, future. You've got great data from your old system, your team is highly wired to it. It'll be interesting to watch what you had and the transition to the new CRM.

thnx
Joe

 

[Alex Snyder]

it Tuesday. Anyone feeling different about industry averages these days?

 

[Jeff Kershner]

I believe most of the general averages have not changed. However, a better questions may be what NEW metrics/averages are you tracking past the usual that we have been tracking for years?


Very generic example: Mobile metrics - conversion averages by form fill and phone calls.

 

[Alex Snyder]

a little bit of a silly question. But I've had a few offline questions posed to me about the usual stats lately.

Make me think this certainly ain't a hard business to keep up with. We keep trying to pull in new metrics and chase little extremes, but at the end of the day the same stats that sold horses sell cars too. In the stat chase we are our own worst enemies.

 

[Alexander Lau]

https://www.driven-data.com/universal-benchmarks/

 

[Alex Snyder]

:thumbup: @Alexander Lau gotta pimp D.R. Truth @jon.berna ....he has all the stats. And he does a good job of keeping people focused on the stats that matter.

 

[JamieS]

I believe most of the general averages have not changed. However, a better questions may be what NEW metrics/averages are you tracking past the usual that we have been tracking for years?

I think it's also important for folks to determine what KPIs to track, and then track them. Make adjustments (hopefully not too many at once), and measure any differences. Like Alex stated, tracking too many data points will cause you heartache and uncertainty. There's also the unfortunate case of others wanting to make changes too fast. That makes it difficult too.