How Dynamic Call Tracking Boosts Sales for Automotive Dealers

Digital is revolutionising the way customers research and purchase vehicles, yet, the telephone - a critical weapon in a car dealer’s armoury - is not given the respect it deserves.

Did you know:

• Over 60% of all enquiries are inbound phone calls.
• Just over 20% of enquiries are made by Live Chat.
• Google My Business generates over 50% of phone enquiries.
• Over 5% of calls into dealerships are not answered. For many dealers, this number is much higher.

I’ve been obsessed with telephones for the last 20 years… Some say this makes me boring, but I beg to differ. Understanding the role the telephone plays in your business is vital to ensuring that your marketing strategy is based on solid data, and your marketing spend is being used efficiently.

Using dynamic numbers, you can attribute all your inbound enquiries to the source – and even keyword – that is responsible for delivering them to you. This leads to smarter marketing and more car sales.

Every visitor to your website sees a unique telephone number. These numbers are assigned to your marketing sources, allowing you to link visits to specific channels, such as pay-per-click (PPC) and referral site visits.

The phone number behaves like a cookie, providing you with granular detail on your inbound phone calls – like you get from your form fills. Using dynamic numbers on your website means you can monitor exactly how many calls come from your PPC spend versus your Auto Trader listings, and which pages they convert on.

Some stats that are sure to pique your interest…

• Calls to dealers from AutoTrader are around 10% higher than their website referrals.
• 5-10% of traffic to a dealer’s website comes from the Google My Business listing.
• PPC generates significantly more calls on a first click basis compared to last click. When you look at the value that your paid search delivers, you need to take this weighting into account.

At its simplest, using dynamic telephone numbers allows you to see where your response is coming from. This means you can easily prove whether Auto Trader charges are justified compared to heycar, for example.

If we look at a typical online marketing strategy, you’ll probably be using channels including:

• Paid search (e.g. Google Ads, Bing/Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook)
• Google My Business (GMB) listing
• SEO / organic
• Email campaigns
• Remarketing
• Referral websites (e.g. AutoTrader)
• Social media

By attributing your inbound calls to different departments, call tracking software highlights inefficiencies in your marketing spend. You might notice a high volume of calls from your paid search activity are being transferred to your service department, for instance. With insight from dynamic numbers, you can tweak your campaigns and make sure your media spend is only going to the campaigns that bring you new leads.

Those of you who know me well will say that my obsession is biased because I live for tracking calls. Whilst, grudgingly, I may be forced to admit to being biased, the main reason I’m obsessed with the phone is because of the amount of actionable insight and data dealers can get from it. It helps you streamline your operations and make more profit.

How well are your operations performing? Can you tighten up the sales process and improve the customer experience? Implementing call tracking enables you to see:

• How long it takes your team to answer the phone: Are they prompt, or do calls go unanswered?
• When calls come into your dealership: Assess the busiest days and times and manage call volumes more efficiently.
• Which departments receive the most calls: An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) automates the process of transferring and attributing calls to departments, freeing up your staff and phone lines.

Furthermore, you can add advanced features to enhance your call handling abilities. These features include call whispers announcing the marketing source, routing plans for out of hours operation, and voicemail boxes.

Hopefully you can now understand my obsession with telephone numbers! Who would have thought that a simple call could generate some much useful data to help you run your dealership more effectively? Data from call tracking allows you to be more effective with your marketing, as well as running a slicker operation.