DealerLeads: An Exceptional Exception to the Rule of Automotive Marketing Online

    As I search the web for positive reviews about outstanding vendors serving the automotive industry, I tend to have a hard time finding legitimate 5-star reviews about anyone.  It’s not that outliers don’t exist, it’s just difficult to identify them through a miasma of bogus review sites, poorly written press releases, and company-generated hyperbole.  With that said, difficult doesn’t mean impossible.

    One such company is DealerLeads (www.DealerLeads.com).  This company approaches lead generation in a completely unique fashion and in essence, doesn’t really sell leads at all.  Rather, they provide state-of-the-art SEO optimization on a level no one within the scope of my research can even come close to matching.  

    DealerLeads builds websites that are harmoniously in-tune with Google’s best practices. Because of that, their sites frequently rank high and attract a great deal of organic traffic, thus displacing other competitive dealerships and publicly traded classified sites that would otherwise box the DealerLeads client out of the local organic rankings.

    Leads that dealers receive are actually enveloped within that organic traffic consisting of a higher percentage of “likely” buyers based on legit conversion metrics.  Those leads are aggregated via a stack of practices that include research pages, on-site SEO, tens of thousands of backlinks, and placement on up to 350 behaviorally targeted (O&O) classified sites with domains based on popular search engine queries.  They also run highly efficient ppc campaigns for dealers with such needs in more competitive markets seeking maximum visibility.

    This next anecdote may sound like an advertisement but to those at DealerLeads, it’s a real problem. By July of 2017, the company had literally over-delivered some $,1,650,000 worth of leads in the form of dealership web traffic it will never collect on.  That means dealers most likely sold cars on traffic/leads emanating from DealerLeads at under a dollar.  Some quick math also suggests some dealers are selling as many as 10-15 cars based on DealerLeads traffic for free!  

There are clearly two scenarios at play, one bad and one very good:

A) DealerLeads had a serious issue with over-delivery

B) Their system is extremely effective at delivering qualified traffic and dealers love it

Here is a sample of DealerLeads reviews from actual car dealers taken from DrivingSales.com

1) DealerLeads is great to work with

Reviewed by an Internet Director November 15th

Recommended:  YES

Pros: Have been working with DealerLeads for 3 years, would recommend Tracie and her team to anyone who wants to drive leads.

2) Best ROI Vendor we have. Hits our Google Analytics Goals more than any other vendor.

Reviewed by an Internet Director November 14th

Recommended:  YES

Pros: We signed up with Dealer Leads a little over two years ago. These guys are the one vendor I don’t have to worry about. Nobody else performs month in, and month out, so predictably. We actually hired an outside attribution company to come in and assess all our vendors. Even they were amazed with the results delivered by Dealer Leads, and if you’ve ever hired one of these companies, you know it takes a lot to impress them.

3) Great product! Crushes SEO and Great for Google Analytics

Reviewed by a Dealer Professional Sep 30, 2016

Recommended:  YES

Pros: I am a huge fan of DealerLeads! Their reporting is through Google Analytics so you know there are no shady statistics. They are the champs of backlinking as well. They are great about meeting each month to go over the stats and even helped us set up Goals in GA!

Cons: none

    You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please everyone all of the time and that goes for DealerLeads as well.  Customers come and customers go, and some like to get snippy with bad reviews.  Still,  vendors have ways of filtering out bad reviews via reputation management software but DealerLeads has no such implementation in place.  For those who may not have had a successful experience with them, or had a management change that cleared the vendor cache, none apparently felt it necessary to voice their displeasure with DealerLeads.

So here’s to www.DealerLeads.com, a true industry outlier, and the first subject of my “best vendor” All-Star reviews.

Kelly Kleinman/Content Director

DealershipNews

Kelly@dealershipnews.com

818-817-6343