By Eric Brown, CEO, inSearchX
Many of you reading this article may recall the articles I wrote as CEO and co-founder of Dataium (a behavioral analytics company that collected and analyzed consumer online shopping data). If you were to wordsmith our output, it would read like this, “There is a 68 percent probability this consumer will buy a 2015 Honda Accord in the next 72 hours.” And yes, we got this right over 80 percent of the time.
As impressive as this may be, it was the right answer to the wrong question. That is, we focused on clicks and clicks alone. And since 2009, when I founded the company (later sold to IHS in 2015), that conversation continues.
Digital vendors, consultants, and agencies are loaded up with account managers, performance managers, dealer success managers, all having endless conversations about clicks. Numerous vendors zero-in on attribution, time on site, bounce rate, bots, VDP views, form fills, and map views – and tell you why their clicks are better than their competitor’s clicks and how to get more clicks for a lower cost per sale.
So, my question for you is, are these the conversations you want to have? Or would you prefer to have conversations about cars with consumers?
But here’s the problem… most clicks are nothing more than a metric on your Google Analytics report. And clicks you buy yield very few conversations. Overall, less than two percent of clicks generate a form fill, and it’s less than one percent for SEM. If you do the math with an average cost per click of $3.00, your cost per lead is $300.00. And, of those form fills, how many does your dealership connect with? Less than half? And that is after days and weeks of emails, text messages, and phone calls attempting to connect with consumers. Now you understand one of the reasons why, despite the move to much more proficient digital marketing, NADA reports an increase in cost of sale year over year.
So, what is a good car dealership to do? Well first off, let’s look at the data above. If less than two percent of consumers are identifying themselves, that means more than 98 percent of consumers remain anonymous. That is your single largest marketable audience. These consumers are potential buyers; they are just not ready or willing (they are able) to share their personal information with you.
What processes or solutions do you have in place that allow them to interact with you in the way they would like? I’ll share more on that next month, focusing on the inversion of the internet and how it and IOT are creating new conversation channels.
About the Author
Eric Brown, CEO and founder of inSearchX. Eric also founded Dataium and is the former president of LotLinx, an AI-powered digital marketing platform. He is also a sought-after industry speaker and industry expert as a guest on Fox News and quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and USA Today and was named Nashville, Tennessee’s “Innovator of the Year” for 2012.
