Are You Tracking the Right Digital Marketing KPIs for Your Dealership? - Adpearance

Are You Tracking the Right Digital Marketing KPIs for Your Dealership?

The key to better marketing performance is cleaner, more accurate data. When you can clearly see what channels are generating leads and demonstrating a strong return on investment for your business, you can make better decisions that generate more leads.

It’s easy to get caught up in different reporting metrics and data points, instead of zeroing in on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are crucial to your dealership’s digital marketing success. But with the wealth of data available to businesses today, how do you know if you’ve selected appropriate KPIs? 

Digital Marketing KPIs for Car Dealers

To start, it’s important to align your marketing and sales goals to make sure you’re efficiently using your budget to reach interested customers and convert them at a high rate. Your marketing efforts should support sales at your dealership and focus on generating high-quality leads—not just leads or clicks.

Maximize Your Ad Spend

Paid search metrics should help you quickly understand what your biggest lead drivers are and where your budget is being spent most effectively. Monitor the following across platforms to ensure you’re generating leads across dealership, model, display, branded, and local campaigns.

  • Clicks
  • Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
  • Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
  • Search Impression Share (SIS)
  • Conversions (Forms, Calls, Chats, and Store Visits)
  • Cost-Per-Conversion
  • Conversion Rate
  • Qualified Sales Prospects (QSPs)
  • Vehicle Sales

Align Your Geo-Targeting with Customer Data

To ensure you’re focused on traffic quality, not just quantity, it’s important to identify where the highest-converting, most cost-effective markets are—this is where you will see the best ROI. Consider geographic features and competitors that surround your dealership to determine your ideal location targeting. Then, use sales-by-zip and market share data to target the areas where your dealership has successfully sold in the past, or where you may be falling behind and need additional advertising efforts to gain back market share. Track these metrics monthly and adjust accordingly.

  • Sales-by-Zip
  • Search Impression Share (SIS)

Contextualize Performance

As much as possible, zoom out to compare your dealership’s current digital marketing performance to month-over-month, year-over-year, and year-to-date data. Comparing monthly metrics against historic data and industry benchmarks will help you understand how your dealership stacks up and see where you can improve performance.

  • Historic Market Share
  • Search Conversion Efficiency

Connect Sales and Marketing Performance

Once tracking is in place and you’re monitoring these KPIs to understand the effectiveness of your digital marketing, you need to make sure the results aren’t being inflated with non-sales leads. If you consider every website conversion as a new lead, there’s a good chance a portion of these “leads” are actually solicitors, wrong numbers, family members, and job seekers that are inflating your pipeline and masking your real results. 

Measure Sales Leads, Not Just Clicks

The success of your lead generation channels should be tied to reporting on true sales leads. To ensure accurate attribution data, leverage user-level tracking to understand the kind of leads your marketing campaigns are generating and determine how many are qualified new car shoppers. Integrate with your CRM to see how many of these paid prospects result in a sale. This way, you can quantify the value of each marketing channel and make more informed sales and marketing decisions.

  • Lead Actions
  • Unique Prospects
  • Qualified Sales Prospects
  • Paid Prospects that Resulted in a Sale

Data-Driven Marketing, Sales-Driven Results

Adpearance can work with you to establish competitive digital advertising campaigns focused on the KPIs that matter for your sales success. Using Foureyes sales intelligence software, we’ll power your marketing campaigns with keyword-level attribution,  phone tracking, and CRM connections that ensure your business objectives and data-driven KPIs stay closely aligned and drive continual campaign success. 

Contact us for a free digital analysis to learn more about the results your dealership can expect to see.

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About the Author

Damon Melton

Damon is a senior digital advertising specialist at Adpearance. He stays at the forefront of digital advertising technology to help drive results for auto dealerships.

Adpearance is the digital marketing company obsessed with generating quality leads. Our solutions combine cutting-edge technology, premium tracking, and an expert team to transform business results.

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