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Internet & eCommerce Pay

Alex Snyder

President Skroob
Staff member
May 1, 2006
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We are beginning to see a trend on RefreshFriday when we have eCommerce Directors, CMOs, or Internet Managers from dealerships on the show. That trend is one against Internet leads. It looks like the tip of the spear has moved away from being paid on Internet lead conversions a few years ago and couldn't be happier :woohoo:

The average dealer still is paid on converting Internet leads into sales, appointments, whatever... and my feeling is that their General Manager, Executive, Dealer Principal just isn't educated in how BAD Internet leads really are. All they see is a trackable metric.

Take it a step further where vendors and consultant are still pushing the lead model. I only have one thing to say to them: you have weak and archaic products that are at serious risk of being displaced :rocket:

Shaun Kniffin (Niff) from Germain was on RefreshFriday with Jeff and me last week and he says that chasing Internet leads is striving to have a 90% failure rate. That's because you only close around 10% of your Internet leads.

And your website.... geesh.... your entire website is built around getting 2% of the visitors to succumb to a terrible lead process. That means your website lead strategy doesn't work for 98% of your visitors. Say this shit out loud and tell me it doesn't sound ridiculous! :banghead:

The best way to manage dealership change is in payplans, so what should we be paying Internet Managers and eCommerce Directors on?
 
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Reactions: Christine Plunkett
So, one could argue, as well as payplans, what is a better way to make the website more effective in converting to real action, and what to do with the increasing (in my case) lead load that seems to be decreasing in quality.

Is the conversion so low because they get what they want from the exisitng website info? Or do our sites suck? Do the leads convert so low because the lead sender was clickbaited into submitting a lead? (OEM programs and TrueCar non branded leads)

Curious...