Your numbers are not even remotely close close in your post, so your speculation on what we spend or what we saved is way off. Our monthly online budget is nearly 4-5x the figure you posted. You kind of struck a nerve with me on this post.
Chad,
Speculation is just that since I don't know the numbers. But if your budget is 5X what I thought it was my point is even more on target:
We run our website in-house so a larger percentage can be spent on other digital sources.
We are talking about a 0.3% of extra budget by running the sites in house and that was my point.
I'm not trying to attack you or your work, I mentioned that there are many reasons why someone may decide to do their own sites, but saving money shouldn't be one because you really don't, or you do at the expense of not having certain technologies.
When I got into the automotive industry slightly over a year ago, I was blown away at the amount website providers are charging per month for dealers. We were spending approx $5200 a month for our previous provider (1 group & 3 location sites). .
My daughter goes to a private school and they just paid $80,000 for a 4 year website contract ($1,600/month) with no extremely spec applications, feeds, and all the crap the car biz needs. I think the auto industry, for how fine tuned these sites need to be, is not expensive.
I can't tell you $5,200 is expensive or not for 4 websites. Did it include some custom programing, on page SEO, content creation, automated rebates, graphics design, etc? I still will gamble my life that you don't spend much less but don't have, and never will, the latest research and technology.
This doesn't take in the price of our Colbat sites for both Kia locations, our Lincoln websites, and Ford Premium websites.
I can't do anything about your Cobalt site or the Ford Direct site, that is something only you as a dealer can change. If you think is a waste of money get together with the other dealers in the state and bid for a change.
You, like other dealership website providers want to see people and groups like us fail, especially our previous website provider. However, there are a few that have had high praises (dealer.com/dealeron).
I don't like or dislike what you do. As a matter of fact I don't even know who you are or what you do for the most part. What I care is that if your business model is better than mine I need to look at adapting. You will fail if you are wrong not because I desire you to fail.
Let me tell you how I see it:
I practice martial arts every day of my life to a fault. I'm good. But my teacher, who is older, slower, and not as strong as I'm still beats the hell out of me. The reason is that he teaches 4 classes a day, so for every year that I put into training he puts 4. For every opponent I fight (and therefore I increase my experience) he fights 4.
Unless I become a teacher I can't be as good as he is.
I'll never forget the email I received from our previous provider and I quote, "I hope you fail and fail miserably; when you do you'll be crawling back to us in hopes to save you. We see these 'graphic designers' come in promising a bill of goods to dealerships but they lack the industry knowledge and support like we can. Dealer websites are not like other websites out there and all in house websites will fail. I'll keep you on file and touch base soon because in a few months you'll be coming back. Best of luck, you will need it, xxxxxxx"
There are assholes in every area of your life, but that doesn't mean all website vendors are. I hope you don't judge the car industry as a whole by the one sales experience you had when you were 18. Know what I mean?
I did quite the opposite in the first year increasing our unique visitor count by an average of 5,032 a month, increasing our unique VLP/VDP viewers by 9,483 for year, increased our conversion rate by 4%, and increased our website lead count by 1,243. So what I'm doing works or is working, I can guarantee you that. If you can guarantee those same results over a DealerFire website, I'd love to see it.
Oh sh@#%& no wonder if it was DealerFire!
Just kidding.
I don't doubt that you increased things, ut my point was towards "we are saving money". I never put in doubt your numbers, partially because I don't know them, I don't know if the dealer worked with DealerFire (there is only so much they can do on their own), etc.
We run our website in-house so a larger percentage can be spent on other digital sources.
I'm part of a in-house marketing team which I also produce our commercials and design our printed marketing materials which saves us lots of money over 3rd party vendors. So our cost saving for in-house isn't limited to digital sources. I'm not going to post exactly how much, but in 1 year it was over 4x our yearly marketing team's salaries.
Again, don't speculate on numbers you don't know anything about.
Well you know I'm a small chicken but I run a data collection company that takes photos of 25,000 cars a month, manages CL for over 500 dealers, have over 10,000 micro-sites and blogs the we maintain, own 2 weekly published magazines (over $1.5M a year in printer cost) so I do know a little bit about what things cost and I'll not take your numbers for granted. I see a lot of P&L statements, payroll, etc.
This is a good set up for the dealer owner because he has another business, he will save of make (however you want to see it) the money the owner of DeaerFire would make. You still need to have a programmer, designer, etc. There is only so much cost you can take out of things, it cost money to get things done and in the car industry margins are pretty thing because competition is fierce among vendors.
Back to me original point:
Not much money saved and chances that you will not be able to develop some technology that you just have at one point.
Most set ups like yours end because of that, not because you are not a great designer/programer/etc but because the dealer reaches an impasse where the team can't develop or acquire whats needed to remain competitive in the market.
