Reporting. Anything else? Digital Marketing

beckie · Sep 11, 2014

I've been lurking the forums for the past 6 months and have learned a lot - so thank you!

I'm new to the automotive (was in powersports) side of things, but have been in the web design / digital marketing world for almost 20 years. I'm the Digital Marketing Manager for a Dodge / RAM dealer (also sell used) and started 6 months ago. This is a brand new position.

In the past 6 months, I've refined the sales internet process, cleaned up all old SEO, updated websites - including making sure all sales are up to date, send out e-newsletters, consistent with social media, managed all SEM campaigns / companies, reputation management, videos of the service department / sales department, manage all 3rd party sites (AT, Cars, etc). Anything having to do with a computer and the internet. ha ha! More things, I'm sure - it doesn't look like much, but they had about 4 salespeople doing my job. So now, those people can focus on selling and I can bring more traffic in!

I created a spreadsheet from the past 4 years with internet and sales data. Unique visitors, leads, lead sources, sold total, sold new, sold used and % sold leads. I then compared each month to the past year. Another part - year to month - and compared those. We just started our web stats, so I only have partial web visitors since July 2013.

I am working on how many of those were mobile month to month. One thing I noticed was that Aug 2013, our traffic consisted of 27% mobile traffic and Aug 2014 - it's now 37%.

I am also working breaking down on sales per person. The dealership I work for is very old school and some resist embracing the internet. We do not have a BDC nor want to have one.

We are running about 26% of the leads as SOLD (Jan - Aug 2014). Am I missing anything? In terms of reporting? Or anything else? Things are much different on this side of things. I'm really enjoying building this department but of course, want to do more, and also make sure the owners are happy with my results.

Rdpatrick · Sep 11, 2014

beckie said:
I've been lurking the forums for the past 6 months and have learned a lot - so thank you!

I'm new to the automotive (was in powersports) side of things, but have been in the web design / digital marketing world for almost 20 years. I'm the Digital Marketing Manager for a Dodge / RAM dealer (also sell used) and started 6 months ago. This is a brand new position.

In the past 6 months, I've refined the sales internet process, cleaned up all old SEO, updated websites - including making sure all sales are up to date, send out e-newsletters, consistent with social media, managed all SEM campaigns / companies, reputation management, videos of the service department / sales department, manage all 3rd party sites (AT, Cars, etc). Anything having to do with a computer and the internet. ha ha! More things, I'm sure - it doesn't look like much, but they had about 4 salespeople doing my job. So now, those people can focus on selling and I can bring more traffic in!

I created a spreadsheet from the past 4 years with internet and sales data. Unique visitors, leads, lead sources, sold total, sold new, sold used and % sold leads. I then compared each month to the past year. Another part - year to month - and compared those. We just started our web stats, so I only have partial web visitors since July 2013.

I am working on how many of those were mobile month to month. One thing I noticed was that Aug 2013, our traffic consisted of 27% mobile traffic and Aug 2014 - it's now 37%.

I am also working breaking down on sales per person. The dealership I work for is very old school and some resist embracing the internet. We do not have a BDC nor want to have one.

We are running about 26% of the leads as SOLD (Jan - Aug 2014). Am I missing anything? In terms of reporting? Or anything else? Things are much different on this side of things. I'm really enjoying building this department but of course, want to do more, and also make sure the owners are happy with my results.

Sounds like you're doing a great job of tracking, which is an area where most people drop the ball. I would also drill down on where each sale is coming from, regardless of whether they are internet leads or not. There are many ways to track this but simply asking every "Which of these websites, if any, led you to visit us?" and you can get a bigger picture of how each 3rd party provider is performing. It can often be multiple sources for one customer.

After that, I would figure out how much your cost per sale is from each provider. Take the total cost of the 3rd party advertising package and divide it by the number of sales you received. This will give you an idea of how everything is performing and which types of customers are visiting you on different sites.

Best of luck!

beckie · Sep 11, 2014

Rdpatrick said:
Sounds like you're doing a great job of tracking, which is an area where most people drop the ball. I would also drill down on where each sale is coming from, regardless of whether they are internet leads or not. There are many ways to track this but simply asking every "Which of these websites, if any, led you to visit us?" and you can get a bigger picture of how each 3rd party provider is performing. It can often be multiple sources for one customer.

After that, I would figure out how much your cost per sale is from each provider. Take the total cost of the 3rd party advertising package and divide it by the number of sales you received. This will give you an idea of how everything is performing and which types of customers are visiting you on different sites.

Best of luck!

Thank you! I actually forgot to add that part. I have a ROI report from each lead source - so it will include how much we made from each source. The problem is that sometimes, it's off - salespeople will just put anything, so we're working on that. I'll add the function of advertising cost / # of sales received. Thank you!