You’ve probably noticed by now that website visitors in retail auto are coming back.

For evidence, the top graph below shows two trend lines New visitors (dark blue line) and Returning visitors (teal line) both steadily growing for about 700 retail auto dealerships in the US over the past 90 days.

The bottom graph shows: Total traffic (black line), Organic traffic (green line) growing as well, while Paid traffic (blue line) remains fairly steady.

So, this increase in visitor traffic of course means that your dealership should be seeing a commensurate increase in First Party Leads. Even better, as you already know, those organic leads have stronger conversion to sales rates… particularly in your organic/direct traffic.

There’s no question that more customers are visiting dealership websites today than they did 90+ days ago. In large part because of the modest return in inventory levels and residual demand. Again, this means that your dealership (and sales team) should be enjoying more First Party leads to help drive sales (as well as to move some of that aging and expensive pre-owned inventory).

If they’re not enjoying more leads, then you should definitely inspect a few things:

• Your website functionality – is it frictionless, easy to use – especially on mobile? Not according to you… ask a family member or friend who’s not in the industry.
• Inventory listings and content – are all units posted with clean and relevant pictures, and content (descriptions)?
• Are pricing and incentives clear and obvious in your SRP’s & VDP’s
• Do your calls to action drive “action” or drive “page exits?”
• Does your team engage with “highly engaged visitors” via chat or some other facility in real-time?

Of course, that’s not a comprehensive list, they’re just a few of the things that you should take a few minutes to inspect on your virtual showroom – your website. I’d strongly recommend looking at the close-rates of your native website leads in your Internet Lead Source Performance Reports in your CRM tool as well. Those close-rates should be rising compared to 3 months ago, along with the increase in organic/direct traffic to your website.

It’s true that shoppers still perceive that inflation, recession, and interest rates aren’t in their favor. Yet, it’s also true that they’re shopping again and they’re shopping for deals. And they’re doing so on multiple franchise dealership websites before they engage with one or more dealerships.

Our data shows that dealers with good websites, good incentives, and good BDC processes are winning more deals than their competitors. It’s the dealerships that know, and more importantly are trained to PERFORM like every lead counts and every phone call counts that are winning more deals and being more profitable. There’s no doubt that your dealership can be doing the same… simply inspect what you expect, and rock and roll from there!

Be a regular and instrumental part of the process. Fix what’s broken, improve what’s not. Make no excuses, leads are there for the taking… either for your dealership or for your competition.