Automotive Marketing- what are the basic metrics?

Posted on 14. Oct, 2008 by admin.

Automotive Marketing- what are the basic metrics to track?

Although this may be a “no brainer” for many dealers, we are time and time again reviewing the metrics and performance of automotive advertising. There are a few key elements when you want to understand how your advertising or automotive marketing is performing. The information you want to discover is “what is my cost per action” on each source of advertising or promotion, both online and through traditional means.

Before anyone can make judgment on the effectiveness of a message or campaign, or even make decisions about a specific media (is newspaper dead yet?) we need to see if you have the basic tracking in place. So, to keep it simple, here is a simple list of what you need to track in order to gauge whether or not your automotive marketing investment is working.

-Does it generate phone calls? How many? (track each source separately)

-Does it generate email leads? How many? (track each source separately)

-Does it generate floor traffic? How many? (track each source separately)

-Does it generate web traffic (How much, what is the quality, does it convert into a lead well?) Again, track each web property separately including your lead providers, websites, factory sites, microsites, dealer websites, etc. If it has a place for a phone number or form, TRACK IT.

The BIG and eventual question is, does it generate SALES? We cannot tackle that question until there is proper accountability in place to track all of the above. Let’s face it, this is a tough market and you need to get a handle on where every dollar is being spent. Therefore, to check your automotive ROI you need the proper tracking in place to:

Capture the Information (CRM, lead management, site analytics, call tracking logs, etc)

Report on the data (spit out reports on each source for the same time period)

Act on the data (Now that we know our $10,000 automotive ad budget in the Super Weekly press got us only 14 calls and zero walk in traffic, what do you do about it?)

In many recent meetings, face to face with dealers, who are facing one of the worst retail crunches in recent history, we have been asking these questions. Read our post on tracking in more detail here

We would be more than happy to share, free of charge, where you can get these tools or what information to track. For full disclosure, we offer many of these services but there are equally comparable services that you may already have in place that already do the same things.

As a good client of ours just recently said on Geraldo last week, when the wind isn’t blowing the sails, we get out the oars. Let’s figure out where the best wind is coming from, and where you can get the best oars for when the favorable winds do not blow your way.

To get more on Dominating the search engines, also see our article on search marketing domination

Continue Reading