At the dealership and in my old twenty group we would look at a ton of website data on a day to day basis. However we seemed to always end up in a discussion regarding trying to figure out which data was really relevant. Actually we spent to much time on this!

 I am purely speaking from the experiences that I had at the dealership and within my twenty group. We would spend tons of time just discussing things such as bounce rate, page views etc.

 While I think that all of these things are important I also think that each dealer should take a long at their website and pick the key performance indicators that are important to them. For instance my hot buttons were Number of visits , conversions and bounce rate.

 What are your most important things to measure?

I recently had a dealer ask me how they should allocate the marketing budget that they have. I think that the percentages of the budget spend are going to differ some what by region. At the dealership that I was at we were moving more and more of a pct to digital vs traditional.......we were prob 50/ 50 on the split with a goal of moving to 70/30 with 70 going to digital. 

 So that brings up the question of how do we split the digital budget up......Obviously the majority of it goes towards google for both seo and sem. I would also throw a healthy portion at social. Then I would put the rest on bing and you tube!

 Do you think that I have missed anything?

These are the types of things that we are currently doing within our digital marketing strategy at the dealership. Please take a look and let me know if there are any new(or old) avenues that I am missing

Google and bing

In this space we currently still  do a lot of pay per click. We mainly use this strategy towards our new car sales. We keep several campaigns running for each site each  month.  A couple of the campaigns we will change each month and target certain things or areas with them. We also do some retargeting to gmail e mail addresses. (very little)

You tube

We are continuously adding new content to our you tube page. We use this in marketing efforts across all of the platforms.

Face book

We have been doing quite a lot on this platform. We will run a different local awareness ad each weekend. We also are trying some new lead generation campaigns as well. We also do some con questing here as well.

I feel like we are doing pretty good in the avenues listed above. I am hoping you guys will chime in and give me some ideas to use on some of the other platforms out there. (snap chat etc)

Driving Sales Executive Summit 2016

For me this was the best Driving Sales Executive Summit to date. I have never networked as much as I did at this conference. The industry's top leaders were definitely there!

Day One

On Sunday morning a group of us actually cycled in Red Rock Canyon. The people that I met on this ride are all industry leaders that I am super glad that I met! A huge thanks to Gary May with Interactive Marketing and Consulting Services for putting this on. Getting contacts like this is so valuable to me.

Jared Hamilton opened up the conference with a great speech! He talked a lot about how the automotive industry has actually become a forerunner in the digital marketing world.

Dan Zarella spoke next….the social media marketing info that he spoke about will be a great help to my dealership.

We then had the best idea sessions. While all of them were great I especially liked the one on the community calendar. This is a way for any dealership out there to get themselves known in the community by doing the right thing. I really liked the way that they asked for feedback from employees on which charities to take on and help.

My favorite breakout of that day was secrets to building a top performing service BDC. I have a pretty good BDC at the dealership currently. This session certainly gave me some improvement ideas.

The day ended with John Boudreau giving a keynote speech

Day Two

Day 2 was extremely crazy! We had breakout sessions and keynote speeches that were full of data and knowledge. Jared started off with his keynote speech which was very insightful and inspiring. He spoke about how we need to cut turnover. He presented a training path that they have tried with some dealers. It has actually cut turnover quite a bit at those stores.

My favorite breakout session of the whole conference was held that day. It was called “Digital Isn’t Driving Fixed Ops Revenue - Phone Calls Are." It reminded me of how important it is to handle every customer call properly. Casey Jenkins did a great job as a presenter. I especially liked the “tips” that she left us with.

I also had a chance to see Joe Chura’s presentation later in the week at my twenty-group meeting. (Cutting edge practices to combine PPC, SEO, mobile social into onsite website strategy) This was awesome as well.

Day Three

Day three was equally as rewarding as the others. The breakout session connecting the dots from online to in-store was very good. Of course Jared’s closing remarks were good as well.

Over all this was a great conference for me. It was great to be able to learn from the industry leaders. I strongly recommend it! I also that recommend that you try to check the videos of the breakouts when they are available. 

At our last Internet 20 Group meeting, we got in to a lengthy discussion as to what each of us should be using to measure various digital marketing campaigns. What we found was that each of us were measuring different things.

On search engine marketing campaigns (ppc), I measure cost per click. I also put a lot of weight on lost impression share as well. What I do not have for this area are any benchmarks to measure against. On display marketing campaigns, I also measure lost impression share. I dont put a lot of weght on clicks in this area. We use this mainly as a branding message. We do put tracking numbers on these campaigns and track the phone calls that we receive from each of them.

On our video preroll campaigns, I measure how long the videos are watched. Once again, I don't put much weight on clicks in this area because it is more of a branding play.

I really don't know what to measure on our Facebook/ocial campaigns. This is fairly new to us.

Any input on what you guys are measuring in the digital world would be a great help....also, if you could share the benchmarks that you are using as well that would be helpful.

We were recently awarded Hyundai Dealer Rater's Dealer of the Year for the U.S. and Florida. We also won the award for Florida last year. This is something we worked really hard at all year. We were able to get the whole dealership involved by going over the goal at every sales meeting....especially in the last two months of the year. We shared the reviews that we received each week in our weekly sales meetings. We also shared where we were at in relation to our goal. We originally were trying to win Florida again, but ended up getting the award for the U.S. Not only does this help with our image in the customers eyes, but it is a great team bulding exercise as well.

One may ask what value does this have for us? Well the SEO value alone has helped in a big way. We also are able to bring this up in our traditional advertising as well. We felt that while it is good to get reviews in all areas that maybe we should put an emphasis on one platform and be the best. We have also been able to show our sales staff how they can leverage this to brand themselves. We have one salesperson who is really old school, but bought in to the review process. He actually has had several customers come in and ask for him because of seeing his reviews! He has created his own brand! Take a look at how he shows up when you Google his name.

https://www.google.com/#q=Roger+spadaro+pensacola

Our dealership has always been somewhat active in our local community events. We have always supported local charities. we made a decision a year ago to continue this and actually ramp it up. We also decided that every event that the dealership supported should have one of our staff members present. we purchased a tent and lots of swag to give away! We also decided to make sure that we play this up in social media.

 We feel that our efforts have been a success. This is however extremely hard to measure! Our Facebook audience has grown a lot but I can only tell you of a few people that we have sold cars too that we met at an event.

 This a link to a landing page that we created to hilite some of the  events that our Hyundai store has been involved with.

http://www.allenturnerhyundai.com/Community-Involvement

This is a link to our other stores community event page https://www.allenturnerchevrolet.com/Community-Involvement

 We feel that it is important for us to be involved in these events. Please take a moment to share a few community events that your dealership has been involved with.