@ Joe
Well I got my hopes up a bit on the added budget. We did finally cancel our print advertising contract which was a big budget drain but I have yet to make any progress on getting those funds reallocated to something useful. Part of the problem here is that we are a small dealership, yet we draw about 300 leads/month. Since I'm a one-man show in the Internet Department I always have my hands full. I revised parts of my follow up process and some of my best salesmen are now actively helping me with long-term prospecting and even short-term follow up (i.e. calls during the evening or my day off when I'm not around). I think this small change alone has been enormous. Jan-March was my personal best three month stretch since getting into the business.
I took your advice and was able to get OEM incentives right on our website. I saw a noticeable influx in new car leads as soon as that change was made and was even able to sell a few cars at full sticker because some customers seem to think the price listed with incentives is the final internet price (actually just MSRP minus incentives). I also think that some (not many) customers in the past actually thought we were quoting MSRP as an internet price because that what was listed on our inventory.
We also added a few more third-party leads with CarGurus which is a very inexpensive lead provider and has already led to several sales in just under a month.
As for pictures...not so good. I was doing great in Jan-March but this month has fallen off. Our process/timeline for used vehicle inspection, detailing, etc is eternally broken and I am beating a dead horse trying to get it fixed. I work with a few too many people who hate change. Needless to say, since my photo process isn't fixed, video is still on the back burner. Like I said, since it's just me here, balancing time can be an issue. I did change our inventory listing so that the slide show video was removed and our still photos displayed but I see that has reverted back 
. I'll have that changed again asap.
Starting today, I'm going to conduct your experiment on VDP for our inventory before and after pictures are added. I will let you know what I find. Thanks for checking in!
