You're right on Joe.
When I hear the words "internet lead" anymore, it just makes me tired, I want to move on. Add "conversion" to the end of those words, and I want to throw up from frustrations. The tools we have to communicate with shoppers do not generate leads, only vehicles do.
An internet lead is simply a shoppers which is interested in purchasing a vehicle you have for sale. How they make themselves known to you is the path of communication they choose to take, the paths of communications are not lead generators, the vehicle is the lead generator. The 3rd party sites we all pay way too much money for (superficially) are not lead generators, we pay them to expose our inventory to shoppers looking to buy a vehicle. If they didn't have vehicles, there would be no shoppers, it's a ying-yang thing. We pay for the amount of exposure those sites have in a given marketplace. If we didn't have vehicles for sale, nobody would ever visit our websites.
I never hear anyone talk about "showroom visits", Walk-ins, but that's the majority of any dealers traffic, how well are you handling that? That's another communication path, most shoppers would rather show up in person than go through the pain of being harassed online.
Chat, phone, texting, forms, walk-ins, are all paths of communication. Texting is super effective at communicating because shoppers have total control, can use it anytime and anywhere, it doesn't generate any leads though.
You know, we all already have the best advertising source, and it's doesn't cost anything extra... it's your inventory.
...sorry for going a little off topic.
