Used Car Leads

[ddavis]

My experience is that the dealers who do a good job keeping track of sources usually use a “last source” attribution model that credits all past “touches” to the source of the last click.

If dealerships use the last source, it will usually be their website. As far a search, most customers typed in the dealership name.
The best way to get source information is talking to the customer at time of sale.

 

[ddavis]

As long as you use a consistent unit of measurement, you'll still notice trends and down times.

That might be true but if you use this months leads vs. this months sales, you will be able to compare with industry averages.

Walkins have nothing to do with leads. If a customer comes in, without an appointment and doesn't ask for an Internet Sales Manager, it is a walkin. That customer should be on the floor log and your closing percentage will be the number sold relative to the number of customers on the log.

 

[yagoparamo]

As long as you use a consistent unit of measurement, you'll still notice trends and down times. But like you said could lead to inaccuracies.

I noticed one glaring problem area with this around Jan/Feb/March of 2012 for us and this was the main reason why I started calculating them differently. We had extremely warm weather and all-time record temps in Jan 2012 and had a HUGE increase in leads in Jan 2012. A majority of these leads then bought in Feb/March, but leads returned to their normal levels for those month. This made the close % inflate substantially for Feb and March.

Chad,

No excuse is valid for faulty analyzing data specially when we know we are!

Measuring a trend will indicate ups and downs which are "easy" to predict, to a certain point, in this business (summer VS winter, tax time, election years, etc). There are some articles in DR about that too.

Understanding the customer's patch and how being in more digital assets increases visibility will give a better understanding in ROI and definitely keep the guys on top from making mistakes on what to cancel.

 

[Matthew Danskin]

I can only imagine that your carsforsale.com website is being managed by the same person or people who manage your other sites. They focus on the leads from your website, cars.com, autotrader and the occasional lead that comes in from carsforsale.com. Correct me if I'm wrong. carsforsale.com doesn't work the same way those other sites do. It is only effective as a tool to advertise on craigslist. If you don't have someone posting lots of cars daily, you might as well cancel your subscription. I would suggest having 1 salesperson take ownership of it, have their contact info on it, and post as many cars as possible without craigslist marking them as spam. With 450 cars in inventory, there is no reason someone couldn't sell 10 cars a month off carsforsale.com alone.