Automotive sages and soothsayers predicted a major fall off of car sales in 2018, mostly due to economic indicators, interest rate hikes, off-lease supply glut, so on and so forth.  What they failed to consider as they formulated their forlorn forecasts was what big momma may have in the offing.

Historically, there’s nothing like Mother Nature to surge sales as well as flood waters. Remember Hurricane Katrina, up until now, the costliest disaster in US history? She wiped out nearly a half a million vehicles and consequently, automotive sales peaked at all-time record volume in 2005 which is no surprise considering the need to replace the water-ravaged wrecks. As fodder for another story, 10,000 of those totals ended up in Bulgaria, being sold as low-priced dream cars turned nightmares when the corrosive nature of the saltwater eventually totaled those vehicles for a second time.

Now we have Hurricane Florence, predicted to be the new Queen of collateral damage whose windy wrath is soon to be felt in dense population centers in both North and South Carolina.  If it continues it’s arc up the coast, it has the potential to inflict destruction in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York, possibly into Massachusetts as well.

2017 saw record auto sales for the simple reason that Hurricane Harvey wreaked havoc, largely in Texas to the tune of 125 billion dollars, tying Katrina as one of the two deadliest hurricanes ever.  It’s not ironic that 2005 and 2017 were two of the best years for car sales.

As one would expect, the best performing brands in Q3 of 2017 were representative of the three manufacturers historically favored by those geos hit hardest by the weather such as Texas, Florida, S. Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia. Here’s the scoreboard; GM has experienced an 11.8% increase in sales, Ford at a 14.9% lift, and Toyota at an 8.9% spike.

GM and Ford pickups led the sales salvo with the Toyota cranking out record transactions as well. Nissan reported that its popular Rogue also set a record, selling just 4,000 units less than the Rav4.

What lies in store for car dealers up and down the coast remains veiled in a “wait and see” phase.  If they can keep their inventory above water, and avoid surging flood water, they may be in for a monetary windfall.

Kelly Kleinman

Content Manager/Dealership News

www.Dealershipnews.com

818-817-6343

A recent survey of 334 used car dealers by Dealer Control shows that only 19% actually responded to lead forms that were filled out on their websites!  

The survey was conducted by contacting used car dealers who are currently using a popular website service that charges $99 per month as a subscription fee, parks the dealer on a templated website of choice, and then controls all email engagement and implementation of a lead gen/form fill system.  There are apparently a number of templates in use by thousands of subscribing dealers, but one thing they all share in common is the reticence of the vast majority of those dealers to follow up on lead forms and vehicle queries.

Quality, 1st generation leads are hard enough to come by so there has to be a reason used car dealerships have such a bad track record responding to queries. Eliminating technical issues, unethical lead rerouting by the vendor, leads blocked due to billing issues, or dealers no longer in business, one is left scratching one’s head. What makes this even more perplexing is that these sites aren’t truly responsive (mobile friendly) according to Google best practices. They aren’t likely to rank very high in organic search as buyers shop for vehicles.  One would think that each lead would be treated like gold.

Is it an Issue with the Website Design?

The mobile versions of these sites go directly to VDPs with no branding marks, or anything that remotely matches the “on-site dealership experience”. You don’t even know what dealer it is you’re getting a canned email response from in some instances.  A properly designed “responsive website” maintains its “look” and brand identity no matter what device is used by the consumer as their technology of choice in the search process.

A state-of-the-art dealer site mirrors the look and feel of actually being in the dealership. With that said, a thought occurred to me that maybe these websites were just old and out of date since many of the URLs don’t even match the business name of the dealership!  The mobile versions even looked like antiquated (m.subdomain) stop gap constructs to comply with Google’s 2 year-old mobile best practices initiative - else disappear in the search engines. Problem is, such constructs do not adhere to Google Best Practices simply by ignoring the user experience portion. Still, although the sites aren’t winning any awards, they still seem to be functional...so maybe the dealers aren’t?

Could Used Car Dealers be Relics of a Bygone Era, Ignorant to the Emergence of the Digital Consumer?

Maybe the majority of used car dealers just aren’t tech or even business savvy which may be why they pay for cheap site templates and don’t understand the latest tenets of digital consumer behavior.  Whatever the reason, the lack of response was shocking considering the hue and cry heard by all listing sites and digital marketing agencies that they’re never getting enough leads!

Of the 19% that actually had a response, 73% of the responses were via a cold “no-reply” email messaging template with no dealer branding footprint on it at all, rather the name of the vendor who supplies the service and maybe a message from a mystery salesman promising to get back to the potential buyer. Most dealers took at least a couple of days to follow up.

Consider the long-lived paradigm that a potential buyer is most likely to interact with the first dealer or two who contacts them, and know that this lackadaisical response can hardly be an acceptable industry business practice. According to research by the folks at InsideSales, “50% of buyers choose the vendor that responds first.” Per researcher Dr. James Oldroyd, “the odds of the lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within five minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead was submitted.” The Oldroyd data also suggested that the average company response time to a lead is 61 hours.  Of the 334 dealers in our study, 3 dealers responded personally within 5 minutes.

Dealers, Take Control!

On average, a typical car buyer will spend 16.75 hours researching online for a vehicle and will ultimately visit 1.6 dealers before they buy a car (MAXDigital study). You had better have your digital-self cleaned up else you’ll rarely be one of the 1.6. Responding to that initial query already puts you way ahead of your competitor according to our finds. Used car dealers need to understand what new car dealers have finally learned about the importance of branding across all channels, most importantly, online. You need to have full dealer control of your branding which includes how your website looks, how you respond to sales inquiries, and deal with customers. You cannot let a lead get sucked into the vacuum of space because you’re system is antiquated or broken else your business will get sucked into the cosmos as well.  

It’s an Epidemic of Inefficiency!

The Oldroyd data suggests we have a bunch of lazy salesmen out there, systems for lead cultivation are put in place but not worked as efficiently as they should be, and businesses across all categories, not just used car dealers, are letting sales slip through their fingers!  With that said, there were several dealers whose follow up was incredibly professional and methodical. To those who know how to sell...I salute you.

Props to the following car sales professionals and dealerships for utilizing effective lead follow up practices via CRM tools or good old-fashioned customer service. Of 334 inquiries, this group of 9 individuals stood out.

Simon Laski of Best Rate Auto Sales at http://www.bestrateautosales.com/

Dan Lentz of Palmetto Ford at www.palmettoford.com

Jim Davis of Taylor Hyundai at www.taylorautomotive.com

Joe Burlett of Frank Motor Cars at www.frankmotorcars.com

Larry Kahle with his auto-respond CRM of Mile High Motors at usedcarsinmontana.com

Jordan White of Exceptional Motor Car at

Don Piper of Consolidated Auto at http://www.consolidatedauto.com/cms.cfm

Betty Entralgo of the Stephen Auto Mall Center at http://www.cusecars.com/

Sam Dorsey of Crossley Ford who for 3 months after the initial lead was sent is still cordially following up to my alias. www.garycrossleyford.com

Just recently, a friend of mine approached me about his dealership site and how they had a consultant (SEO guru), do an SEO analysis of his site. He was concerned that he may be losing money on keyword selection based on the analysis. As I explained to him there is some confusion out there regarding the entire Google platform and that having a balance of both high-level SEO, and an optimized PPC campaign is the ideal. I also explained that you only get charged by clicks, not keyword choices (lol)

Let's cover SEO first. SEO stands for "search engine optimization" which is a practice that makes sure that your website follows all of the necessary rules of engagement to make it easy to rank as organically high on the search engine results pages (SERPs) as possible. It includes having good content in the form of copy, pictures, and video. All material should be relevant to the subject matter and have keywords and key phrases as an essential part of the site copy.  There are other technical aspects but forget those for now.  Having great SEO is the "free" way to get listed.

Offsite SEO is still a huge part of the overall SEO mix. Having other high-quality sites backlink to your website is the water that lifts the ice cube to the top of the glass so to speak. Having your dealership properly listed via all of the 300+ listing sites and the 4 main data companies (Factual, Acxiom, Infogroup and Neustar (Localeze), means that people will correctly know your company name, address, hours of operation, and telephone number. To have incorrect info strewn about the internet will definitely hurt your chances of getting highly-ranked. It will hurt your overall "Quality Score" which is essentially what Google uses to rank you in the search engine, and that's where PPC and SEO strike their balance.

What is the "Quality Score"? Quality Score is Google's rating of the quality and relevance of both your keywords and PPC ads. It is used to determine your cost per click (CPC) and multiplied by your maximum bid to determine your ad rank in the ad auction process. Your Quality Score depends on multiple factors, including:

1) Your click-through rate (CTR) (PPC campaign)

2) The relevance of each keyword to its ad group (PPC campaign)

3) Landing page quality and relevance (SEO)

4) The relevance of your ad text (PPC & SEO)

5) Your historical AdWords account performance (PPC)

As you can see, there is a mix of PPC and SEO involved in optimizing a Quality Score which essentially determines where your stores website is going to show up in a typical search operation. Great SEO alone can get you on to the first page of search, but unless you are well-branded, your position may vary from near the top, to not on the page at all. The leads you get from great organic (unpaid) placement are basically free and are high quality. However, to get into the top position and get the most clicks possible, and the best clicks according to numerous studies, you have to pay for placement.

PPC guarantees a first page presence. The cost of that presence is somewhat based on the quality of the website's SEO execution. The ads in the pay per click campaign have to be compelling enough to get a good click through rate, but the words and phrasing used in each ad must also match those keywords and phrases (long tail search terms) on the website pages they are linked to. The better the execution and matching of verbiage in ads and on the site, the better your organic ranking, and the cheaper you clicks will be. It's a seriously incestuous relationship. Google wants to reward you for creating a good user experience (SEO) but needs to make money so they have PPC to nudge those rankings to the top if you pay enough to rank high.

Google really has it figured out. It used to be that Google had two columns on every search results page. The left column had the organic listings (best SEO executions and/or brand names). People used to click at an 8:1 ratio favoring the organic or "free" listings over the listings in the right column which were all paid for. Google then eliminated the two column design and started putting PPC campaign ads on top of each SERP which now has only one column combining paid and free results. This cut down the ratio that favored free search results and increased Google's click revenue.

The point is, having as much visibility as possible in any search operation is crucial. It's termed "page dominance". In my estimation, the companies that do both well, win. The companies that only do PPC, run inefficient, expensive campaigns. The companies that ignore PPC, are likely too budget-conscious to compete and suffer with inconsistent visibility. Those who combine Google Best Practices, and optimize both SEO as well as their PPC campaigns, dominate their competition.

I hope this helps clarify the decade-old question of how SEO and PPC affect one and other, and how using both to your advantage is the best way to the top of the mountain.  If your dealership is looking for some expertise in SEO and PPC for that distinct advantage feel free to consult with those who responded to this article or visit www.cardealerppc.com for their solution to your current needs.

When Craigslist realized that they provided better leads for used car dealers than any of the paid classified sites, they decided it was time to get paid for it.  They are no longer free, but do, on average, provide better quality leads than the paid sites.  Enter, by default, the new, slick looking "FREE" classified site Usedcarsforsale.com.  It is fast becoming the "automotive industries go to classified".  

They are currently signing 150 car dealers per week to the platform, with no end to their growth in sight.  They are now posing such a threat that carsforsale.com will no longer "volunteer" to provide inventory feeds from their (cfs.com) clients to the Usedcarsforsale.com classified site.  This in spite of the fact that they still provide those feeds to the other sites and had been providing those feeds to UsedCarsForSale.com for two months before the stoppage. Remember "fear the beard"?  We now have "fear the free automotive classified site."

With the larger dealer groups jumping on board (Lithia Motors, Group 1, Larry H. Miller), I can see why some vendors might fear the "free".  After all, once UsedCarsForSale.com reaches proper inventory counts per market, dealers will see results that may make them reconsider expensive classified pay sites.  Search is still the dominant force in car buyer research activity, and "used cars for sale" in exact and broad match search queries, drives way over a million searches per month!  It's inevitable that this classified site will be a top organic search ranker within the next several months.  

How does UsedcarsforSale.com make money you ask?  The answer is apparently via 3rd party vendors who use the platform to test a number of emerging technologies and pay for the opportunity.  Dealers become the benefactors at no cost to them because the tab is picked up by technologists testing a variety of concepts to see what best drives serious, bottom of sales funnel car buyers into dealerships both online and into the lot.

One salesman at UCFS.com explained to me that the toughest thing they have to deal with is explaining that it's an absolutely free, basic platform and having the dealerships believe them.  It's true, but some of the dealers they speak to are apparently so jaded that they can't conceive of a concept that includes the word "free".  Imagine that.

Depending on the size of your dealership, whether you’re a franchisee or independent, you may or may not have staff dedicated to social media and or Google AdWords. Much of what you do on social media is based on who you’re targeting. Facebook, the invasive social Frankenstein that knows everything about everybody taking up space on it’s platform, is still the best place to advertise inventory and events your dealership has planned on social media.

It’s relatively inexpensive, and it’s hyper-local, meaning you can target users within your DMA very easily. Video ads do very well on the platform and it’s easily the #1 social media choice for adults over 36 who spend a country-wide average of 45-50 minutes per day perusing it. If you’re looking for leads, expect to pay between $27 and $43. If you build a certain amount of branding into your social media pain threshold, the cost “cringe factor” will subside when you audit your marketing each quarter.

Facebook users are up in volume but overall usage of Zuckerberg’s monster is down between 10-20% depending on the sources you site. There are a number of reasons for this which cover the gamut of political hangovers, the lack of organic reach, annoying memes, the fact that people under 30 sign up but rarely use it, and a sense that the entire platform looks too busy and old to younger users.

Teens and young adults do not like Facebook. It belongs to their parents. For dealers looking to reach first-time car buyers a few years from now, think twice. In fact, Facebook doesn’t even rank in the top 3 of social networks for teenagers who prefer Snapchat and Instagram whereby they can engage with each other quickly, have house parties on the “House Party” app, and instant response to content they post.

Facebook has done it’s best in the past to nurture the aforementioned generation to guarantee long-term domination, but have so far failed with each incarnation. From it’s teenage Lifestage app, to trying to compete with House Party via their stand alone “Bonfire” app, as well as producing original content in the form of Facebook TV, FB has fallen short. Still, nothing will stop FB from attempting to carve out enough erosion in the landscape to create yet another revenue stream on the backs of the next generation once it has disposable income and time to waste starring mindlessly into their mobile device.

Meanwhile, a couple things that aren’t going away anytime soon are Google Search and SEO best practices. For car dealers looking for an easy attribution model, AdWords is a no-brainer. 2 trillion Google searches are performed every year and the analytics provided are not only agnostic but very helpful in determining the efficacy of any campaign. Google isn’t a 3rd party vendor that can choose which data is presented to the client, the Google numbers don’t lie. When the click traffic is legit, it does reflect a bottom of the funnel, first generation, active buyer, and you can easily track the lead as it processes through your organization. It’s a line item in any budget and should make up a minimum of 70% of any digital advertising allocation.

A practice every dealership needs to get good at is one that delivers a near 0 cost per lead. SEO optimization isn’t easy, but just playing by the rules gets you half the way there. Content is the Holy Grail of SEO and should be refreshed as often as possible. Backlinks, proper listings in all of the major data providers, and indexing sites are crucial aspects of top-line SEO. SEO is not paid media but creates superior visibility that drives traffic to a site at no cost to the store. Figuring out how to do it right is the first step in ascension to the top of your DMA and in the long run will cut your overall advertising budget.

Many of the bigger franchise and Indie dealerships have a hard time attributing where their leads come from. Typically, a single lead may touch a number of different advertising and classified platforms at any given point in the shopping process, including the dealer site itself.  Dealers feel they need to maintain a presence on a variety of increasingly expensive, publicly traded, comp sites to maintain a certain level of visibility in order to hit that lead every step of the way.

Because of this misconception, dealerships are continuously burning ad dollars by over-exposing themselves financially with inefficient advertising and marketing practices. Dealer Analytics provides clarity by elucidating the waste, and helps streamline dealership advertising/marketing processes with top notch analytics...not guess work. 

Simply put, Dealer Analytics is used as a dealership’s insurance policy against wasting advertising and marketing dollars, and ensuring that their website is producing traffic and leads at optimum levels.

Dealer Analytics assigns each client a Google Analytics expert who acts as a “dedicated Account Manager”.  The account manager is tasked with the following practices:

• Monitor and report on the performance of website traffic through Google Analytics
• Generate weekly reports reviewing the performance of each dealer’s website and vendors
• Monthly one-on-one screen shares to go over website/vendor performance
• Alert regarding any issues with traffic, tracking or website performance
• Work with dealership vendors and/or web company to correct issues that are affecting the websites lead generation
• Direct line provided to each dealer’s account manager, no 800 numbers, for quick answers and help
• Free, one-on-one Google Analytics training for anyone at the dealership

Over the course of a single year, Dealer Analytics saves each dealer thousands of dollars in wasted ad budget and inefficient online practices.  The cost to dealers is based on 3 tiers.  The tiers are broken down as such: $99/month, $199/month, and $299/month, with no a 12 month contract.  This also includes unlimited phone calls for the top tier and help from the assigned account manager.

During my conversation with Tracie Costabile, VP of Dealer Analytics, I asked her to give me a couple examples of how they can make a measurable difference in a dealerships online performance.  Here is her response:

“A small Chevrolet dealership in Montana recently enlisted our services to help them determine how to spend their very limited marketing budget.  After analyzing the data in their Google Analytics, we were able to show exactly which vendors were bringing quality, engaged traffic, and which were sending junk clicks that weren’t helping the dealership’s bottom line.  This dealership saved thousands of dollars per month by getting rid of what wasn’t working, including some expensive, big name vendors.  As a bonus, taking that money and putting it into the programs that were producing for them, produced more first generation leads from their website, which in turn boosted their sales.”

“A Ford dealership in Las Vegas was able to benefit from our website monitoring service.  Part of website monitoring is checking on the backlinks the site has.  When the website’s quality scores plummeted, a check into their backlinks revealed that they were being unscrupulously targeted by a competitor who was linking X-rated websites to their main dealership website.  Quality scores are what Google uses to determine where a site will be returned in an organic search.  If the scores go down enough, the dealership disappears from page one of organic searches.  We were able to help the dealership disavow these bad links and restore their quality scores, giving them back their organic, page one placement.”

As a digital marketing veteran of 10 plus years, I’m impressed with Dealer Analytics overall approach to analyzing data and providing actionable advice that makes substantive improvements in performance.  To have an experienced analytics expert provide a monthly audit of your dealership’s digital operation, including digital ad spend, attribution analysis, and website performance for as low as $99, is perhaps the greatest bargain in automotive vendorship history.  These guys are a leading candidate for Automotive Vendor of the Year 2018!

There are a heck of a lot of vendors serving the automotive industry and a lot of really good ones to boot.  We’ve done our research, compared reviews, and made a few calls to determine customer satisfaction. We decided that our top 2 picks for 2017 are truly the cream of the crop, medium-sized operators.  So without further ado, here are our top 2 vendors for 2017 in no particular order!

Social Ordeals:

This vendor is not specific to the auto industry but provides a long list of dealerships with an inexpensive package of off-site SEO services that get serious results.  It’s impossible to to find anything less than a 5-star review for this company.  Chris Montgomery, the President of Social Ordeals brags that their rate of client retention is an astounding 97%, which not only sounds impressive but is impressive because it’s factual.  

They offer listing distribution updates to over 300 listing sites which basically guarantees that your store will always be listed with the proper contact information online, where it counts the most.  Most dealerships have incorrect info on dozens of listing sites and don’t realize that they get penalized by Google for such infractions.  Social Ordeals also offers social media management for a fraction of the cost of most other vendors, and that includes managing FB ad campaigns as well. They focus primarily on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Social Ordeals has in-house ppc account managers, all of whom are former Google employees and certified Google AdWords specialists.  Chris’s staff has seen it all and done it all within the Google platform as they manage hundreds of thousands of dollars of daily AdWords budget.  WTS, perhaps the most intriguing service they offer is their reputation management/marketing suite of services.  

They employ a software that automatically surveys dealership customers, filters out any reviews that are less than 5-stars, and prompts those who write 5 star reviews to post those good words on a variety of review sites from Yelp to Google Plus, to Facebook, DealerRater and more.  Their account managers respond to all reviews that are internally generated in order to make sure that all customer concerns are addressed, be they favorable or not so favorable.  After 5 years of operation, and running one of the tightest operations in business today, Social Ordeals wins for itself and its customers.

Social Ordeals: 5-Star, 1st-time winner of the Dealership News: Vendor of the Year!

DealerLeads

The entire concept of DealerLeads is to provide as much organic traffic to their dealership base as possible.  Essentially, they do things to deliver superior results that tend to be beyond the ken of dealership level SEO talent.  Steve Tackett, the owner of DealerLeads has an understanding of SEO garnered over 20+ years of working with dealerships that is very hard to rival. For example, the shear volume of backlinks he generates for his clients would astound the late Carl Sagan it’s so astronomical.

By July of 2017, the company had literally over-delivered some $,1,650,000 worth of lead traffic it will never collect on.  That problem has apparently been solved.  According to Jennifer Knight (Business Office Director/DealerLeads, "I can't imagine there are too many companies who take pride over panic by over-delivering a million and a half dollars worth of leads"!

Leads that dealers receive are actually enveloped within a flow of organic traffic that consists 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 “exact match” search engine queries. Serious buyers are much more likely to click on domains that match what they type into the search engines.  For example: Used Cars Near Me as a domain would be www.usedcarsnearme.com.

DealerLeads also builds websites that are harmoniously in-tune with Google’s best practices and rank much higher in local searches than their competitors do. The company also offers ppc management for those who are seeking instant visibility or page dominance with no management fee attached.  In the bang for the buck and customer satisfaction categories, DealerLeads is definitely in the lead.

DealerLeads: 5-Star, 1st-time winner of the Dealership News: Vendor of the Year!

Kelly Kleinman/Content Director

Dealership News

www.dealershipnews.com

818-817-6343

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