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Measuring Ad Campaign Success

Starting a new advertising campaign can be exciting, but knowing how well the campaign is performing can be a little tricky. Since getting an accurate answer to “how did you hear about us?” from a customer or the promise of your team to input the answer into your CRM is often unreliable, it’s important to have a plan to measure your campaign success. Before you start any new campaign, establish a baseline, or average, for the leads your store is already generating. It is a good idea to start with a 12 month time span; break it down by quarter, then by month, and even by week. Establishing a lead baseline gives you a ruler for comparison and allows you to see how your new campaign is impacting your store –for better or worse.

There are three common ways a prospect begins the engagement process with your dealership:

  • They visit and/or inquire via your website. –Good
  • They call your store. –Better
  • They arrive in person on your lot. –Best


Digging a little deeper into these three areas is important to establishing a baseline for measuring the success of your new campaign.

Website


Ideally, you will have several ways to capture/generate that web lead, such as live chat, trade value form, coupon request, inventory squeeze page, and/or a finance application. When it comes to web site leads, we want to identify:


  • Number of LeadsCampaign Success
  • Number of Leads Contacted vs. Total Leads (Benchmark*=89%)
  • Set Appointments vs. Leads Contacted (Benchmark*=66%)
  • Kept Appointments vs. Leads (Benchmark*=31.8%)
  • Number Sold vs. Leads (Benchmarks*=9%)


In real numbers: 100 web site leads would result in 66 appointment sets, 31 being kept and 9 cars sold.

Phone Calls


Incoming phone calls are golden opportunities. Who is answering your phone calls? If you aren’t overloading your phone lines, you have the opportunity to speak to every incoming call versus your team trying to reach someone from a lead sheet. Ideally, no matter who is answering the phone you should have call tracking –better yet a call monitoring system– set up. For measuring purposes, you want to look at:


  • Number of Incoming CallsCall Now 3
  • Set Appointments vs. Incoming Calls (Benchmark*= 81%)
  • Kept Appointments vs. Appointments Set (Benchmark*= 59%)
  • Number Sold vs. Appointments Kept (Benchmark*= 30%)
  • Number Sold vs. Leads (Benchmark* = 15%)


Or to use real numbers: 100 incoming phone calls would result in 81 appointments set, 59 of those appointments being kept and 15 cars sold.

Showroom Traffic


The last area to be explored is your walk-in traffic. How many people are showing up to your store without an appointment? We want to look at the number of store visits and what percentage is being sold. This is also a great time to pull a credit bureau analysis of both sold and unsold customers. It can help you identify the range and frequency of credit scores of the customers you are currently attracting. It can also clue you in to any under-served markets. If there are many unsold customers with a common score, you can look for finance company and/or inventory gaps that you could fill to add more profit to your bottom line. It will also give you a range of comparison to see what type of customer your new campaign is bringing to your dealership.


Now you can measure your ad campaign success.


You now have the information you need for the areas of your store that will be most affected when implementing a new marketing campaign. Once your advertising begins, it is a good idea to keep track of all these areas on a weekly basis. This helps you to quickly identify the campaign success and/or where your team may need some training or additional help. A little measuring, monitoring and managing can go a long way to increasing the effectiveness of your advertising dollars.


*Benchmarks = the 75th percentile of all dealer BDC data collected by DealerStrong.

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