To put it in ballpark terms, nine out of every 10 car buyers shop online. Essentially, three-fourths of the car-shopping process takes place online, and three-fourths of the buying decision is made online. What’s more, the Internet is more powerful than any other factor influencing a car buyer’s decision.

Why, then, does the average dealer only spend 41 percent of their advertising on digital? (Note: NADA puts the figure at 41 percent; Borrell has it at 57 percent, according to Haystak Digital Marketing).

Sharing those statistics, that was the question that Haystak Digital Marketing founder Duncan Scarry posed to a crowd of mostly dealers at the 2015 Digital Summit his company was hosting at Google headquarters on Wednesday.

But it’s not just about simply bulking up your online advertising. You have to be everywhere when it comes to your online presence, Scarry said — so, for example, not just AutoTrader.com or Cars.com, but both; not just Google or Bing, but both.

One example that Scarry gave during his presentation was that of Grand Central Station in New York. If you compiled all the origination-to-destination combinations from all of those travelers passing through, you would almost assuredly find that no two paths are the same.

The same could be said of online car shopping. As Scarry put it, there is no Point A and Point B with a straight line in between — there are infinite number of ways shoppers can, and do, shop online, he said.

 If you look at the usage of the various categories of online shopping — third-party sites, dealer sites, search engines, OEM sites, etc. — not one has 100-percent market penetration, Scarry pointed out.

Put a different way, he said the single biggest opportunity to influence the shoppers is on the Web. Thing is, they could be any number of places on the Internet, so you as a dealer have to be everyone,

And given these stats, plus the fact that consumers use eight sources on average with 24 different research points, Scarry says the amount of data they consider is “astronomical.”

But boosting your presence and casting a wide net is only part of it — it has to be quality content, he emphasized.

To paraphrase, chicken scratch can't necessarily be turned into chicken salad.  ​