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In early 2020, no one could have imagined what the next two years would hold for the world- or the automobile industry. Through the shut downs of the early pandemic to vehicle shortages, a tightening economy and higher prices, to the in-dealership challenges of retention and growth, so much has taken place during this transitional time.  At DealerPeak , we acknowledge and have tracked these changes. Our research team used a first-touch attribution model to analyze data collected from hundreds of rooftops across the U.S. in Q1 2022. The data shows that there is a significant shift in how leads are generated in favor of third party digital retailers, along with an overall increase in online marketplace conversions. It is predicted that continued uncertainty will hover in the market for at least another year or more. With this understanding, DealerPeak expects dealer groups to become even more reliant on third-party organizations for inbound lead support. The Industry Continues to be Tested Q1 of 2022 has shown that issues like dealership inventory, manufacturing stagnancy and inflated prices are continuing to affect conversions and the way in which consumers shop for vehicles. One of the largest obstacles for both manufacturers and dealer groups is the semiconductor chip shortage, a situation that is forecasted to plague the industry through 2024. Lacking inventory plus an impending potential recession means that retailers must get creative and stay optimistic. Smaller brands with smaller market share are having an easier time keeping up with it all. Mazda and Maserati, for example, are able to achieve a much higher conversion rate compared to other manufacturers as they offer greater vehicle availability.  One Emerging Trend to Avoid Dealers are looking to cut costs. It’s inevitable during a challenging time, however DealerPeak has identified a major trend to avoid. In Q1 2022, website provider conversion rates dropped across the board. This is attributed to the fact there has been less incentive for dealer groups to maintain their websites based on the current market conditions, coupled with less need to generate dealership foot traffic. We believe maintaining a strong website is vital for long-term success. The best performing website providers offer buyer-focused features such as chatbots, digital engagement, and embedded digital retailing tools. What the Future Holds for Automotive Resilience and adaptability are common themes among dealer leadership in 2022. Seeking opportunities wherever they arise is now essential to annual planning, and that may mean expanding partnerships with third party groups. As mentioned, third-party leads dominate as a primary lead source because these platforms have a large variety of vehicle inventory to share with buyers. Organizations and groups that can evolve from “me” to “we” will go far in this new chapter of automotive innovation. There was also an increase in overall conversion rates for marketplaces like Autotrader compared to recent quarters. Online marketplaces allow consumers to shop and compare across all available inventory in the market - an asset in an economy where on-location dealership selection is low. This gives the buyer a sense of opportunity and control, keeping shopping frustrations to a minimum. Autotrader performs better than other marketplaces due to a large, high-converting database of vehicles. Thanks to high-ranking SEO and brand recognition, they attract abundant amounts of consumer traffic.  Support is Available Now DealerPeak is an exclusive auto dealer CRM specializing in centralized data for multi-franchise dealer groups that provides real-time insights. It's our duty to help dealerships and vendor partners succeed - and this is more important than ever in times of uncertainty. We hope you found the information to be helpful in your late-quarter 2022 and early 2023 planning. Please reach out with questions or to learn more about our CRM, Desking, Equity Awareness, or Open API programs. This article was contributed by Zach Ferres , Board Chairman of Dealerpeak, in partnership with Laurie Halter, Dealer Marketing Magazine Expert Panelist and Owner of Charisma! Communications.

A customer for life goes a long way in automotive. It’s not just the vehicle purchase, it’s everything that comes with it: maintenance, service, add-ons, renewals, and, of course, referrals.   But it’s hard to scale personalized campaigns to past customers and to leads that ghosted. The messaging is different, the approach is sensitive, and the timing has to be perfect. There are also several factors that come into play like the last website visit, VDP views, and lease/finance renewal.  While no human can physically scale this kind of personalization, this is just another application of machine learning that could turn your CRM into a money-making machine. Think about it: if your CRM has 10,000 non-active leads, and you can reawaken even as little as 10%, you're looking at 1,000 new customers for life. It’s really pure gold waiting to be discovered.  It’s all about the audiences  The first step in making sure you’re investing in the right technology to turn more of your CRM into revenue opportunities is the audience game. You want to make sure your dealership isn’t bucketing opportunities into irrelevant audiences, like lease renewal for someone who has more than a year remaining, or service for someone who just came in. The demanded-- and expected-- hyper-personalization starts with the right segmentation, so you need to be optimizing audiences like people who recently visited VDPs, cash renewals, and cold “non-buyers” (leads that converted over 8 months ago and did not buy a car from you).  Make it dynamic  Once you have the right machines in place to identify and segment appropriate audiences, you need to make sure your email templates and SMS marketing have dynamic templates and merge tags. No one wants to receive an email without their first name or pre-filled forms. If you’re sending the email, you should know who they are!  But it goes even further than this- as you send traffic from an email blast to a specific landing page, your dealership can have dynamic videos and forms already embedded on the landing page to maintain that 1:1 conversation with your prospect. Once someone clicks on a hyperlink from your email, you will know how to identify them and greet them when they land on your website, keeping the transition and user experience extremely smooth. You can also personalize things like vehicles of interest or relevant services with dynamic templates.  Don’t forget connectivity  Even if your dealership invests in the best technology for mining your CRM, real-time machine learning can’t possibly function at its best without connected data. Make sure your dealership’s website data and ad activity is connected and communicating with the CRM so you have a full picture of the prospect’s digital footprint. While CRM information is critical, it has to be coupled with shopper activity in order to make the most of every opportunity and turn more (dead) leads into sales. When data is connected it also provides you with the most updated version of your customer’s story, bringing you one step closer to conversion.   There are a lot of pieces to pull together when thinking about personalized lead nurture at a scale that can convert more of your database into business. And while no human can possibly do this, your dealership should consider AI-powered technologies that can learn your audiences, segment, and target shoppers with just the right message on and off the site. Your data and your customer base could be the gold mine you’ve been looking for, so don’t miss out. 

We’re halfway through 2021 and we’re still seeing website tragedies in automotive. And yes, it really is a tragedy. When a dealership spends that much money for a solid website, competitive traffic, and SEO maintenance, you’d expect the website to be optimized for conversions and leads. If you want your website to attract most modern-day shoppers, there is some work to be done in the industry because, without this gem, dealerships can’t showcase their inventory, incentives, and dealership culture to the avid online shopper.  So let’s dissect some of the common mistakes that we are still seeing today and how you can fix them.  Overlapping CTAs One of the most common website tragedies is when CTAs (call-to-actions/buttons) overlap with each other. CTAs are your moment to shine, dealers! So if you’re crowding the button with bad UX (user experience), your expensive traffic is never going to convert into a lead-- and not just because of the aesthetic, but because it’s actually impossible to click the CTA underneath when something is blocking it.  This is a must clean-up situation so you can optimize for the most leads. Where can you start? Probably with consolidating on-site vendors so you can avoid these CSS mistakes, but if you insist on keeping separate vendors, I’d certainly recommend connecting the vendors to coordinate online real estate.  Stuck/Cutoff Overlays Dealership websites often have multiple pop-up overlays, including chat, that simultaneously interrupt a shopper's browsing experience. But what’s worse is that often the overlay is cut off, usually because it’s not optimized for every screen and every device. As you can imagine, not seeing the full engagement can lead to some frustrated online buyers.   To avoid this, dealers need to work with quality (not quantity) website optimization partners and ensure proper QA on every device. With our screen-obsessed generation, you never know if your next buyer will be searching for their vehicle on a tablet, iphone, or computer, but rest assured, they’ll expect the perfect user experience wherever they are.  Dead Specials Pages When consumers click on your specials page, they’re expecting gold-- how can they get the best deal and are you the store that’s going to give it to them? If your specials page doesn’t display any incentives, you’re losing an opportunity. Your dealership should be investing in technology that scans multiple data sources, in real-time, so you can pull any incentive opportunity for your dealership at any time. This way, your dealership doesn’t just rely on OEM incentives resulting in some dead days in the beginning of the month.  Lack of Transparency  Even if your store is not a one-price store, you can still show basic price transparency on your website and leave room for negotiation later. In this example, the sale price isn’t even listed which pushes away the modern shopper looking to understand ballpark prices before committing to a conversion online. Use transparency to attract all kinds of shoppers, but especially the experienced online shoppers.  While it’s important to look into all the new digital marketing solutions out there to build healthy streams of traffic, this is a reminder not to leave your website behind. Your website is your home base-- your lead magnet-- to represent your dealership and bring in more business in a world where 92% of shoppers will start their journey online. Let’s make it easy for them! 

Long the industry standard for measuring digital advertising, Google Analytics launched a significant update recently. More than an update, GA4 provides a whole new paradigm on how to think about and measure web traffic. So whether you're the guy who crunches the numbers, or needs to rely on or manage those that do, here's a quick dive on what you need to know about the new Analytics 4. Google Analytics Pre-Update: Universal Analytics As a starting point, a quick recap pre-update. Google Analytics, a free tracking tool from Google, provides data on your dealership's website traffic. It reports on things like which content or products are driving traffic on your site, from what website your visitors arrived, where and how they are converting or what actions they are taking on your site, as well as information like users' age, gender, country, device, etc. Many vendor dashboards are based on GA4, so whether or not you're viewing it in its native form, you're likely still relying on its data to make decisions. A key point on the previous Google UA is that tracking was accomplished by placing a block of JavaScript code on your website. And while that worked well for your website, tracking mobile devices required a different version of analytics, for example, GA for Apps, or  Google Analytics for Firebase , which created a problem. The data from these versions looked quite different from the tracking for your website, often making it difficult to implement consistent tracking. New Device Support and a New Data Model With the new GA 4, you can now track your website, an app, OR BOTH together. But since page views, bounce rate, or time on site are different for mobile, GA introduced a second change - a new data model. To unify the collection methods, GA underwent a complete rethinking of how it works, redefining things like page views, transactions, social interactions, etc., under one concept. These are now referred to as events. With the new GA4, an event can be almost anything you choose; a pageview, screen view, or app view. With each event that gets triggered, you'll also see extra information that describes the event more closely. These are called event parameters. Also, these properties can now occur in other events. So you can query them together and compare them against each other. It also future proofs the system for the different sorts of devices that you may want to track, like the IoT (Internet of Things) devices or Point-of-sale systems.  Changing How We Think about Analytics As you can see, Google Analytics 4 is a significant update, offering new tools with an entirely new perspective on data and how it represents the digital world. In addition to providing more flexibility in what we choose to send into the system, it also allows Google to plug your data into their existing machine learning systems and provide predictive insights. There is no longer a need to ask questions; rather, GA 4 gives us insights right away with new predictive metrics already built-in and available. The new GA4 is also more independent regarding the assumptions about what type of business it's looking at. In a nutshell, Google Analytics 4 has moved from being less of a reporting interface where you merely view your data and instead of providing you with D-I-Y tools to build yourself. This means your GA 4 setup doesn't have to look like everyone else's. Of course, this means more advanced planning on your part so the events can be properly interpreted later.  In closing, while the current Google Universal Analytics platform will likely stick around for a while, it's pretty clear that GA4 is the next step in the evolution of analytics data. So if you're ready to jump in and see what the new GA4 can do for you, there are three ways to get started (with varying degrees of commitment).  1. If you're ready to fully rely on Google Analytics 4 reporting. Set up a new site on a Google Analytics 4 property. 2. Create a parallel new GA4 property collecting data alongside your existing UA property. This will also establish a connection to migrate configuration settings from your UA property to your new GA4 property when you're ready. 3. Add Google Analytics 4 to a site that already has Analytics. Your UA property is left unchanged and continues to gather data. Note: you'll need Edit permission on your current account. Read more on setup here .  

If you want to keep a secret, secret... If you'd rather not air your dirty laundry in public... If you don't want anyone ever to find out what you did that one time in college... Here's the best place to hide that information from the world.... Page two of Google search results. Searchers are 10x more likely to click on the first result than on the 7th-10 listed website, according to a recent analysis of over 5 million searches. The news gets worse from there. Less than 1% of searchers will click on anything at all on page two of the search results. A lot less than 1% to be exact - 0.78%. If you want to depress yourself, head on over to Google and do a quick search for your best selling model: Ford F150 Toyota RAV4 Alfa Romeo Stelvio. The odds are pretty good your dealership's not going to show up on page 1. Page 2 either, for that matter. It gets a little better if you add "city name" or "for sale" to the search, but not much really. You pay MILLION$ to the factory for the right to promote and sell their products, but you're nowhere to be found when people are looking for them. Do you know who you will find on page one of the search results, though? Third-party lead providers. Every time. All Day Long. Twice on Sunday.  Your customers were looking for you when they found them. They want to buy what you're selling, but first, you've got to pay the tax. Pay the gatekeepers. It's like they stole your watch, and they're charging you thousands a month to let you know what time it is. Well, it's time for a change, that's what time it is. Do you know why the lead providers and aggregators DOMINATE page one of the search results and you're stuck back in the boondocks on page 3?  It's simple really — three little words. Content. Content. Content! They've cracked the code, and they understand that Google and other search engines (but seriously, Google) will reward them for creating a steady stream of fresh content. It's a you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours kind of deal. Google is in the business of taking all of the content on the web, mashing it up, running it through its algorithm robots, and putting it in front of the right eyeballs at the right time to maximize advertising revenue. Google needs more content to attract more eyeballs and more dollars. If you give it what it needs, it will reward you with what you want - a higher search ranking. The lead providers know this, so they spend millions churn blog posts and reviews and top ten lists about anything and everything. Meanwhile, most dealerships don't even have the blog function on their website activated and if they do, the most recent post is about getting your car ready for summer vacation from the summer of 2017. It's hard for them to see the forest for the trees. Blogs are rarely high traffic pages, and they don't actually sell anything, so why bother? But Charlie Watson, Marketing Director for the Mark Williams Auto Group in Cincinnati, uses his dealerships' main websites' blog feature to boost SEO and drive traffic, not to the blog post themselves, but to the home and VDP pages. "You can't really do it for instant gratification because you're never going to get it," he says. "So we just trust in the process and work that." In addition to the SEO boost Watson gets by keeping Google fed with fresh content, he sees an added benefit from regularly blogging and sharing those posts on social media, email, and across the web. "Of course, we do a lot of video work, but our blogs allow us to reach a different audience," he says. "Don't forget about people who like to read." Here are a couple of tips to get you started: Keep it local Car shopping may begin online, but it still when they drive off of your lot. Retail is local, and the web hasn't changed that. Location. Location. Location. Being there on that high traffic street corner is half the battle, so make sure your blog is continually mentioning local events, local celebrities, and local attractions for your town and all the little hometowns surrounding your store. Keep it personal Your people are your superpower - employees, customers, neighbors, local vendors. The only thing that differentiates your dealership from every other dealership is your people, so shine a light on them. Use your blog to tell about your people, and best of all what they're doing in the local community... with other people! Keep it fresh Of the over 200 factors that Google uses to determine where your web page shows up in the search results, high-quality content is by far the most influential.  If your last blog post is from three years ago, odds are the contents aren't very useful to readers, but a post about local activities going on in your town THIS month - that's relevant. That's useful. That's quality. And Google will help you spread the word if you write about stuff like that often enough.

What You Do Speaks so Loudly, I Cannot Hear What You Say People inherently value freedom of flow. The difference between your bedroom and a prison cell is whether you can leave it. While the pandemic severely restricted travel and tourism rates fell off a cliff, holiday travel numbers still reached record highs for this year. People value the ability to go places and will take certain risks to get there.  Automobiles represent this idea of freedom and make it possible for many people now more than ever before! Owning a car opens many doors and offers many opportunities, not just for travel, but in job choice and many other realms of life.  Does it make sense, then, that the auto-buying experience offer within it the same kind of freedom that vehicle ownership offers? Price point and product quality are no longer the number one consumer concern. Sure, these things still matter, but the primary driving force behind purchasing decisions is the customer experience or CX. Up to 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for an item if it comes with a superior customer experience. The more expensive the object, the more willing a customer is to pay extra for a better shopping experience.  The Customer-First Approach Unfortunately, traditional dealership processes don't match this idea of freedom and lack a customer-first approach. Websites have become so very similar, and various restrictions and guidelines impact what offers can be shown online. The days when all you needed was a well-designed site and eye-catching offers to get people in are gone. Additionally, this past year has accelerated the drive to limit in-person interactions to the bare minimum. That means that brands across the board will have to put as much personalization into their online engagements as possible to fill the gap. Person-to-person sales tactics are useful because good salespeople know how to connect with customers and give them their desired shopping experience. If you fail to deliver that personal connection with your digital storefront, the customer will go somewhere that does.  What I Say or What I Do? Promising a great shopping experience isn't the same as delivering it. What do the tools on your website provide? An empty form to fill out? Real answers? A live connection? How do you become THE one location that earns a buyer's visit? What is their experience with you before they ever step foot onto your lot? Your website's features will speak volumes about the experience you offer and the freedom they are seeking. If you assure your customers that you are putting their needs first but then try to capture their data at every turn, they will feel betrayed. Asking for contact info should come only if the customer says they want to hear back from one of your employees. Consumers don't want a digital run-around. They want to find the answers — and the service — they are looking for. Does your website provide that? According to a study by Cox Automotive, consumers visit an average of 4.3 automotive websites and 2.3 dealerships in the course of their car-buying journey. Shoppers are looking for something specific and will only visit the dealerships that fulfill their car shopping expectations.  If you don't make your prices easy to find for your customers, you're also not putting their needs first. Hiding prices might seem like a way to force consumers to begin a chat with one of your agents, but that's not actually the case. Removing prices causes chat interaction rates to plummet because customers don't want to spend time with a company that uses such tactics.  Using bots and forms to capture lead data sends the wrong message to your customer. It says, "You're just a lead, and we just want your marketing data so we can send you ads later."  How can your customers hear the message that their needs come first if your site is shouting far louder that you just want their data? Answer: they can't.  If you're willing to spend thousands of dollars per month to drive online traffic to your site, it's also worth investing in the user experience for your digital visitors once they arrive. Perhaps instead of pouring more money into ads, you could work to retain a higher percentage of your visitors and convert more leads.  Let me put this in dollars and cents.  The average cost for an automotive lead was $205 in 2019 — a cost that is likely trending up in our economy. So, I ask you, just how free is that "free" chatbot or 10-question form you're using to generate leads if $205 are blown every single time a poor experience turns off a shopper? Let Your Actions Speak Think about what improvements you can make to your existing site to better serve your customers' needs. What would make the customer experience (CX) of your website match the expectations of your visitors?  Transparent pricing, ease of use, and more features are all on the top of the list. But consumers also value being able to jumpstart the process before even arriving at the dealership. Getting a jump on the paperwork, valuing their trade-in, and scheduling appointments are all ways to put your website to work for your customer — and you.  Are your actions speaking louder than your words? Because your site visitors are definitely listening.