Digital car advertising is constantly changing. New techniques for getting better leads and more clicks continue to evolve, and GMs have more choices than ever before. Despite all of these options, most dealers’ online marketing choices boil down to a choice between third-party and first-generation leads. Whether you’re an independent store or a franchise, the choices remain the same. Though the technology for connecting to a potential shopper has changed, the bottom line is that getting the right leads in your CRM is the difference between duds and real-life sales. Getting those leads to convert is more complex than ever, and a big reason is that managers do not have the right tools to monitor their marketing campaigns. 

As a dealership manager, your priority is to sell cars, trucks, and SUVs in any way possible. You work hard to get staff who know how to connect with consumers and financiers who can crunch numbers in their sleep. Digital marketing vendors, though, come with a lot of jargon that doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense. Some folks call it PPC or CPC, and a third group wants to talk about SEM. It all seems the same, but they insist it’s different because they’ll say anything to get you to try out their handy-dandy program. Vendors will promise you everything but the moon and the stars to give their one-of-a-kind platform a try. Can you tell the difference between them? 

We’ll wager that you can’t tell the difference because they all generate third-party leads. These leads sound so good on paper: a few hundred leads in your CRM every month for a low price sounds too good to be true. You sign up and those leads populate. Now your team sifts through them to find a shopper willing to bite. Have you noticed how many of those leads go nowhere, though? The low price you pay for those leads means you have no quality control over what you receive. On top of that, all those (supposedly) promising leads are also in your competition’s CRM. There is nothing exclusive or extraordinary about these leads, but GMs keep paying for them.

It’s easy to see why third-party leads are so popular. No one has taken the time to teach the automotive industry how to use an analytics program. Sure, vendors come with their own, but those self-reporting platforms do not offer any insight. Moreover, if you have five vendors, you will not learn how to use five different programs to get a weekly report that is primarily gibberish anyway. It doesn’t make sense, and you have much better ways of using your time. So, you count leads to figure out your budget and hope that enough third-party leads come in to make ends meet. 

These days, though, a much more efficient solution exists. As a GM, you need a user-friendly platform that lets you monitor your vendors on one screen according to the same metrics. At the same time, this program must be transparent, so it can’t come from your vendors. Having a new set of metrics will do two things: free you up from counting leads and, more significantly, make it easier to work with vendors that generate first-generation leads. These leads are up to ten times more likely to convert into a sale, and the more of them in your system, the easier it will be to meet monthly goals and move some iron. So instead of listening to yet another presentation from a third-party lead provider, take the time to learn about what marketing analytics and first-generation leads can do for your store’s profits.