DealerRefresh

Obstacles, Observations and Opinions of an Automotive Internet Sales & Marketing Manager

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5 Principles to Rock your Online Reputation and Win more Customers

Not long ago I was on the phone with Sean Peoples, VP of Sales for CarGurus. I’ve known Sean for some time now and there’s never a dull moment during our conversations. We got on the topic of online reviews and he was sharing with me some interesting data around customer reviews on CarGurus.com. I asked him to share this data in a post here for our readers. I hope we hear more from Sean in the near future. He’s a smart dude! -Jeff

Who cares what people are saying about you online?

By now, you know the answer: everyone that is shopping for a car on your lot.  For dealerships, online reviews offer an opportunity to establish credibility and trust among prospective customers – or they can quickly destroy both when things go wrong.

Our experience with user reviews and online community runs deep (notably, our founder and CEO was the co-founder of travel review site, TripAdvisor).  More than 7 million unique monthly visitors research and shop for cars on CarGurus, and we invite each shopper that contacts a dealership through our site to submit a review of his or her experience.  More than 250 of these shoppers take the time to do so daily.

Recently we spent some time analyzing 100K of our most recent dealership reviews, and I wanted to share some insights from this study that I believe will be useful to your dealership.

The biggest takeaway from our dealership review research is that the majority of dealerships are nailing it when it comes to customer satisfaction are… [Read more…]

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Google Jelly Bean SERPs – a Treat for Some!

 

Google’s new Jelly Bean SERPs

SERP’s are the key to consumers finding your dealership online. It’s no surprise that Google is the SERP-master when they own 88% of all search traffic. Google SERP’s are evolving quickly in the mobile world.

Roughly 60% of a dealer’s SERP traffic results from searches of the dealer’s name. The next most popular search type combines a “locale indicator” plus a manufacturer name. Boston + Ford is one example. These two SERP results can drive up to 80% of a dealer’s search traffic, so it’s important to own these search phrases.

But how can you do that?

[Read more…]