Information TechnologyResearch & Analysis

How Do You Measure Up? We’ve now written three articles on how Google views our industry for speed and performance. We touched on Page Speed, Speed Index, SEO scores for OEMs (vs Independents) and vendor vs vendor . Next, we looked at Google’s accessibility and best practices score for OEMS. In this article, we will wrap up this four-part series with an analysis of how Google ranks website vendors for average SEO, Accessibility, and Best Practice scores. Remember, our data source is quite large pulling from over 35,000 dealer websites. No joke. Average SEO Score As everyone knows, technical SEO is a very important requirement for good website design. If your technical SEO is poor, then your site will behave like a one-legged man running a marathon.   The average SEO score for all vendors was 86%. Overall, this is pretty good and a sign that most vendors are getting their technical SEO right. This is in sharp contrast to our mobile Page Speed analysis where the performance was dismal. But let’s look at the data… What does this bar graph tell us?  The most obvious thing we see is that Sincro Digital has work to do and YourCarLot is doing slightly better than most.   Average Accessibility Score What is Accessibility and why is it important? Google’s Accessibility audit/score is rooted in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA is a civil rights law that “prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public.” What does that mean for web providers? Simply put, websites need to be designed in such a way that they can be easy to “read” whether by adjusting sizes, maintaining strong contrasts, and/or by allowing digital readers to “read” the website out loud for someone with a severe visual impairment. Google’s Accessibility Score weighs the average of a number of accessibility audits to create the score that you see. These scores are important because if you have a low score, you are not serving your customers well AND you are possibly exposing your dealership to a lawsuit by an enterprising lawyer or two. Enough with that. On with the data: By and large, these results are good, but as you can see some providers, such as Naked Lime and Dealer.com average below 75%. Realistically, the average should be higher and technical and design adjustments to the website can improve performance. I would recommend that any provider who is below at least 85% should seek to improve their positioning. Otherwise, they are risking causing trouble for their dealers. That said, kudos to those website vendors 90% and above such as AutoFunds, Jazel, LotWizard , ProMax , SOKAL , V12 , Team Velocity , eBizAutos and SurgeMetrix . Average Best Practices Score Your Best Practices score is based on an audit of common web development mistakes, some of which serve as the root cause of scoring deductions for other scores such as those above.   A poor score here is very avoidable so the overall vendor average of 75% is something to decry and not celebrate. Realistically, you should score over 90%, but like I said above, 85% or higher is a good start. Here’s some data-driven eye candy since a “picture”, or in this case graph, is worth 1,000 words. As you can see from the data, most website vendors hover around the 75% mark with some, such as CarBase, Dealer eProcess, Dealer.com, DealerFire, DealerInspire, FusionZone, Motorcar Marketing, Naked Lime, and PixelMotion all scoring in the 60s.   Sadly, there are only two website vendors above 85%: V12Software at 88% and SurgeMetrix at 91%. The Final Word While Brian Pasch drives conversation around GA4 standards for the dealer community, we need to have the same standards discussion for website vendors as I suggested in my last article . Some standards are pretty obvious. For example, since we know that bounce rates increase dramatically the slower a website loads, we should set our speed standards according to user behavior. 3 seconds is a good goal for mobile sites although 4 is fine to start. In the case of the stats above, it is not hard to reach 90% for a performance goal for all three measures. We can do better.   If anyone wants to discuss the data we collected, have opinions and suggestions for standards, or want their site (and even their competitor’s sites) evaluated, then contact me via email or 954.507.6468. Until then, use this data to push for better performance. You deserve it. 

How do you measure up? PART ONE In our previous two articles, we wrote about how Google uses its software to assess a website’s performance, from page speed and technical SEO, to download rates and accessibility compliance. The first article looked at page speed, your speed index score, and SEO rating, while the second article reviewed Google’s accessibility and best practices score. The focus of those two articles was on how OEM websites performed relative to each other and Independents.  The topic of this article will be to review how website vendors perform relative to each other, as seen through the eyes of Google. Our data source was over 35,000 dealer websites. Google’s Speed Index Score Google’s Speed Index Score is based on the average time it takes for visible parts of the page to be displayed. For this study, we only looked at mobile devices since around 80% of car shoppers shop by mobile device, while over 90% of Hispanic shoppers shop the same way.   Let’s look at the data… As an industry, we can do better than this. I’ve identified two critical cut off points - at 5 seconds and at 10. Ideally, mobile load times should be 3-4 seconds at most. Any time longer, and you start to suffer an increasing volume of drop-offs.   I have chosen the 5 second mark just to be practical, recognizing that some OEMs require a lot of time consuming add-ons and features that guzzle load time. But even with this said, it is hard to justify the speeds we see here. I imagine some providers might not like this article and will argue that our data is faulty or should be ignored. That’s fine, they can take that argument up with Google. These are Google’s numbers after all. We need Standards Brian Pasch , a well known automotive veteran, has quite wisely launched an initiative to have the automotive community come together on some GA4 standards in the hopes of crafting common and usable standards for the industry. Based on these numbers, we would do well to apply the same thought process to automotive website performance to ensure that we deliver highly usable, fast, and Google complaint websites to our dealer customers.   To do this, we would have to identify what’s slowing down the sites (think third party code), what metric we’ll use to gauge success (think Google since it’s the 8,253 ton Gorilla in the room), and ensure that all vendors play by the same rules. Otherwise, we’ll continue to get results like you see below for Google’s sister metric to Speed Index, that is, their Google PageSpeed Score. Not good. The Final Word Like I said in my previous two articles, you can’t bury your head and try to ignore Google’s ranking factors. You have to learn how to work with them to maximize the performance of your customer’s website. Google can’t be ignored, but it does serve as a neutral metric for evaluating website performance. If your provider is listed here, see where they rank relative to their competitors and contact me for a deeper analysis, or just use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to do your evaluation. Speed counts, and your website should be as fast as possible on your customers’ mobile and desktop devices. Otherwise, you risk losing potential customers who don’t want to sit around waiting for your website to load. Part 2 of this vendor review will follow in a couple of weeks… Stay tuned.

How Do You Measure Up?  PART 2 In Part 1 of this two-part series on website ranking factors, we discussed Page Speed, Page Index, and Technical SEO scores. We look at the results of our AntiguRecon tool which surveyed over 35,000 dealer websites using Google’s algorithm to drive its calculations. We found that independent dealer websites tend to be faster than franchise websites and that we have some work to do if we want to improve our industry’s performance overall. In this article, we look at dealership website Accessibility and website design Best Practices scores. Let’s have some fun… Average Accessibility Score What is Accessibility and why is it relevant? In the past I’ve written about this topic in detail, but for here let’s just say that your website should be designed so that it can be “read” by people who have limited sight, or are sight impaired in full. In the latter case, a screen reader needs to be able to “read” the page in an understandable way. All of this is required because of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which became law in 1990 and lawsuits have been on the rise for non-compliant websites. All that said, there is good news in that while there is room for improvement, the ratings are not as horrible as the page speed and index ranking factors. If we look at the graph below, Independents over-perform OEMs again with an average score of 83.4 to an OEM rating of 73.9 . Mazda got the lowest average rating at 67.1 , while the highest score went to Bentley at 87.1 . Average Best Practices Score The final score in Google’s Lighthouse algorithm gets into the best practices that are employed in the creation of a dealer website. This score tracks common mistakes made by web developers. Google’s algorithm weights elements based on risks they might pose, among other things. Google itself states that this quality score is a “helpful diagnostic tool, not a key performance indicator”. Nevertheless, a low score tells you that you should talk with your provider to see what might be improved to improve performance. Often you will find that some of the best practice issues have to do with optimizing file use which in many cases can improve speed. So how did our intrepid OEMs and Independents do? Let’s look at the table below. Bentley, following its previous trend, is the top performing OEM, while Hyundai has work to do at 57.8 . That ranking definitely says that there is room for improvement on their websites. Further research could tell us why those sites score so low, but we’ll leave that for another article. Finally, Independents outpaced OEMs at 76.7 . The Final Word - Part 2 What all this data tells us is that there is a lot of room for improvement in how we construct dealer websites. OEMs and their website providers would do well to look at the data and think seriously about how they can reduce the impact, or volume, of third party code on their websites.   This is a bigger conversation than what you might think. In my view, many dealer websites have become cluttered and clogged with distractions that slow down the site’s load time and lose sight of the purpose of the website, that is, to generate leads and business for the dealership. With mobile by far outstripping any other tool that is used to view a website, it would behoove us to have websites that really are designed with a mobile first mentality and a commitment to speed.   I can only hope for change, but in the meantime we’ll keep collecting the data and releasing it to spur conversation and improvement. Should anyone want to discuss this article, or the tool we used to collect the data, you can reach me here .

It is estimated that 39% of adults are watching video on a CTV device on a daily basis. This is up from 31% back in 2019 according to  data  from Leichtman Research Group (LRG)1. This represents a large audience with spending power and the desire to shop for a vehicle. As a result, dealerships are taking a closer look at the connected television medium because of who is viewing CTV, as well as how often, not just the overall households.  The increase in CTV also represents a disruptive leveling of the playing field for advertisers who historically have purchased traditional TV, and those who could not previously afford it due to budget constraints or efficiency concerns.  The programmatic targeting capabilities of CTV allows for large advertisers to buy more efficiently through diversification of their media mix and better data fidelity in their audience reach. It also allows smaller or more niche advertisers an opportunity to advertise in front of larger audiences on television without the high cost and ad waste associated with traditional media buys. Creating greater efficiencies The decision for auto retailers and their advertising agency partners to consider CTV is less about re-allocating digital media budgets to video, which most dealers already execute through programmatic and social video campaigns.  Furthermore, dealers should not entirely abandon their traditional media buys and budgets, either. However, in many cases those dealers that begin to explore a reallocation of portions of their traditional media investments over to CTV see significant improvement in the performance of their overall media mix and experience a positive impact on their cost per unit sold and serviced.  Increases in target markets The first CTV benefit is scale, where dealers can leverage large programming opportunities and access across major recognizable logos that has strong coverage across networks and devices. Secondly, dealers and their partners in CTV are continuously working to understand the market penetration they are gaining or losing, and have access to unique data technology to ensure campaigns are on par with the reach of top cable providers. These partners also offer dealers access to digital media purchase technology that leverages a Demand Side Platform (DSP), which is software that allows media buyers to buy each impression based on whether the viewer meets their audience parameters. They can also help ensure ad content is not played along side or in tandem with violence or other sensitive subjects that would be detrimental to a dealer’s overall brand values. Driving greater bottom-line results While all of this sounds promising, results are what matters. One mid-size regional dealer in Florida recently tested an Amazon DSP against other traditional media platforms and ran a two-week CTV campaign, directed to in-market shoppers on FireTV, within their store’s PMA. Their campaign measured correlative metrics holistically against all digital media channels including search, fixed ops, social, sales, and ROs. The dealer saw significant gains in performance across every measured metric when looking both at period-over-period and month-over-month. Furthermore, to test the fidelity of the data, they also measured key metrics when the campaign was terminated and saw almost a 15% decline in impressions and clicks in search, coupled with a distinct drop in shopper engagement on the website. This included a +57% increase in sales, +17% increase in closed ROs, and a +16% month-over-month increase in dealership revenue, according to data from PureCars. Dealers are naturally hesitant to jump into the CTV pool all at once. However, with the results from this dealer’s trial along with the ongoing growth of the CTV category, this disruptive platform will continue to grow as a viable alternative providing a competitive edge to those dealers that explore their options early on.   1:  https://www.leichtmanresearch.com/39-of-adults-watch-video-via-a-connected-tv-device-daily/

Automotive Retail is Consolidating It’s no secret that significant consolidation of automotive retail is underway. Every week, Automotive News reports additional acquisitions by the leading retail consolidators. Earlier this year, Automotive News reported that the consolidation trend has continued steadily over the past 10 years – even through the pandemic. At the end of 2020, the Top 150 Dealer Groups owned 21% of all dealership locations and represented 23% of industry sales volume. This is up from 13% of locations and 16% of volume ten years earlier.   The need for significant technology investments is one driver of consolidation. Smaller dealers are faced with large investments to enable digital retailing to meet customer expectations. Dealers are also facing new investments in electrification technology to accommodate the industry shift to EVs. And some dealers are choosing to sell rather than make the investments. For example, approximately 20% of Cadillac dealers are reported to be walking away from their franchises, rather than make required investments in selling and servicing Electric Vehicles.   Tesla’s Retail Approach Shows What is Possible Tesla’s retail network shows that technology can not only be a driver of consolidation, but also an enabler. Tesla has fewer than 200 Sales Galleries and fewer than 150 Service locations. Connected Car technology is one of the keys that makes it possible for Tesla to service its customers with so few facilities. On the sales side, Tesla enables comprehensive on-line shopping. In service, Tesla says that it can accurately diagnose 90% of all issues remotely and that it can repair 80% of problems without a visit to a service center. Connected Car technology makes this possible by allowing Tesla to remotely connect to its vehicles for diagnosis and for ongoing insights into real-world customer usage. Tesla can also determine the customer’s location if it needs to dispatch a remote repair and Tesla can often repair vehicles with an over-the-air software update. It is safe to say that Connected Car technology is the only way that Tesla could operate with so few physical locations. As this technology becomes more widely used by all OEM’s, there will be growing opportunities for other OEMs to consolidate sales and service facilities. Lessons from the Pandemic and the Chip Shortage Both the pandemic and the chip shortage have accelerated trends toward digital retailing and reduced inventories. As reported in Car and Driver , Ford has concluded that the pandemic accelerated customer interest in shopping and ordering vehicles on line. Many dealers successfully responded by offering at-home test drives and deliveries. A build-to-order mindset for consumers has been further accelerated by the chip shortage, which has made it difficult for dealers to hold inventory and for customers to shop from inventory on the dealer’s lot.   Connected Car Technology Will Enable Further Consolidation Connected Car technology will further enable the trends toward retail consolidation and digital retailing. As Tesla has demonstrated, a well-connected OEM and Dealer network can easily provide remote sales and service to customers without needing so much real estate. As customers become more comfortable with online ordering and remote service, the most successful dealers will be those who make the best use of technology to serve customer needs.   We will soon see dealers making extensive use of Connected Car tech in their sales and service operations. For example: In Sales, vehicles can be made available for any-time test drives and parked inaccessible locations. Vehicles can be electronically disabled to prevent theft and only enabled for prospects with a valid authorization code. Also in Sales, a limited test drive can be extended to a short- or longer-term rental, with data collected to make effective suggestions to the customer for a customized vehicle, accessories, and software. In-Service, ongoing monitoring of vehicles will create increasingly sophisticated predictive models. These will allow Dealers to contact customers long before a failure occurs and offer either a physical repair or a software update. Also in Service, Dealers can monitor vehicle diagnostics trends, and can proactively schedule vehicle maintenance to be done at a time that is most convenient for the customer and also the most efficient for the dealer. The bottom-line result will be continued consolidation and more efficient use of real estate to meet the needs of automotive shoppers and owners. 

In the earliest of days, weeks, and even months for auto dealerships returning to business (open doors at the facility), we are getting some encouraging early indications of leads being a decent volume, retail sales bouncing back a bit, and revenue and profit returning to levels of operational survival. At least that seems to be the narrative. Inventory depending on the brand and model can be challenging, but nonetheless, a fairly good bounce back from the days of March through May, by most indications. As being reported by Ward's and others, June auto sales will defy bragging about compared to year-over-year and by expected standards, but at least they're on an upward trend. July retail deliveries aren't expected to set off firecrackers either, and fleet sales with the rental agency bankruptcy and economic woes deflate total volume as well.   On a yearly forecasted perspective, there is some upwardly hope as well. Wards Intelligence expects June's seasonally adjusted annual rate to total 12.9 million units  (See chart below).  That compares with May's 12.2 million and April's awful 8.7 million. Moreover, it is well below June 2019's 17.2 million-unit SAAR and the 16.8 million deliveries that were predicted, pre-pandemic, for 2020. Yes, unemployment and production start-up and interruptions, consumer confidence, the pandemic, and fears of normalcy all weigh in on this. But are we looking at the right figures and metrics to see what is really happening?   Are we even evaluating the right measures?   I would also argue that we will have to shift, and in fact, transform the very way in which we both "sell" cars and evaluate the industry as a whole. While some indicators may not be entirely easy to quantify, there are new measures and KPI's that we must start considering, and in fact running our retail business by and guiding our new business practices and operations towards. Some examples of the new metrics that I believe will 1) drive survival through this crisis, and 2) transform your retail business into a next normal thriver, include: Now I am not going to suggest we throw out the old standard measures, but in order to transform, in order to think differently, we must establish new targets and metrics. These new measures will keep us focused on what the needs of consumers are and will be and how we fulfill them. In order to accomplish an auto retail industry and business transformation, I believe there are four major components (or capabilities) to consider: 1. Not vehicle sales, but vehicle usage The industry analysts, OEMs, captives and banks, third party retail portals, and certainly dealers must all monitor shifts to measuring and supporting vehicle usage over vehicle sales. I won't go into a ton of detail why the world of vehicle sales, vehicle needs, and vehicle mobility has been disrupted forever, but I think most of us realize it has. What we knew as daily work and social commutes, weekend get-aways, road trips, and all of our life is under dramatic shift and unknown future. What will be constant is our need for mobility when we want, how we want, and where we want.   This provides both a challenge and an opportunity for auto retailers. How do I support the market for people to gain access or usage of a vehicle, and provide the product, the service, and/or the experience to do so and make it a profitable endeavor for my business? In fact, how may that actually become the guidepost for my business of the future? Dealers (and OEMs and financial institutions) will need to redefine what success looks like and how it can be profitable. It will have to include the idea and strategy and measurement of providing access to vehicles, and not just the transaction of vehicles. This may or may not include versions of providing fleet and rental, subscription or license options, car sharing and car riding, new flexible lease and mileage options, other vehicle and service options like electric charging, vehicle and fleet disinfecting, pick up and drop off (not just to the dealership but as a more mobile customer journey service), and much more that will be supportive of overall customer vehicle usage and customer mobility. That is the target for future success. 2. Focus on customer experience The idea and practice of customer experience are certainly not new, but it did take on a magnified focus with the pandemic crisis shifting how many people interacted and expected any retail business to operate and accommodate. I even wrote about "experience" needs to be the North Star for an organization. It should be the ultimate goal, and the functional operations and capabilities need to be transformed and configured to deliver upon it. Customer experience and fulfilling customer expectations will be the very thing that defines the auto retail industry of the future as we work through this shifting landscape.   In auto retail, this is even more of an imperative. Consumers are now more than ever walking from one industry and one experience to the next, expecting a certain standard. We must follow the customer's lead. How can we serve them and empathize with their journey and daily life and intersect in a meaningful and valuable way? This absolutely means pick-up, drop-off, driveway delivery, "no touch" servicing, mobile service, omni-channel and preferred channel access, and support for their mobility needs. It will mean even more yet to be determined. The customers are telling us what they want and need. The key is, are we listening?   Be sure to listen. Apply your own experiences and expectations of other organizations and industries. Start by supporting customer empathy and customer experience, and you will find the revenue and opportunities from it. Customers will pay for better experiences. 3. Don't simply digitize current processes This is a pitfall too many businesses and too many dealers fall into. If I just add technology, it will help, and things will get better. The technology is then either not adopted, does not work well with the current business operation, and overcomplicates and becomes cumbersome for the users. Digital change ultimately comes through People + Process + Technology. But process is first! Understand what the goals are, the North Star of customer and employee experience, and then make sure all processes are focused on delivering value to that end. If the process is not aimed at value for the customer or employee experience, it is simply adding unproductive and unsatisfactory work and noise. A lot of current dealership processes need to change. It is great we have added more online selling and scheduling tools. But the workflows and processes need to support an efficient value-add process. There is no reason after conducting a majority of a sales process online that a customer should have to be at a dealership for, on average 3.5 hours to finish paperwork and take delivery. There is just not! It is the number one dissatisfaction with the car buying process and is just one of many that need to change. I can buy and sign for a house in less time. Before any technology is ever implemented or added, make sure to consider and re-design the processes it will support. It is your opportunity for transformation. It is the best chance to advance and leapfrog ahead of a current state. 4. Become flexible, agile, transformative Inherent in all of the above components and capabilities is the core principle to be agile and flexible. What does that mean? It means don't do business as usual. It means you may have to get uncomfortable. It means you may have to pivot and shift from a plan or previous strategy based on results and feedback and customer interest. Your transformation strategy and plan should be a living guidepost. One that can be altered and changed to adapt to conditions and opportunities. To be agile, flexible and transformative is an actual capability; and probably the most valuable one. It will allow you to not get stuck chasing decaying margins or performing tasks that are not valuable. A lot of insight and direction will come from your data, the old and new measures suggested your customers and a general sense of the business opportunities. Listen for it! Be agile, flexible, and humble enough to follow it. This is not an overnight challenge or change. What I am suggesting is that life as we know it has changed. How we interact with retail has changed. How we use our vehicles or need mobility has changed. All has changed at least for quite a while, and some like the raised customer expectations have changed forever. So, let's understand those factors before we simply try to optimize some already archaic retail processes. We must measure factors that are the real evaluation of what is happening with mobility, vehicle usage and access as well as customer mobility expectations. Those measurements are where we need to drive our future business to operate and perform. Those will indicate new capabilities an auto retailer must develop to keep evolving and transforming to a future state of what's next and what's successful. Start with a North Star guide of what you want to deliver as an experience to customers and to employees. From there, create a plan and roadmap to build towards the capabilities necessary to deliver upon it; the people, process and technology. But always be agile, adaptive and flexible. Listen, pivot as needed, and pursue the customer experience. That will lead auto retailing through this crisis and into a new era of high value, high engagement and high satisfaction retailing experiences.