Two experts in digital marketing said one of the best elements of this dealership tool that helps move more metal and keep the service drive flowing is how it can be measured.

Those same two experts with whom Auto Remarketing visited during this year’s NADA Convention & Expo also acknowledged that one of the challenging parts of digital marketing is the fact that so many little components can be measured.

So what should dealers do? Search Optics’ chief relationship officer Christian Fuller summed up the situation this way:

“There’s a lot of things you can do to spend money online, but it’s about how smart you are in your spend,” Fuller said. “The focus always needs to be on the results and what is the return on your advertising dollars. You’ve got to show how it’s helping your cars to be sold, and there’s a lot of good technology out there to be able to do that.”

By now are you thinking, “Wonderful, even more technology that’s going to be a monthly cost already eating away at my thin gross margins.”

Well, Netsertive automotive digital marketing evangelist Gary Galloway explained how he turns to a tool that’s readily accessible, especially when he’s just beginning to work with a dealer group.

“One of the first things I do with any dealer group is just assess their state of analytics. A lot of times, they don’t even know if they have any or not. When I say analytics, I’m talking about basic website analytics,” Galloway said.

“I only do metric analytics through Google. A lot of website vendors have their own back-end and their metrics. To streamline that, I just use Google Analytics so there’s one place to log into. That allows me to compare dealerships within the group side-by-side with one dashboard,” he continued.

A key metric both Fuller and Galloway mentioned to Auto Remarketing is how dealerships measure conversion rates. How much did that special campaign to improve the service drive work? How often did potential buyers fill out a form stemming from a special sale in your used department?

“A big piece of this whole digital marketing thing is measuring conversion rates,” Galloway said. “You have website traffic coming from a certain campaign; so, what happens to that traffic once it gets to your website? Does it convert to a phone call or does it convert to a lead?

“The next thing I do is to see how they have conversions set up on their website. A dealer can define a conversion any way they want. For me, a straight-up conversion is a form being filled out on the website. That’s how it’s set it up. And it has to be set up in Google,” he continued.

Once a dealership has some processes in place, Galloway indicated managers can first establish a benchmark for comparison and further evaluate their efforts from that point.

“Nine out of 10 dealer groups I’ve worked with had no idea what their conversion rate is,” Galloway said. “The average website for any industry converts at a 2-percent rate. There are some dealership websites that convert at 6 percent or even 12 percent. That’s a big deal when you’re having 50,000 website visitors coming to your site each month.”

And while that 50,000 figure in Galloway’s example might be robust, he shared another formula that often impacts how well a dealership is performing with its digital marketing efforts.

“It’s all common sense, but it’s so hard to execute,” Galloway began. “It’s being very deliberate with your clicks.

“If you’re doing a certain campaign, you want that click to go to a relevant page that’s engaging and makes it easy for the customer to share more information or contact the dealer,” he continued. “The groups I’ve worked with to drive their conversion rate up have done things as simple as setting the contact form on that page without needing another click.

“What I’ve found in research is for whatever website click, dealers halve their audience,” Galloway went on to say. “Say you have 50,000 people coming to your website; with every click that group makes, you’re down to 25,000. With another click you’re down to 12,500. Just minimizing the number of clicks to get that consumer to where they want to go is one of the things I’ve done with my groups.”

Both of these digital marketing experts conceded that sharpening a store’s plan can be challenging, especially with how many other chores need to be accomplished.

“The biggest challenge they have is managing all of this,” Galloway said. “General managers have so many things going on. They have personnel issues, parts issues, sales issues, co-op issues. Really one of the release points for them is taking off their digital marketing concerns so they don’t have focus on that. They can focus on other things.

“Dealers are struggling to separate all the noise and get down to what can really help them,” he added.

Senior editor Joe Overby contributed to this report.