Hello Rdpatrick,
The first thing I would look at is your in house follow up process. It is fair to say that you may have to handle leads differently depending on the source of the lead. Only a certain percentage of customers purchase within the first 30 days. A higher percentage purchases after 30 days and then there are the customers that purchase 60 and even 90 days out from the initial contact. Take a look at other dealers in your market and see how many are listed on Cars.com and test those dealers to see how they handle their follow up process. If they are doing a great job of staying in contact with the lead 40 days, 50 day, 60 days out then they may be beating you to the punch. I'm not sure of the stats regarding what the average purchase time frame is between cars.com and autotrader but this may be something you should find out. If you find that it takes cars.com shoppers longer to purchase well... there is one problem you will need to address.
The first thing I would look at is your in house follow up process. It is fair to say that you may have to handle leads differently depending on the source of the lead. Only a certain percentage of customers purchase within the first 30 days. A higher percentage purchases after 30 days and then there are the customers that purchase 60 and even 90 days out from the initial contact. Take a look at other dealers in your market and see how many are listed on Cars.com and test those dealers to see how they handle their follow up process. If they are doing a great job of staying in contact with the lead 40 days, 50 day, 60 days out then they may be beating you to the punch. I'm not sure of the stats regarding what the average purchase time frame is between cars.com and autotrader but this may be something you should find out. If you find that it takes cars.com shoppers longer to purchase well... there is one problem you will need to address.
