Many of us, particularly those of us working in digital marketing, agree that CDK websites are... not good. In fact, CDK does not stand alone in this regard. Many of the OEM recommended website providers produce products that can hardly be described as professional grade. They are rife with structured data errors, are often slow to load, many 3rd party integrations cause issues and there is a complete lack of best practice standards when it comes to compliance with analytics or search engines. Whats more, often service requests to correct problems, when they do (often) arise, can go weeks and even months without resolution. 

For many years now, Wikimotive's general recommendation to newly onboarded clients is a change in website provider or we strongly recommend the need to pay for a non-compliant website built on a Wordpress platform. As a digital marketing company built on the foundation of SEO, this is almost always an essential move for dealers. Think of how flawed a business model it is to have to tell a potential client that they have to spend more money with someone else before they even consider spending money with you. Surely, no one would make such a recommendation unless there were a substantial need. And we are not alone in this thinking. Many dealers (maybe even yours) routinely have more than one website. Worst of all, most dealers in the know have no faith that this will change any time soon. But, what if it did change? What if CDK didn't suck?

Recently, I met with Chris Cunningham, product manager, earned media, of CDK Global. Unlike the decade and half I have experienced with CDK prior to this meeting, I found Chris to be not just competent, but incredibly impressive. Having just had a terrible meeting with CDK the week prior with one of our clients, I expected the meeting to be another veiled PR stunt. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Both myself and my chief digital office challenged Chris with a laundry list of highly technical issues which we believe make CDK a terrible choice for dealers. Chris didn't just have an understanding of the issues we were covering, he shared many action plans already in the works that address many of our concerns. More importantly, he shared his understanding of why the issues we were pointing to were so critical for dealers. 

Now don't misunderstand me. One exceptional employee at a company with an $8.7 billion market cap cannot effect change in an organization. But the fact that he exists and that others like him surely exist combined with the enormous resources a company like CDK can bring to bear once a course is set is more than just a little encouraging. Time will tell. We're committed to keeping an open mind to work with all vendors in this space toward improvement for the benefit of the dealer body. But this poses some obvious questions... What would it mean for other vendors in this space if CDK went from one of the worst in class vendors to one of the best in class vendors in a 2 year period? How many dealers have multiple websites now? What would it mean to dealers to reclaim advertising money on extra websites that would no longer be needed and what would it mean to the dealer community if they could actually rely on their OEM recommended site not because they have to have one, but because it quickly became the benchmark against which all other providers are measured?

Again, its really important to stress that CDK is nowhere near this place... yet. But what if they were? Let me know what you think in the comments. Do you think CDK could make such a big pivot? If you have a second website, how would you reallocate spend if you didn't need it? Do you think CDK should invest the time and effort in creating a product that follows Google's best practices? What else does CDK need to do to win you over?

Sep 22, 8:24AM, UPDATE: James Grace has contacted Wikimotive and shared findings with us: "We've tracked down the source of this issue to a 3rd Party Integration with Edmunds.com that was active on approximately 16% of our sites.  Edmunds pushed tracking code to these sites that was causing the Google session-ID to be overwritten with every "event" on the website, ultimately creating a new session for each event.  This dramatically increased direct traffic in these clients' GA accounts.  We've deactivated these integrations across the Dealer.com platform and the issue has been resolved.  We will be communicating with Edmunds to discuss whether or not to reactivate the integrations.  Dealers with questions or concerns should reach out to their Dealer.com Digital Advisor."

Thanks to James and his team for their efforts to bring transparency to the dealer community. The dialogue I've had with James gives me hope that there will be more transparency to come and that digital agency's like Wikimotive will have better access to staff in a position to take action for the benefit of their dealer clients. Wikimotive will be meeting with James and his team next week to discuss other areas of concern regarding data integrity and 3rd party integration.

BREAKING Sep 21, 2:16pm: James Grace, Sr. Director of Analytics at Dealer.com has contacted Wikimotive and is looking in to this issue as well as original potential causes. We have a tentative meeting scheduled to discuss this as well as other data concerns for improving analytics data quality at dealer.com. See future article to follow. 

FINAL UPDATE, SEP 21, 10:23AM: AT THIS TIME WE CAN CONFIRM THE ISSUE HAS BEEN RESOLVED. DDC IS NOT ACKNOWLEDGING THAT THIS AFFECTED MULTIPLE WEBSITES. WE ATTRIBUTE THE ISSUE AS A SERVER/PERFORMANCE ISSUE. 

Yesterday we were measuring site load times in excess of 50 seconds. Today we are measuring them at just above 10 seconds fully loaded. At this time we consider this resolved, however you should check for this issue if you are observing slower than normal site load times.

IMPORTANT: DDC IS NOT ACKNOWLEDGING THAT THIS ISSUE IS AFFECTING THE PLATFORM GLOBALLY OR TO ANY DEGREE OUTSIDE INDIVIDUAL INSTANCES. THEY ARE NOT TAKING ACTION TO TROUBLE SHOOT THIS ON OTHER WEBSITES. IF YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE AN ISSUE YOU WILL NEED TO CONTACT DEALER.COM DIRECTLY!

SEP 21, 9:19AM, UPDATE:DEALER.COM CLAIMS THIS ONLY AFFECTED A SINGLE SITE AND WAS DUE TO A ABD IMPLEMENTATION OF GOOGLE ANALYTICS. THEY CLAIMED THE ISSUE IS RESOLVED, HOWEVER WE STILL SEE THIS ISSUE OCCURRING.  IT APPEARS THAT DDC HAS REBOOTED ONE OR SEVERAL SERVERS. THIS IS UNCONFIRMED. WE STILL SEE THIS ISSUE AFFECT SOME SITES WITH INTER-MITTEN REGULARITY - MORE NOTICEABLE WHEN WE OBSERVE WEBSITE FUNCTIONING SLOWER THAN NORMAL (IF YOU NOTICE YOUR WEBSITE LAGGING OR LOADING SLOWLY, YOU SHOULD CHECK FOR THIS ISSUE). OTHER SITES ARE STILL TRIGGERING THIS ISSUE ON EVERY SESSION REGARDLESS OF SPEED - THIS SEEMS LESS REGULAR.

12:23PM EDT, LATEST UPDATE: THIS ISSUE DOES AFFECT CHROME BROWSERS BUT IT IS LESS CONSISTENT WHEREAS IT CONSISTENTLY HAPPENS ON ALL OTHER WEB BROWSERS INCLUDING CHROME AND SAFARI IN MOBILE. THIS WILL LIKELY DIRECTLY AFFECT YOU AND YOU SHOULD TAKE ACTION IMMEDIATELY.

UPDATE: THIS MAY ONLY AFFECT SAFARI & INTERNET EXPLORER BROWSERS. MORE UPDATES TO FOLLOW.

Today at Wikimotive, we found an interesting development regarding analytics on Dealer.com websites while reviewing a client's data. We noticed a 767.32% increase in their direct traffic, seemingly, overnight. At first we thought maybe a rogue email campaign was generating bot traffic, but instead we found something a bit more surprising. 

You can see this happen for yourself using the realtime tool in Google Analytics. Search your dealership name and click the result which will take you to your homepage. From there, navigate to new (or used) inventory. Next, filter your results by make, model, body style or any available filter option. Once your filter is applied you will notice that your organic session has ended and you are now listed as a new direct session. 

If you continue to refine filter options your direct session will bounce and a new direct session will be created. This is very concerning as the level of data corruption can be significant depending on user behavior. If your store's IP is not filtered from your view and your sales people use your website to show different vehicles to customers in the showroom this will create substantial additional traffic that never really existed. In the most extreme case we found, one dealer went from 921 new (direct) users for 3,309 (direct) sessions  to 7,988 new (direct) users and 10,435 (direct) sessions in just 30 days. 

Worse still, this will impact all session data from other sources. If your referral traffic filters inventory that session data is lost form that point forward. If they visit multiple VDPs or other pages and submit a lead it will be sourced as direct instead of the true originating source - same for Organic, or any other traffic source. This has far reaching consequences and should be corrected swiftly. 

I have confirmed that this was not a one off by testing this on multiple brands across multiple dealers. I would strongly urge that if your website is provided by dealer.com, that you reach out immediately and find out what they are doing to correct this. We have contacted dealer.com about this issue for our clients, but have not yet received a response.

Tell us what you find! Are you seeing the same thing? Did you have different findings? Be sure to check multiple browsers and check mobile vs desktop!

The Difficult Truth We Ignore

After spending 22 years in auto retail and coming up on a decade as a vendor to the automotive community, I’ve learned that there is a glaring misconception about success in automotive that must be addressed. Our community operates under the false presumption that “selling a lot of cars” (arbitrarily) equals success. As you read this, I’m sure right now you know that there is a certain number of cars, both new and used, that your dealership wants to sell this month. It might be based on how many you sold last month or last year or the incentives provided by the manufacturer. But rarely (if ever) is efficiency part of the equation. Sure, there are stair-steps and trunk money and CSI and many other ways dealers forecast profitability, but this process leads to a constant chase where “HOPE” is the fundamental basis for goal setting and achievement. There is a sweet spot for selling the most amount of cars for the least amount of expense and many dealers are falsely operating under the presumption that this is happening. This needs to change.

We often discuss that a car is the biggest single purchase a person will ever make (after a home). For car dealers, the biggest single expense most dealers face is their marketing (after personnel). Why then, with so many industry experts talking about data and metrics; creating new acronyms all the time, has our ability to forecast and make solid decisions on where to invest (or cut) spend not evolved further than it has? 

The Truth About Data

There are no shortage of articles written by industry experts about data. Sales attribution (multi-funnel vs last click, etc) is the hot topic of the moment. But what if the problem isn’t your vendor? How do we even know where to begin to make an assessment of what is or isn’t working? Think about how many metrics we “experts” have told you that you need to understand over the years? SRP’s, VDPs, sessions, visits, bounce rates, conversion rates, time on site, behavior flow, assisted conversions - and lets not forget you need to be Google Analytics certified just to understand where to find it all and understand what it means. Its information overload. And even once you understand it, there are no landmarks. There’s an automatic understanding that a huge amount of time will need to be dedicated to truly understanding it. 

Whats worse, is that there is a lack of standards between vendors in even collecting your data in the first place. Improper installations and use of Google Tag Manager, event tracking, mismanaged UTM parameters, etc can make your data virtually meaningless. Understand, this is not an occasional problem. MOST dealers that are using OEM recommended website providers are likely to have glaring issues with the quality of their data largely due to the incompetence of those providers and/or your 3rd party providers due to multiple tags firing, improperly installed GTM or 3rd party incompetence modifying your website with their containers. This is particularly troubling as this compromise of your data integrity creates a lasting problem both in assessing your historical performance as well as properly assessing future performance of new vendors. 

A Truth You Can Rely On

In 2004 I posited a theory that there was a direct correlation between the number of visits a website received and the total number of cars a dealership would sell in a given month. There’s a good chance one of your vendors may have recited some version of this metric but things have changed and there is more information can be derived from this correlation.

1%-2% of your total website sessions should represent the total number of cars sold (Sessions to Sales - STS). This is important because it doesn’t matter if your store is more focused on new volume or used volume. It doesn’t matter if you focus on subprime or not, buy-here-pay-here or not. The only outliers to this correlation are exotics and ultra highlines — lifestyle vehicles. Don’t worry, your Lexus, Range Rover and BMW dealer will fall in this range too.

Why a range? The range IS your landmark: 

The closer you are to 1% the more you need to look at the following: BDC performance, closing ratios, website conversion

The closer you are to 2% the more you need to look at your marketing spend and consider increasing that spend to sell more cars or… the more you need to evaluate wether that marketing spend is generating enough traffic relative to that spend.

The Irony of the Truth

What I have found most often is that dealers that don’t know this information tend to act contrary to their best interest. Dealers who are close to 1% tend to think they are over spending their marketing and are averse to looking internally at hiring and training the personnel they need to properly close the amount of consumer interest they are getting. Generally, their marketing spend will indicate a high cost per sale, but their cost of personnel relative to their volume will likely be low or that personnel will be low performing. 

Dealers close to the 2% number tend to think they are rock stars because their people are “over performing.” Generally, their marketing budget will indicate a very low cost per sale, but the cost of personnel will be higher than industry average. In reality, there is a substantial opportunity for growth. 

Even the stores you may look to for inspiration are often missing out on existing opportunities. Just this past July, I saw a very good Chevy dealer that sold 812 vehicles in July. Their GM boasted about the 85,000 sessions and 812 cars sold (2:1 Used to New). Now understand this is a great organization. They do many, many things right. And yet, I would bet the farm that they left about 300 cars on the table. And this is the irony of the problem. A top 20 Chevy dealer that sells nearly 300 new cars and over 500 used cars - by far the leader in their market - would never know to even look for this missed opportunity. 

Who’s Job Is it?

Many marketing companies focus on “their analytics.” Since marketing can only provide you with the opportunity to do more business and cannot complete the transaction for you this tends to be where reporting ends. But how often have you taken a meeting with a marketing company to find that their numbers show everything should be great but you’re not sure you even sold one more car as a result of the spend?

It has always been my philosophy that it's our job as vendors to provide the value; to not just do what is easy, but get in to the dirt and do the hard work. I believe it is the vendor’s responsibility to figure out the problem especially when my reporting shows success and the client’s sales do not reflect that success.

That said, empowerment is a great equalizer. Dealer’s should have personnel that routinely examine their own data: leads, website conversion, BDC performance. You should know how to spot BDC associates that are marking leads unresolved to move them outside of a process to inflate their ratios for the benefit of their pay plans. You should know how to normalize lead sourcing. Where to look for things like website changes when lead sourcing changes in your CRM. How to build a pivot table to understand your data. 

Walk the Talk

Bear in mind this is a very brief summary of the opportunity that exists. If you find that when you compare total monthly sales in your store that that number is 1% or lower or 2% or higher, I would welcome a call. No agenda or sales pitch. I’d be happy to walk you through the data and find what is missing. It's time to walk the talk. Success at the end of the month should be more than an arbitrary number based on the past. It's time to win and know it. 

Its 4pm (EDT) before a major weekend event. Do you know where your website is? Not if you're a CDK Global customer because all websites are down!

UPDATE: While CDK/Cobalt does not have an official ETA all websites should be back up today, "at some point..."

This is why dealer's need exceptional vendor partner's help to guide their digital presence. 
 

Pro Tip: OEM recommended website providers are recommended because they pay huge kickbacks to the OEM, NOT because they are providing leading edge technology. 

For too long I’ve stayed silent. For too long I’ve watched as the industry experts have talked about socially engaging and response times and show ratios and acronyms. For too long I’ve watched as dealer ad budgets have gone up and up and up as the buy-in on vendor reliance taken hold. Enough is enough.

Process is important. No question. And yes, vendor partners can serve a useful purpose. But I can’t remember the last article I’ve read on an automotive centric site that talks about dealer managed content or the merchandising of the dealer’s products and services. Everything seems to rely on this false dependence on AutoTrader, or cars.com or Edmunds, or (insert billion dollar vendor here).

Consumers want to connect to the products and services and, wait for it… PEOPLE they buy from more now than ever. The writing has been on the wall forever too. Thats why you see sales reps leaving these big companies in droves. Why do you think the Tesla model continues to baffle auto experts? Its no surprise when people can pull up a YouTube video of the keys to their tesla being handed to them by Elon Musk.

I’ve still listened to dealer principals talk about bill boards and seeing their name on the side of public busses and try to convince themselves that “not all of our consumers are using the internet!”

Taking the last insane statement out of the mix, why am I so pissed off about this? Because we still spend so much damn time talking about the peas when we should be focussing on the the steak. And no one seems to want to do it. Spend more than 5 minutes outside of automotive and every expert in the world talks about content and context. And lets face it, in the world of automotive retail we suck at it. We’ve allowed all of that voice to come from someone other than the dealer. And its just plain wrong. We’ve become convinced that the dealership voice will become drowned out by the big names and it just isn’t true. I see it again and again even when I bring on a store in the biggest markets with the toughest competition. The dealer’s voice is unique in a sea of the same regurgitated copied crap that exists all over the web.

I know I’m going to lose either way I go here. Because how do I substantiate what I’m saying without some stats. So I’m going to include a random 30 day look YoY that I just pulled off the cuff. Some will say Its self serving. Yep. I’m in business to make money. But truthfully, I don’t care if a single person calls me up about this. I really just hope more than anything else I make some of you think. Because you’ve been sold a lie for so long that you can’t make it without these big vendors and its going to be the demise of dealer profitability.

1. 99% of the OEM approved website vendors are making it impossible for you to have a voice and merchandise your products because they are blatantly violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. And they don’t care and the OEM doesn’t care because the web providers pay a huge percentage of the website monthly fee back to the OEM. It has no basis in meritocracy.
2. Because of #1, all the great content you might try to use to get your voice out there in the web is shut down by the fact that Google just took a giant crap on your website that is primarily filled with duplicate content and in direct violation of Google’s guidelines. And you’ll never even know about it anymore because all of this happens automatically without notification of a manual penalty.

This is the steak! This is your website! This is YOUR voice as the dealer to YOUR consumers. And somewhere along the line we’ve subscribed to the idea that the middlemen deserve the right to sell your consumers to you. And the OEM makes it almost impossible for you to even try to make your own money when they hit you over the head with co-op.

If I told you I’d pay you $50,000/month guaranteed to do something thats going to lose you $500,000/month in gross profit how quick would you be to take me up on that offer? But that’s exactly what has happened to our industry.

I could rant on, but I’m just going to leave it here. Hit me with your critique. Tell me I’m a mad man if you must, but maybe, just maybe do a little soul searching and tell me it wouldn’t be worth just trying to make more money on more cars by connecting to your customers directly instead of through 5 other middlemen who take a piece of the action first.