Many of the bigger franchise and Indie dealerships have a hard time attributing where their leads come from. Typically, a single lead may touch a number of different advertising and classified platforms at any given point in the shopping process, including the dealer site itself. Dealers feel they need to maintain a presence on a variety of increasingly expensive, publicly traded, comp sites to maintain a certain level of visibility in order to hit that lead every step of the way.
Because of this misconception, dealerships are continuously burning ad dollars by over-exposing themselves financially with inefficient advertising and marketing practices. Dealer Analytics provides clarity by elucidating the waste, and helps streamline dealership advertising/marketing processes with top notch analytics…not guess work. Attribution is just part of that analysis, albeit a major component to be sure.
Simply put, Dealer Analytics is used as a dealership’s insurance policy against wasting advertising and marketing dollars, and ensuring that their website is producing traffic and leads at optimum levels.
Dealer Analytics assigns each client a Google Analytics expert who acts as a “dedicated Account Manager”. The account manager is tasked with the following practices:
Monitor and report on the performance of website traffic through Google Analytics
Generate weekly reports reviewing the performance of each dealer’s website and vendors
Monthly one-on-one screen shares to go over website/vendor performance Alert regarding any issues with traffic, tracking or website performance
Work with dealership vendors and/or web company to correct issues that are affecting the websites lead generation
Direct line provided to each dealer’s account manager, no 800 numbers, for quick answers and help
Over the course of a single year, Dealer Analytics saves each dealer thousands of dollars in wasted ad budget and inefficient online practices. The cost to dealers is $269/month with a 12 month contract. This also includes unlimited phone calls for the top tier and help from the assigned account manager.
During my conversation with Tracie Costabile, VP of Dealer Analytics, I asked her to give me a couple examples of how they can make a measurable difference in a dealerships online performance. Here is her response:
“A small Chevrolet dealership in Montana recently enlisted our services to help them determine how to spend their very limited marketing budget. After analyzing the data in their Google Analytics, we were able to show exactly which vendors were bringing quality, engaged traffic, and which were sending junk clicks that weren’t helping the dealership’s bottom line. This dealership saved thousands of dollars per month by getting rid of what wasn’t working, including some expensive, big name vendors. As a bonus, taking that money and putting it into the programs that were producing for them, produced more first generation leads from their website, which in turn boosted their sales.”
“A Ford dealership in Las Vegas was able to benefit from our website monitoring service. Part of website monitoring is checking on the backlinks the site has. When the website’s quality scores plummeted, a check into their backlinks revealed that they were being unscrupulously targeted by a competitor who was linking X-rated websites to their main dealership website. Quality scores are what Google uses to determine where a site will be returned in an organic search. If the scores go down enough, the dealership disappears from page one of organic searches. We were able to help the dealership disavow these bad links and restore their quality scores, giving them back their organic, page one placement.”
As a digital marketing veteran of 10 plus years, I’m impressed with Dealer Analytics overall approach to analyzing data and providing actionable advice that makes substantive improvements in performance. To have an experienced analytics expert provide a monthly audit of your dealership’s digital operation, including digital ad spend, attribution analysis, and website performance starting at just $99, is perhaps the greatest bargain in automotive vendorship history. These guys are a leading candidate for Automotive Vendor of the Year 2018!
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