I touched briefly on sourcing your internet leads the other day. Now to the ROI on those sources. A lot of dealers spend a lot of money on the internet for advertising and marketing of their vehicles. You have to really evaluate all of your lead sources on a monthly basis to make sure that you are getting the most for your money spent.
You have to really dig into analytics on the lead sources at the end of the month. I know that it takes me about 2 days to get through all of my reports to get all of my ROI results for my providers so it can be time consuming. I look at an internet sale as a lead that was generated from a third party source, your website, or a phone call that is trackable. Trackable meaning you have a dedicated phone number from that source. It is a phone-up, but if it is generated from a third party, I do view that as an internet sale. DO NOT count floor traffic that comes in the door and says “I saw this car on the (fill in the blank), do you still have it?” Even though there is room for argument, I don’t count it. Has to be a true internet lead or a phone call from those sources for it to count in my eyes.
Dig into your CRM. Almost every dealership in the country has a CRM that will generate most of the reports for you. You do have to take those figures and plug them into a spreadsheet. Calculate your leads and sales from those leads and you obviously have your closing percentage. You then have to look at your profit. I run two reports; one with front and back-end profit and one without the back-end. You then want to plug in the cost of all of your sources. Take your total cost and divide the cost by the total amount of leads and will give you your cost per referral. The benchmark should be under $50. You then want to look at the cost per vehicle sale. Take your total cost of your sources and divide that by your total sales. The benchmark of cost per vehicle sale should be less than $250.
Your spreadsheet should look something like this:
| Lead Source Analysis | Close Rate Analysis | Gross Profit Analysis | Lead Cost Analysis | |||||
| Lead Provider | Referral Volume | Units sold | Close rate | Monthly Gross | Gross average | Monthly cost | Cost per referral | Ave. CPVS |
| Autobytel.com | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| Autotrader | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| carfax.com | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| cars.com | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| cars.com NLP | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| dealix (new) | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| Dealix (used) | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| ebizautos | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| edmunds.com | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| google-Honda Certified | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| Honda | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| Honda QQ | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| usedcars.com | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| vehix.com | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! | ||||
| Total | 0 | 0 | #DIV/0! | $0 | #DIV/0! | $0 | #DIV/0! | #DIV/0! |
Automotive Sales Strategies from Jim 