Have you done a full analysis of why your leads have been decreasing vs last year?
Recently two of our markets (3 stores - 2 Ford, Lincoln, 1 used car lot) have complained about low lead volume - specially internet used car leads. I put together spreadsheets and reports galore. Upon analyzing them, I discovered our used car lead volume began the decline in the week of Oct 15-19, 2012. Upon asking around I discovered this was the exact week we went away from as-is vehicles and decreased our used car stock number substantially. The lead volume hit one store harder than the other two stores which this inventory reduction
May seem like a simple thing we should have seen right away, but the reports our marketing team, our internet teams, and managers were running didn't point this out. Reasoning being, our internet used car leads decreased, but our internet used car sold numbers increased, plus our internet new vehicles lead count increased. Our used internet lead convert to sold rose from around 15% to 38%. Even though leads decreased substantially the leads we did get were higher quality and sold at a higher rate.
Additionally, upon an 18-month analysis across new and used website leads I concluded mobile visitors have increasing hurt our visitor to lead conversion rate and overall website lead volume. Upon taking mobile visitors out of the figures our conversion rate has actually increased. In month 1 of this analysis our mobile traffic was around 15%, month 18 it was 41%. However, our lot fresh up leads have increased month over month. With this said, mobile users can be counted multiple times within unique visitor traffic numbers (computer, tablet, phone), mobile user tend to be overall lower converting and less likely to fill out web forms, and a number of mobile users are actually on your lot looking at inventory. Mobile is a huge factor in reports and numbers. I'm close to completely separating mobile website stats from desktop website stats.
