In 2018 dealerships have well and truly grasped the need to capture all their leads to a lead management system.  At AutoPlay we've seen the volume of leads captured by dealerships via the Sales Pipeline increase consistently every year.  With licence and business card scanning and integration with DMS systems it's incredibly easy to capture leads to the AutoPlay Sales Pipeline.  In addition, email or other electronic leads are captured automatically either from the website or via our API's - meaning the vast majority of leads are getting captured to your dashboard.

​One area that AutoPlay have never been able to confidently report on is the number of 'Phone' leads received by dealerships.  Capturing these details is entirely reliant on the salesperson being disciplined in their lead capture processes - something that is far easier said than done.  Looking at 5 of the major multi brand distributors AutoPlay works with, we can see that on average less than 7% of all leads are recorded using the Lead Type = Phone each month.

​Anecdotally we've heard in Aussie that the number of phone calls can outstrip the number of walk-in/email/other leads by 20-to-1.  According to ADP Digital in the U.S, call volumes outpace email leads by a more moderate 4-to-1 ratio, and approx. 19% of car buyers make first contact with dealerships via the phone (J.D Power U.S New Autoshopper Study, 2015).  Autotrader/Kelley Blue Book put this figure at 25% of all leads vs 14% emails.

The discrepancy between these figures is significant - which is most likely due to one dealers definition of what constitutes a 'Phone' lead.  This only serves to highlight the difficulty in accurately attributing phone leads, but the underlying fact is that the number of phone leads your dealership receives is almost definitely more than what your sales team is recording in the Sales Pipeline.

​AutoPlay partner with a company called Adtorque Edge - who offer call campaign tracking to AutoPlay customers.  Recently Adtorque began working with a mutual customer based in Auckland.  This dealer receives approx.  1200 leads each month and typically records about 7% of these as 'Phone' leads.   Through working with Adtorque Edge they have begun tracking Google and facebook campaigns across all channels - including attributing the number of phone calls to the dealership to specific marketing campaigns and channels.  What they discovered was that of the approx. 1200 leads, over 27% of the leads were actually phone calls - a fairly large discrepancy from the 7% that are manually being recorded within AutoPlay Sales Pipeline.  

Stats available from Adtorque Edge for the Australian market highlight this same concept.  Through improving the attribution of phone leads Adtorque were able to highlight the incomplete tracking that dealers were experiencing from their online marketing.  The table below highlights that for this customer they believed that Keyword #1 used in Google Adwords was the least effective - with just 17 website conversions recorded and costing AUS$75.47 per acquisition.  This ranked Keyword 1 as the worst ROI of all 6 keywords used at the dealership - comparing poorly with the average cost per acquisition for all marketing campaigns of AUS$59.42.  However this was based purely on website conversion and did not take into account any phone calls generated from those campaigns.  By setting up specific phone numbers for these campaigns Adtorque Edge was able to more accurately attribute how effective the campaign was, finding the Keyword #1 also generated 88 phone calls during the same period - taking the cost per acquisition down to $12.22 and meaning that it now ranked as the most effective keyword based on ROI.

Unfortunately at the present time AutoPlay are unable to automatically capture phone calls as leads within Sales Pipeline.  However despite these technical limitations we still believe there is enormous value for kiwi dealerships in gaining more transparency over their online marketing spend.  If you are interested in finding out more about call attribution from Adtorque Edge please contact sales@autoplay.co.nz and we'll organise them to contact you.

Recently AutoPlay has been growing into the Australian market and have noticed a big difference between Aussie and kiwi dealerships – the value placed on online leads.
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The immediate reaction is that this is mainly due to the different online lead model that dealers are used to in Australia.  Whilst kiwi dealers spend a monthly fee to the likes of Trade Me that is based on the number of listings displayed – no matter how many leads those listings generated.  In Australia dealers will pay approx. $50 for each lead they are sent from the likes of CarSales.com.au.

Naturally this puts ROI front and centre for Aussie dealers as they are faced with the reality that if they ignore any leads they receive they are literally throwing away $50.  As a rule, this means that all leads are valued and worked hard by the sales team – no matter the perceived quality.

NZ can be a different beast.  Sales teams are smaller so prioritising what leads are being worked sometimes needs to happen.  It’s a harsh reality that some of the online leads received by dealers will not look like quality leads.  We’ve all seen them – the “tyre clickers”, the online brochure requests, the ones that are so far apart on price that they are never a realistic opportunity to convert to a sale.  When you factor in that sales people are often never aware of what the true cost of leads actually are, it’s no surprise that not all online leads are valued.

One of the methods AutoPlay uses to help bring the true cost of generating those online leads to the forefront is by adding Costs to the Campaigns and Lead Sources.  This process takes just a few minutes and will yield accurate ROI without changing any dealership process.  The majority of dealers are now tracking the source of their leads, and without changing their process the management team can see exactly how much each lead is costing them from everyone of their marketing sources.

Similar to Test Drives, ‘Web – Dealer’ was the most common source generating Test Drives in April 2018.  Test Drives generated via the ‘Brand’ increased by 4.6%, however dropped to third - being leapfrogged by Test Drives generated from the ‘Direct’ source (up 5.3% from March 2018)