How Do You Handle Phone Calls?

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.