I just left a Ford dealer where I was a one man team (right before I left they had added another guy to do Kia) so I wanted to use the money they spent on AutoMart on more leads. It DID generate a lot of calls but mostly they were “get-me-done’s” (our average credit score was about 680) cherry picking the old units we advertised (in the paper media) some emails with a low response rate (to my emails back) on the web side.

I’m now at a Chevy dealer where we’re using the free stuff we get from dealer specialties but I haven’t had time to get to them on the list. I’m still bulking at paying about $4200 for 8 to 10 leads from AutoTrader.

My GM has the contract on his desk now to purchase some leads from Dealix. I had poor luck with them at the rural Ford Dealer but I’m willing to try them (for FREE) at a suburban Chevy dealer. They’re running a special in our market for first month free (up to $1000). Hopefully he’ll sign today so we get the free month. I’m going to at least try buying leads since combining Cars.Com and Autotrader last month got me about 30 leads (including printed maps, phone calls and everything).

Sorry about going off topic a bit…

Rob Ernst

Superior Chevrolet
Internet Sales Manager

Mobile: 513-200-5025
Direct: 513-354-3206
Showroom: 513-541-3300
eFax: 513-554-2942

My favorite post above is William who said it he didn’t have a way to track his website traffic accurately, but somehow he measures ROI?

Get into analytics, whatever solution you choose.

You guys that are holding on to print take a good hard look at what those calls are leading to. Are they turning into appointment? showed? closed? We too tried Automart mag among others and the ROI was extremely low. To qualify, we used a total of 43 different tracking numbers, have someone listen to all calls and notes on those calls are distributed to management each day.

Simply put, you can funnel the money used in print into SEM and receive more high-quality calls.

To justify using AutoTrader.com, Cars.com and Automart.com among others depends on your business plan. If you’re embracing ebusiness and putting the same focus on that as you have traditional media in the past then you have no choice. You have to be on there with your competitors. Be ready to price aggressively to be competitive.

As we have for the past 3 years, we are currently running no TV or radio and have just cancelled our last bit of newspaper and focusing on internet. These last 28-36 months have taught us valuable lessons.

We intend to use the knowledge gained to further seperate ourselves from the competition.

Our rep always says this, and so does their website when I log on… funny thing though – my weblogs AND google analytics say they don’t drive any traffic to us. His excuse – “well, you just have standard listings” (ie – free from dealer specialties). Umm, yeah.. what does that have to do with you apparantly fudging the numbers?

Their print DOES work for us though. It generates just as many calls for for each dollar spent as does autotrader.com or cars.com. I made a display ad for our used car managaer to try it out one month, and the calls that came in to our tracking number was enough proof for me. I cancelled beepbeep and another lame vendor we had, and told my dealer to let the used car manager use the money for more display ads in automart. My family owns the dealership, so in the end I just want the money to go where it works the best – even on the VERY RARE occasion it isn’t my department

>We spent $2,500 in SEM and had low quality and duplicate leads …

My gut says blame the ads/website/keywords here – not the medium. I run our own SEM in house, and the vast majoirty of the time I just send the traffic straight to our home page. For $2,500 in ppc expenses, we’d sell at least 10-12 cars. And thats just handing the leads over to the sales floor

I hit google.com/yahoo.com and typed in words like “used cars,” “cheap trucks,” etc. to see what type of websites were returning well … Automart.com was one of these – for $800 a month, I can post my inventory, talk live via im, etc.

I understand each market is different, but instead of paying a company to do your SEM at $2,500 a month (which yeilds a low ROI) …

…Why not pay automart.com (less than half this amount) to get their site/your inventory to return in searches (organic or paid) consumers are doing?

http://www.google.com/analytics/#utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-webmaster_central&utm_medium=et

It’s free. Have you tech people paste in the code on all of your pages, then stand back for about a week or 2 while it collects traffic.

Also, I hear good things about: http://haveamint.com/
$30 a year.

g’luck,
Joe

So how well is it working? I dunno!???

… And I measure my ROI (so far this month eBay is leading).

I am a little rough around the edges, but a lot of my compadres agree with me. The bottom line is: Don’t tell me how great your are Mr. Vendor, show me!