Today every dealer wants to sell more cars and spend less money, that’s obvious. What isn’t so obvious is the where and how to do it. That’s the goal of this calculator, to help you see a simple, logical path to selling more cars and spending less money. With how today’s shoppers buy cars, your Fast Track to more sales isn’t in more website traffic, it is in more shopper to lead conversion. Notice that I didn’t say “visitor to lead”, I said “shopper to lead”. There is a difference between the two and that difference is opportunity cost for your internet department or business development center.
The cool thing about the calculator below is that you’ll supply your own dealerships actual numbers in it to prove to yourself that your focus and budget should be on more shopper to lead conversion rather than driving traffic or trying to improve outdated 2015 website traffic metrics. The good news is that it’s easy and once you see it you can’t un-see it. You’ll be making cuts in your marketing spend to increase your focus and budget on conversion. It’s the one-two punch that all of the market leading dealers are doing today. They’re selling more cars and spending less money. Keep this in mind, whether or not you’re in a “flat market,” outdated flat thinking won’t push your sales and profit curves upward.
Okay the tool works when you supply your own dealership numbers. As you can see there are two tabs: the Cost Comparison Tab– helps you understand the impact on marketing spend versus conversion spend, and the Opportunity Comparison Tab– helps you understand the overall opportunity costs (and revenue) of comparing driving traffic to converting online shoppers.
Both tabs help you realize the 2% Rule, which is: “Any 2% increase in conversion conversion rate of engaged visitors sells more cars than any 20% increase in quality website traffic.”
Disclaimer on the tool. While it’s all simply arithmetic using your actual numbers along with a couple industry averages, the tool compares spend and/or opportunities to Pureinfluencer’s Conversion Strategies Performance for two reasons: 1) we have dealers all across the country and terabytes of qualitative and quantitative data to prove all of the calculations; and 2) the tools’ hosted on our website 😉
Quick Field & Calculation Tips on the Compare Costs:
- Unique Monthly Visitors: It’s just that, UNIQUE monthly visitors (get it from GA)
- Cost Per Click: The average CPC that your dealership pays in your market
- PPC Budget: What you currently spend (or what you plan to increase your spend by)
- Website Conversion Rate: Your visitor to lead conversion rate (industry average is 1.5 to 3%)
- Estimated New Traffic: Dividing your budget by your CPC. (This assumes no cannibalization of your organic traffic – which would happen)
- Current Leads: Estimated traffic X your website-conversion-rate
- Current Leads to sale: The calculator uses a simple industry average of 10%. Pureinfluencer’s leads close between 20% to 30+%, we use the low end on this calculator.
- Current Units Sold: 10% x Current-Leads
- Cost Per Unit Sold: PPC budget divided by units sold
Quick Field & Calculation Tips on the Compare Opportunities:
- Unique Monthly Visitors: It’s just that, UNIQUE monthly visitors (get it from GA)
- Highly Engaged Shoppers: Statistically 20% of your website traffic is considered “highly engaged” these are visitors that are actively shopping you, same brand and off brand competitors, 3rd party sites, and private sellers. On average this 20% of your traffic will purchase a vehicle within the 1 to 30 days.
- Website Conversion Rate: Your visitor to lead conversion rate (industry average is 1.5 to 3%)
- Website Leads: Unique Monthly Visitors X your website-conversion-rate
- Unconverted Engaged Opportunities: Highly Engaged Shoppers – Website-Leads
- Conversion Solution: Adding a conversion strategy to win just 2% of the Highly Engaged Shoppers. Revisit the 2% rule above or in the tool-tip on the calculator.
- Total Leads Per Month: Your current status versus a 2% minimum conversion solution.
- Your Website Lead To Sales Rate: Industry average is 10%
- Average Gross Dollars per Unit Sold: I KNOW that you know that number!
- Total Gross: This shows the Gross Amount from your current strategy versus what you could have by redirecting marketing spend toward a conversion strategy.
The Email These Results button: this gives you an opportunity to have both of these comparisons conveniently on one simple document in your inbox to review with your management team.
I encourage you to enter your numbers and see for yourself how many more cars you can be selling and how much more profitable you can be if you focus more of your budget and your attention on converting more of the traffic that you already have on your website. Remember, its 2017… more traffic isn’t your sales growth problem, low conversion rate is.
Here’s the calculator:
Enter your dealership's numbers for each field below:
Enter your dealership's numbers for each field below:
Please feel free to share this blog/calculator with anyone that you think might benefit from it. Also, I’m very interested to hear your strategies or inputs around how you improved your dealerships’ sales performance by focusing on conversion.
Happy selling, and have a SPECTACULAR DAY!