Digital Management

Today’s Consumer’s Digital Journey to Car Buying

August 2, 2019 by Cassie Ciopryna Leave a Comment

Learn about car-buyers’ digital journey and how it’s changed the game for auto dealers.

It’s no secret that the internet and digital devices are important for today’s consumers. It has changed the way people buy, and has especially had an impact on car-buyer’s journey to purchasing a vehicle.

Dealers cannot ignore digital formats as a vital piece of their marketing and brand recognition for customers. Without a great digital management program in place, dealers won’t have a great chance of even being considered by most car shoppers.

Learn more about digital management with your free copy of our Automotive Digital Management Guide.

J.D. Power recently released their U.S. New Autoshopper (NAS) Study^SM in which they deliver insights into today’s consumers’ customer journey to car dealerships.

Below are some interesting insights from this study that dealers need to take into consideration for the rest of 2019, and when planning for 2020.

Path to Purchase

The time of from when internet shoppers start looking online to purchase a vehicle until they actually purchase a vehicle is 12.6 weeks.
Premium and Pickup buyers have a slightly larger path to purchase, at about 14-15 weeks.
Lease buyers move the quickest through the path to purchase, buying just after 10 weeks.
The path to purchase increases as age decreases – so expect Gen Y/Z to take the longest when buying a new vehicle.

Knowledge of make/model to purchase

58% of internet shoppers enter the shopping process knowing the make or model they want to buy.
- This has increased from 49% of buyers knowing the car they wanted to buy in 2013.
Only 2.4 models are considered when buyers first begin visiting dealers, including the model purchased.
Dealers’ websites are the most-common way that new buyers discover the vehicle that they want to purchase, followed by having previously owned the model they are looking to purchase.

Devices used and website visits

Shoppers continue to use smartphones for their automotive shopping, and over half of car buyers are internet shopping use their smartphone when looking to purchase a vehicle.
14% of automotive internet shoppers don’t ever use a computer (desktop or laptop) while shopping.

Fewer sites are visited over time as more and more buyers know the make/model of the vehicle they want to purchase from the onset.
- On average, internet shoppers visited 3.7 manufacturer websites, 2.4 dealer websites and 2.6 independent websites in 2018.
Of all the websites visited, independent sites are named “most useful,” (36%) followed by the OEM site (32%).

Shopping content accessed

Almost three-quarters (73%) of shoppers look at vehicle pricing, and 71% access model information.
Search inventory, photo galleries, and vehicle comparisons also remain in the top 5 pieces of content accessed by shoppers.

“Vehicle pricing, model information, search inventory and photo galleries continue to be the most used content on auto shopping sites.”

– J.D. Power U.S. New Autoshopper Study

Dealership contact

A phone call remains the second-most-common initial form of contact, coming in only behind walk-ins.
29% of buyers initially contact dealerships in a digital format:
1. Dealer website
2. Email
3. Requested quote online
4. Online chat
5. Text message
6. Facebook page

Track your consumers’ online journeys with EveryLead

CallSource has the most powerful automotive dashboard in the industry. Our robust, non-cookie based web analytics allows you to separately track sales, parts, and service calls also while correctly attributing your online and offline sources so you can spend your money efficiently on your best customers.

CallSource’s Digital Management Platform, EveryLead, is the only platform that shows calls, texts, chats, and web leads all in a single, real-time dashboard. Schedule a time to talk to a specialist about EveryLead today, or give us a call at
833-EVERYLEAD.

Track the complete customer journey and follow consumers cross-domain and cross-device with the most robust multi-touch attribution solution out there.

Learn about all of your leads with EveryLead.

I want to learn more about EveryLead.

Reference: https://www.jdpower.com/business/resource/jd-power-new-autoshopper-study

Tracking Attribution With Cookies vs. Non-Cookies

August 1, 2019 by Kevin Dieny Leave a Comment

What are tracking cookies, and how does cookieless tracking work? We will explore how to track with cookies and also how to track without cookies, and the solutions that use cookieless tracking for deeper marketing insights.

Cookies are not altogether dead as many would have suggested back in 2014, yet, the need for online tracking without cookies continues to rise, especially with the need for accurate attribution.

As users continue to utilize multiple devices from various locations throughout the day, the largest data analytics tracking companies are continuing to develop viable non-cookie options. The bottom line is—if you want precision tracking users online you will need a non-cookie based method. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter don’t provide them.

What are tracking cookies?

Tracking cookies are labels. They label web pages when they load and also label the user who visited. Cookies label demographic information for each user that visits a web page. The labels describe useful information about the users and the web pages they visited. Every cookie should be unique to every user and contain an ID that the platform uses to keep track.

Unlike a typical ID, the cookie does not contain directly identifiable information about the user. In fact, privacy conspirators rejoice because cookies are inherently incomplete identifying people behind the user. There are several flaws of cookie tracking and we will cover them all.

The flaws of cookie-based tracking

USERS do not represent actual people; they are only a count of unique ID’s.
USERS are not shared by different browsers, devices, or locations.
USERS are easily deleted and often deleted by the people they supposedly represent.
USERS are only unique to a specific time period and after that time are reset.
USER counts are not perfectly precise and are often adjusted from the actual numbers by an unknown amount.
Sampled USERS means you are only getting a distant snapshot and not precise data if you work with Custom Segments or add 2nd Dimensions to the data.

How do the flaws in tracking with cookies affect my analytics data?

The experience of users is greatly affected by cookies. Cookie data helps websites to remember preferences on websites; they ensure that websites are handling data securely, and they switch information in advertisements to make them more relevant.

Marketing is made more effective in every circumstance when the information that is communicated is personalized to the end-user. Cookies help to facilitate this personalization by storing information that will help to reduce spam and redundancy, and increase relevance.

The flaws have a direct impact on your marketing because whenever you calculate any metrics that rely upon your website counts, you will have data filled with artifacts and errors. Although they cause a lot of controversy in privacy, it is the business marketer who wants to make sure that they get what they pay for out of their web traffic:

You need to know exactly how much traffic you are getting from channels you pay for.
You need to know the quality of the traffic you are getting from channels you pay for.
You would like to know that the traffic you are receiving is filled with real people.

These three demands do not seem that hard to answer, but with cookie-based tracking, you are taking an educated guess at the precision of your data. Statistics tell us that the only way to increase our confidence with the precision of our data is to increase the size of the sampled group so that it more closely matches the population it represents. Look at the graph below for an example:

In the graph above you can see the purple columns representing counts of data and in red, you will see the standard deviation for these averages based on a 99% confidence level. As you can see in the chart above, the data is accurate to a degree of error that falls within the red bars; the errors are very large for this small data set. This oversimplified example shows how data is skewed in small numbers… and how large the chance for error.

My website has hundreds of thousands of user traffic. Is that a large enough sample?

As mentioned, the only way to diminish the flaws of user traffic is to significantly increase the data size. As many have questioned before, if you have web traffic in the hundreds of thousands a day, is that enough to minimize the flaws and have more precise results?

Just like their confectionary counterpart, your data is as good as what you put in. If you want 90% precision in your data then you should expect to rely on results that are 90% accurate. Feel free to be as demanding as your organization needs. This is a decision that has to be made at the beginning and one that must be lived with. If you want chocolate chip, you need to put chocolate chips into the dough. If you want peanut butter, you need to put that into the dough. The same goes for measuring web traffic, leads, phone calls, bounces, visitors, sessions, and ultimately attribution.

How does cookieless tracking work?

Cookieless tracking gets much more intricate with what it can track rather than relying on users, which, as outline above, have many flaws in accurate tracking. Basically, with cookieless tracking, there is still a script that runs when someone visits your site. The data that this script captures is not stored in a cookie in the visitor’s browser, but sent to an analytics server that stores the streaming data.

Cookieless tracking allows you to track people not only cross-domain, but also cross-device.

Cross-device tracking without cookies

Cross-device tracking means that no matter where consumers are searching for you – desktop, laptop, smartphone, etc. – you can accurately attribute them and see their real, complete customer journey.

Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn, to name only a few tracking platforms, are slowly shifting away from cookies. They are completely aware of the flaws outlined, yet most have not leaped into the cookie-less world.

Why stick with cookie tracking?

Cookies are not easily replaced. Technology has come a long way in the decades since the inception of the internet, and there is still a lot of valuable information that can make use of cookies. Locally shared and flash-based versions of cookies help applications to load, servers log information into cookies, and developers use them second-hand to ensure that everything is working.

The transition means changing to a new system and having to force marketers to adopt. Privacy laws are still barely catching up and entrepreneurs have to cope with those privacy entry barriers. The services paving the way are making use of cookieless tracking by showing off all the innovative techniques for personalizing marketing. So while cookieless tracking is a more precise way to track, not everyone is quite there yet.

The future is a cookieless world

As long as organizations are creating cookieless tracking systems that allow for protecting privacy, they will be steps ahead of even the largest platforms in the world. The innovations that are available to marketers who are loosed from the flaws of cookie tracking are numerous.

A brief walk-thru of EveryLead’s cookieless tracking

We can’t talk about tracking that does not use cookies without mentioning our own product that does just that. If you want precise web reporting, then we recommend that you learn more about EveryLead, CallSource’s cookieless tracking system. We put a lot of time and effort into creating a privacy protected non-cookie tracking system that would deliver to marketers the capabilities of accurate reporting all in one place.

Start tracking your leads without relying on unreliable cookies.

Get EveryLead.

I want to talk to someone about utilizing cookieless tracking for my business.

Why Your Business Needs CallSource

July 1, 2019 by Cassie Ciopryna

Introduction

CallSource is the premier technology-enabled business performance company who invented call tracking over 25 years ago.

Having tracked over 1 billion phone calls, CallSource is the industry expert in all things call tracking. We have developed our products based on our clients’ feedback, wants, and needs.

CallSource is much more than just a SaaS call tracking company. With human-analyzed lead scoring, appointment confirmation, and employee performance overviews, as well as real call coaches and a reputation management system that responds to reviews for you, CallSource aims to help our clients improve in all aspects of their business.

No matter how you record your phone calls, or where you receive online reviews, CallSource provides data-driven recommendations to improve your marketing spend, optimize employee performance, manage your brand reputation, and help increase your bottom line.

If you are not using any call tracking solution, you are blindly making decisions for your business. Ringing phones are a sign of a healthy business, and you spend many thousands of dollars to make phones ring. Call tracking is essential to make informed marketing decisions based on real data, not assumptions, of marketing and employee performance.

The CallSource Purpose is to enhance performance, accomplishments, and results for individuals and organizations in work and in life. We are here to help you on your business journey.

How the CallSource Solution Works

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
– Peter Drucker

What sets CallSource apart from our competition is our human element.

We humanize your business through our data, giving you actionable options for what you can do right now to improve.
We have unparalleled customer service because of the great humans who work at our company.

We are the only call tracking company that uses humans to score and analyze phone calls, as artificial intelligence (AI) still isn’t at a place to compete with human accuracy.

Although it is a marketing attribution technology, call tracking helps you get to know your customers and what drives them to your business. Data is necessary to make informed business decisions, but it does nothing for your organization without humans diagnosing the data and taking actions based on analytics.

What is call tracking?

At its simplest, call tracking is a set of unique phone numbers (local or toll free) for each marketing campaign that you want to track. Ideally, you should include all of your ad sources, such as your website, direct mail pieces, television advertising, and online listings. All calls to these numbers are routed to your main line(s).

When a potential customer calls in to a call tracking number, detailed information — including the caller’s phone number, name, address, connection status, duration, and more — is automatically captured. The call recordings can be listened to almost immediately after the fact for review.

By viewing call tracking reports, you can see which advertisements drive the most calls to your business, and whether or not you need to move around some of your marketing spend for the best ROI. You can also see the busiest call times for your business, so that you can staff your employees accordingly.

Moving beyond call tracking

Call tracking benefits all appointment-based business. However, there are many more solutions to truly move the needle for your business.

CallSource’s call management solution, which is a suite of our products, tracks and records phone calls, then filters those calls through our phone analytic system. No other solution comes close to the accuracy of CallSource.

While our competitors rely on the speech analysis of robots and crowdsourcing to monitor your calls, we use real people who know your industry to listen and determine the true outcome of every call.

With lead scoring, appointment-conversion rates, employee report cards, call coaching, and reputation management, there are many solutions to help improve employee performance and accurately attribute marketing.

Employee Performance Improvement & Brand Management

“You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the marketplace.”
– David Ogilvy

What Brand Management Means for Your Business

Having a consistent and cohesive brand is important for any successful business. Your brand isn’t just a pretty logo plastered on different materials; it encompasses what your business stands for, and what problems you solve for your customers.

CallSource empowers a consistent brand experience for your customers from the moment a potential customer calls your business. Your call handlers are a potential customer’s first impression of who your business is. How your employees speak to customers should be consistent with how your website represents you, and the tone you use in your online review responses. By speaking with united messaging and similar tones, your brand becomes more personal and is able to connect with consumers on a deeper level.

Your employees are an integral part of your brand. By properly managing your employees and their performance, you are managing your brand and its reputation.

Improving Employee Performance

Your phone handlers are callers’ first impression of your business. No matter your industry, as a business that relies on appointments to drive customer acquisition and sales, you need your phone handlers to deliver a consistent phone experience and adhere to the principles of a successful call. Call handlers should have a sales-type mentality when answering all inbound calls, with their number-one goal being to gain the caller’s commitment to your business by the end of the phone conversation.

It is not enough to be polite and answer questions; call handlers must take control of the conversation and ask callers to set an appointment with your business.

How do you ensure that your employees are delivering consistent service while selling the appointment to customers if you are not measuring performance?

Improve employee’s phone skills with our free call handler audit.

The Importance of Measuring Call Conversion Rates

By receiving analytics on your employees’ phone calls, you can easily see where your call handlers are excelling, and where they need more training and coaching to improve.

CallSource scores all inbound calls with real human analysts at an accuracy rate of 95% or above. Our analysts listen to and categorize calls based on true prospects and appointments set. We analyze each phone call so you don’t have to. The benefits of third-party scoring versus self-scored calls means your call handler is concentrating on the customer and not trying remember every nuance of the call. Having CallSource score your calls also means that every call is consistently scored, providing the business with unbiased data to make better-informed decisions.

Missed opportunity alerts allow you to take control of call handlers’ lost leads to recapture lost business, and improve appointment conversion rates. Without insights into how many of your inbound leads do not commit to an appointment during the phone call, you are losing business to your competitor.

Increasing Conversion Rates Through Call Coaching

Your call handlers’ calls are scored based on key indicators to ensure that proper conversational tactics for a successful, appointment-driven phone call are employed. Managers and employees receive a scorecard of call-handling performance. Call coaching is also available to boost performance where it is needed.

CallSource’s criteria for call-handler performance is based on over 25 years of analyzing and scoring phone calls. Call handlers are scored using a special scorecard developed by CallSource and honed over the years, called our Core Four Principles of a phone call.

With employee scorecards, appointment conversion rate reports, and call coaching, you will have real data to help improve your employees’ skills. Using this personalized data to learn which employees need help and what they need help with will help call handlers improve phone expertise, and enable them to set more appointments, giving your business more opportunities to make sales.

“I always thought my staff was great, but after I bought a new office, and compared its poor marketing results to our other offices, I suspected the front office staff was underperforming. I didn’t have the visibility to be sure what the problem was and I needed a way to know for sure. With the data CallSource provided, I knew which phone staffers learned from the training we gave, and I knew when a specific phone handler fumbled. It was one of the top three best business decisions I ever made.”
– Mark Sanford, CSG Better Hearing

Measuring Your Success With Marketing Attribution

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
– John Wanamaker

To accurately attribute your marketing spend and its success, you must track it.

Call tracking is the most accurate way to attribute your offline marketing. Knowing what you spent per advertising source, and tying that back to the number and quality of the calls that it drove, gives you your true ROI.

How CallSource Helps Inform Your Marketing Spend

We know that it costs money to make the phone ring, and even more to convert a lead into an actual appointment. CallSource reporting takes the guesswork out of where to invest your marketing dollars, and serves as leverage with your vendors when it comes time to evaluate your advertising performance.

Ensuring that a third party is tracking your marketing performance (instead of relying on reports provided to you from your different marketing vendors or personal evaluations) provides reliable and accurate data for better results.

By not only simply seeing how many calls are coming in from each ad source, but by viewing the types of calls coming in filtered through our human analytics, you can see if your magazine advertisement is truly bringing in 50 leads per month, or if 90% of those inbound phone calls are repeat callers or solicitations.

Reviewing call conversion reports by marketing source can help isolate poorly performing ads and highlight ads that are bringing in leads who are ready to schedule the appointment. Call conversion reporting can also give insight into which of your call handlers are not converting prospective customers into appointments, so you know where to focus your efforts.

“CallSource has helped us track specific marketing efforts, giving us a better negotiating position with various media outlets when it comes to setting prices for time and space.”
– Phil Clement, Daniel’s Energy

Online to Offline Attribution

Although call tracking was invented before digital marketing existed, there are many similarities between the two. Both offline (or traditional) and digital attribution are indicators of advertising effectiveness. Both shed light on your customers’ journey to your business and offer ROI reporting. When you couple digital and offline attribution together, a customer’s entire journey is revealed.

Just as CallSource pioneered the call tracking industry, our digital platform is unlike any other, bringing offline and online attribution together to accurately track your customers not only across domains and channels, but across devices.

Our platform is one-of-a-kind, tracking every phone call, chat, text, and web visit that’s coming from your advertising – all in one real-time dashboard.

Conclusion

“Outstanding people have one thing in common: an absolute sense of mission.”
– Zig Ziglar

As an appointment-driven business that relies on the phone to make sales, you will greatly benefit by using CallSource’s solutions and putting in the effort to improve your performance.

With 99.999% uptime, we’re your source for reliability and confidence that your calls are getting through. Our platform is proven, and we work with only the finest Tier 1 class phone carriers.

Although most call tracking services utilize AI and speech analytics to deliver their call analyses, CallSource uses real human analysts to listen to calls and deliver highly accurate data. While speech analytics is useful for a number of things, it lacks the accuracy required to grade an employee’s telephone skills fairly.

CallSource also has the best team to deliver the best-rated customer service. Every client gets a dedicated team assigned specifically to them as well as round-the-clock customer service teams working to make sure that you never go with a question unanswered.

“I can’t say enough about the support we have received from the CallSource team, especially our account rep who is always there to answer our questions or schedule and conduct dealer trainings.”
– Mitch Gaber, Englert, Inc.

Getting Started with CallSource

Onboarding with CallSource is easy to do. We will provide you with new toll free or local phone numbers to publish on your various marketing sources. If you prefer, you can port in your existing marketing source numbers, or integrate your existing recording method to benefit from our services.

Customer service is the number-one priority for us, and every client receives a designated team of CallSource representatives on their account. Your CallSource team will have an introductory call with you within days of signing up to guide you through any set up and walk you through our easy-to-use reporting platform.

Our continuing advisory services will ensure that you are not just getting data delivered to you, but that you know how to use this data and set goals based on our reporting.

Start Now

CallSource’s solutions provide the insights based on 25+ years of experience and over 1 billion phone calls tracked. In order to grow your business and acquire new customers, you will need to put in efforts to improve. Using call tracking and actionable analytics will guarantee your future improvement success.

It’s time to let us help you reach your goals. CallSource is ready to take this journey with you.

Request a Demo

Your Newest Customers, Millennials, Are Changing Up the Car Buying Process. So Where Should You Focus Your Efforts?

June 28, 2019 by Cassie Ciopryna 3 Comments

Millennials optimize the online car buying process more than any previous consumers. What does this mean for dealers?

It’s no secret to car dealers that the process of car selling is ever-changing. Besides the evolution of automobiles themselves, there is also another important factor changing in the industry—the customer.

As the largest call tracking company in the world and having worked with auto dealerships for over 20 years, CallSource sees all the trends in the automotive marketing space—so you can say we know a thing or two about it.

It is important to not only focus on the car selling process but the car buying process that your consumers are experiencing. And while it may or not be surprising for dealerships, millennials (people born between 1981 and 1997) are making up a bigger customer-base than you may have previously thought. Seriously –AutoRaptor reports that as of April 2016, millennials are the largest living generation in America.

The question that remains is: where should you be focusing your marketing and selling efforts to most effectively meet your sales quotas and your millennial customers’ needs? The answer, of course, can be found online.

Quite literally—I mean the answer is the internet. You need to focus more on your online process and the online car buying journey.

OK, focusing a bit more on your online efforts probably isn’t any groundbreaking news for you – but I want to make sure that you understand the significance. Having a website isn’t enough; there are many facets of the online experience that you need to pay attention to, especially when it’s reported that millennials spend over 17 hours researching their vehicle before purchasing it, and 71% of them need to be aware of all of their possible vehicle options.

These two stats combined show that they are obviously perusing many other sites other than your own, so you need to make sure that your dealership stands out online, and that doesn’t only include your website.

How do you do this?

Dealers Need to Focus on Online Reviews

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—you need to focus on your online review presence! This is even more vital when attracting millennial customers, who are more likely to read and write online reviews. Still not convinced that you need to spend more time on reputation management? This statistic may change your mind.

BrightLocal reports that 97% of millennials read local business’ online reviews, and 89% of them trust online reviews. That means a better online review presence may make the difference between winning or losing a customer.

Don’t think that just because you may be in the closest proximity to customers that they’ll choose you for convenience—Digital Air Strike’s Sixth Annual Automotive Social Media Trends study for 2017 reports that 72% of car buyers and 63% of service customers would drive 20-60 miles to a dealership with good reviews. Don’t you think that’s worth striving for?

Get Smarter on Smart Phones at your Dealership

Most of us are guilty of being attached at the hip with our smartphones; it’s a device that millennials are using when doing some of their online research. Sad as I am to report this, according to AutoRaptor, 80% of millennials have texted in the past 24 hours, and 83% of them even sleep with their mobile device.

Automotive text-enabled phone numbers

This is why you need to be sure to have a great mobile-enabled website, as well as tech-savvy smartphone capabilities such as text alerts, click-to-call, and app integrations. If a consumer tries to text you and your number isn’t text-enabled, they will think that you are ignoring them, and move on to your competitor who does have text-enabled lines.

Don’t be left behind due to a lack of being up-to-date with your technology.

Mobile-Friendly Sites to Sell More Automobiles

Don’t know if you have a mobile-friendly site? Check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. It’s a free mobile evaluation tool.

Dealers Need Digital Ads

AutoTrader reports that 82% of millennials credit third-party sites as the top source of their purchase decision. You want to make sure your dealership appears on all of these sites, and anywhere across the web that consumers are looking as a part of their buying decision.

If you don’t know where they’re looking, you don’t know where to target this customer-base. But when you can track the entire customer journey – cross-domain AND cross-device, you can ensure you are showcasing your dealership to prospective customers and understanding how people get to your dealership.

Less Isn’t More

I don’t want to say that millennials are more flashy than their Baby Boomer parents but…I’m going to say it, they’re more flashy. When you can show off everything you have in a few clicks to a social media site, how can you blame them? According to AutoTrader’s study, millennials care about owning the best brand and are willing to pay more for a product that fits with their image.

Marketers and salespeople know that achieving a sales lead is no time to be modest – show off on your website what features your dealership has that makes you the best and put your vehicles’ special features in the forefront when listing cars. You know that millennials are going to do a deep dive into figuring out all that they can anyway, why not deliver it all up front?

Schedule a time to learn how CallSource’s EveryLead platform can show you which cars consumers are looking at now – and make sure to keep your most popular vehicles in stock.

Auto Dealers Need to Get More Social on Social Media

You better believe that some of millennials’ online research will lead them to social channels. If you aren’t present there, it can be catastrophic for your dealership. The truth is, they might not even find you to begin with if you aren’t present on social media.

Digital Air Strike reported that 77% of car buyers and 55% of Service Customers clicked on a Facebook ad because of an offer or promo, and a recent report by Deloitte found that 47% of millennials say social media influences their purchase decisions (compared to 19% across other age groups). Where are you advertising?

Social media isn’t only for gaining new customers, though. You should be using your social channels to regularly communicate with your audiences, especially if someone directly communicates with you via these platforms. Sprout Social reports that 30% of millennials engage with a brand on social at least once a month, but also—89% of social media messages to brands go ignored. Yet, the top choice for a customer care channel is social media. Don’t be a part of this disconnect—use social media to your advantage in marketing and customer service.

Keep Consumers Engaged With Your Dealership

It’s evident in this internet-era that people just don’t have quite the attention span you may be hoping for. And when, as we mentioned, millennials are spending over 17 hours doing their car research before buying—it’s important to get their attention back to your dealership. Responding quickly to online chats, tweets, or whatever digital way your consumer is interacting with you is imperative.

Do you know how your social chat feature on your website is doing? How about the number of consumers who are visiting your website and then leaving to visit another dealer’s site? Well, with EveryLead, you can see these stats and more. With this newest product, you can see transcripts of online chats, which cars your consumers are viewing, and how many are defected to competitor sites—all in one easy dashboard.

So what are you waiting for? Get working on your online presence and start selling to your largest pool of customers! The millennials are waiting for it.

Schedule a demo with a CallSource Automotive Specialist now and start improving your dealership’s sales – even to millennials.

NAP Consistency, Local SEO, and Call Tracking: How Can Your Company Have it All?

June 27, 2019 by Cassie Ciopryna

NAP consistency isn’t the end-all and be-all for ranking high in your local search results. It is only one piece of the puzzle that is SEO.
Google has many tips on how to improve your info to appear in relevant searches in your area. Below are some tips they give for improving your Google My Business profile:

Enter complete data

Verify your location(s)

Keep your hours accurate

Manage and respond to reviews

Add photos

Keep reading to learn the truth about what NAP consistency means

As a local business, having potential customers in your area aware of your existence and the products and services you offer is a vital component of your company’s success.

There are a few ways to get in front of potential customers so you are top of mind when they need you. Usually this is done with different types of marketing. But, since the inception of the internet and search browsers becoming mainstream, another major way that consumers find your business is organic search. This means they type in the browser what they are looking for and the list of local businesses appear.

To be a leader in your local search market, you must have a good internet presence, which includes using successful SEO (search engine optimization) best practices.

One factor of local SEO that cannot be ignored, and any smart digital marketer must be aware of, is NAP consistency.

Yet, any smart marketer also knows that it is vital to properly track and measure marketing attribution for marketing success, too. One vital way to do this, especially for local business that are appointment-based and rely on the phone for appointments and sales, is with call tracking.

There have been many claims that you cannot have proper, successful NAP consistency when using call tracking, which leads businesses to believe that you can’t have both great local SEO and properly attribute your phone calls – but this is not true.

Call tracking, when done correctly, will not have a negative impact on NAP consistency and your local SEO.

Read on below to learn how your local company can have it all: great local SEO, correct NAP consistency, and call tracking.

What is NAP consistency?

NAP is an acronym standing for Name, Address, Phone Number. Having NAP consistency means having a consistent listing of your business’s name, address, and phone number (and also website – but NAPW just doesn’t sound as catchy) across all listings on the internet.

Having consistent listings helps search engines match your business and serve it up as a local result.

Why is NAP consistency important?

Although no one knows the exact formula for Google’s ever-changing SEO ranking methods, it is evident that NAP consistency is an important factor for businesses, especially those who want to show up in local search.

It has been said that having too many inconsistent listings of your company, even with slight variances of company name such as Sunrise Heating and Cooling vs. Sunrise HVAC can impact your business’ reliability to search engine crawlers, therefore ruining higher ranking chances.

NAP consistency and local SEO

NAP consistency is especially relevant for local businesses that want to have high rankings in local SEO results.

Interested in some Local Business Digital Marketing strategies? We’ve got a podcast episode on that very topic here.

When Google crawlers can correctly identify your business and where it is located, it has a better chance of showing up higher in local search results and having a good presence in the Google Local Pack.

But NAP consistency isn’t the end-all and be-all for ranking high in your local search results. It is only one piece of the puzzle that is SEO. Google’s specific algorithm for measuring SEO is their own “secret sauce,” and few actually see the real formula. Basically, Google’s algorithm is continuously updating to keep rewarding pages that they feel are delivering valuable information to the end user, which is the mission of Google’s search.

The more times your company appears in local searches, the more opportunities there are to bring leads to your business.

Google has many tips on how to improve your info to appear in relevant searches in your area. Below are some tips they give for improving your Google My Business profile:

Enter complete data
Verify your location(s)
Keep your hours accurate
Manage and respond to reviews
Add photos

Many businesses don’t even have a complete Google My Business profile, so before worrying about the more detailed SEO tactics, it is important to make sure your business has a completed profile on Google My Business if you want to show up in local search results.

Why is local SEO important for your business?

Having a good SEO presence, especially a good local SEO presence, is detrimental if you want to show up to local consumers searching for a need they have from a nearby business.

For example, if a person nearby searches Google for “Toyota dealership near me,” your business will show up in the Google local pack as long as you are performing well in local SEO and have a completed Google My Business profile.

To gain more customers and get more business, you must appear in local search results – how else do you expect consumers to find you? If you don’t exist on the internet, you won’t exist in the minds of most people who are searching for your products or services.

The more times your company appears in local searches, the more opportunities there are to bring leads to your business.

Does call tracking affect NAP consistency?

Now for the hard-hitting question: does call tracking negatively affect NAP consistency?

Since most call tracking methods require unique call tracking numbers to be placed on your different marketing sources, the answer here is more like a hard “maybe,” rather than a definitive “yes” or “no.” Unfortunately, most things with SEO aren’t necessarily black and white (as much as we’d all like them to be).

While NAP consistency outlines that your name, address, and phone number must match, it isn’t clear what weight this has in your overall SEO presence.

NAP Consistency Importance for SEO

Keep in mind that there are different types of call tracking methods – static call tracking and dynamic number insertion (DNI). Dynamic numbers display a different number to every consumer; the numbers that are displayed are different than what the real connecting number is on the backend.

Dynamic numbers are configured in such a way that they have no effect on NAP consistency.

It used to be said that regular, static call tracking hurts SEO, but technologies and SEO best practices have both evolved since then. The myth that call tracking ruins your SEO simply isn’t true.

In Google’s most recent guidelines for representing your business on Google, they note to provide a phone number that connects to your business location “as directly as possible,” OR to include a website. The “P” in NAP could also refer to your website, and therefore we can’t be exactly sure how much weight one or the other really holds. (We don’t have a Google crystal ball).

Another key thing to note is Google says “additional phone numbers can be used on Google My Business websites and other local surfaces.” If Google was to negatively impact having different phone numbers on different websites, would they allow additional phone numbers to be used on other websites? Call tracking numbers can be used in local search – especially if you follow this easy step-by-step process to add a call tracking number in Google My Business.

This quote goes contradicts the “rule,” saying that the NAP must be 100% consistent on all sites and across everywhere that your business may appear on the web.

Using call tracking & having NAP consistency

Though it is clear that NAP consistency is an important factor of local SEO, it shouldn’t make you afraid to use call tracking to help your company have the most accurate marketing attribution.

The benefits of using call tracking are clear:

Accurately attribute which ad sources callers call from
Make better marketing decisions to impact ROI
Discover peak times for inbound phone calls to make scheduling decisions
Record phone calls for employee and customer insights
And much more

Businesses don’t want to have to choose between using call tracking to help business performance or have superior SEO practices in place for a better online presence. And that choice doesn’t have to be made. There are ways to utilize call tracking and be an SEO-friendly company.

Dynamic Number Insertion
- With DNI, you can accurately track consumers down to the referral site and keyword level to see what leads people to your site – and has no impact on SEO.
Tracking your main business line
- Though tracking your main business line isn’t as effective for marketing decisions as using unique call tracking numbers is, it is an option for those who are still concerned about the effects that call tracking may or may not have on NAP consistency. Tracking your main line requires setting up that number with tracking enabled. Talk to a CallSource specialist for more information on this method of call tracking.
Static call tracking
- Since the impact that NAP consistency really has on local SEO is still slightly unclear, and whether or not phone number or website consistency matters the most in your NAP, it is probably safe to still use unique call tracking numbers on certain places that your company appears online. Just be sure that the rest of your NAP information (Name, Address, Website) remain consistent throughout. Stay up-to-date with the rest of SEO best practices to ensure that you are continuously improving and optimizing your website to be optimized to show up in search engines.

Win with complete marketing attribution and SEO-friendly tracking

CallSource’s EveryLead platform enhances Google Analytics data and pulls together all of your online and offline attribution in one easy-to-use platform so that you can see all of your traditional and digital (paid and organic) marketing campaigns at-a-glance. EveryLead uses dynamic number insertion, so you can be sure that nothing is negatively impacting your SEO.

Ready to start tracking your customers’ complete journey, online to offline, cross-domain and cross-device? Request a meeting with a CallSource specialist or call 833-EVERYLEAD to learn more.

Learn the complete consumer journey for more
reliable marketing ROI

Get Dynamic Number Insertion.

I want to talk to learn more about dynamic number insertion.

Digital Attribution 101: Why Digital Attribution Matters to Your Dealership

June 18, 2019 by Cassie Ciopryna

Digital attribution may sound like the newest marketing buzzword, but it is more than a trendy topic. Understanding digital attribution tells you how to reach consumers to get them in your doors so you can sell more cars.

Why does digital attribution matter?

To implement an effective digital strategy, you need to track and analyze your digital marketing. When 9 out of 10 Americans are online, and 81% of consumers research online before making a buying decision, you have to advertise online. Easy, right? The trick is – correctly tracking your online ads’ success.

Research shows that digital channels will overtake traditional media by 2021; everyone knows you need to advertise online to reach potential buyers.

The problem is consumers’ buying journeys aren’t as linear as they used to be. It isn’t always as simple as a person seeing one of your PPC ads, clicking it, and then calling your dealership to come in and see a car. Everyone wishes it were that simple! But we all know when potential consumers are doing research, they are bouncing from one piece of content or ad to the next before contacting you.

When this happens, how do you correctly measure which points of the customer journey were important and how do you weigh each touch point? The answer is to use multi-touch attribution.

Solving gaps with multi-touch attribution

A key component for successful multi-touch attribution is determining unique users to follow along their buying journey. Not all research sessions or point of the journey are completed in one session; it may be across several days or even longer that a buyer is researching and increasing their purchase intent.

By correctly identifying people – either by using cookies to identify users or using a more robust, cookie-free marketing attribution solution such as CallSource’s EveryLead platform, you unveil the complete customer journey. Once you know your consumers’ journeys, you must determine which multi-channel attribution model your dealership should and will follow to attribute each touchpoint.

The main multi-channel attribution models used by marketers are:

Last Click/Final Click Attribution: Attributes the final channel’s click through to the source of lead generation.
First Click Attribution: The reverse of the last click; attributes the first channel that brought someone into all of the other channels as given credit in lead generation.
Linear Attribution: All channels are assigned a consistent value in the customer journey by distributing attribution evenly.
Time-Decay Attribution: The channels at the end of the consumer journey receive the most credit, and the channels as the beginning receive the least. The channel at the halfway point of the consumer journey received 50% of the weight.
U-Shaped/Position-Based Attribution: Favors straight lead generation by giving more credit to the first channel that brought someone in and the final channel that converted the consumer.

To dive deep into multi-channel attribution models and determine which is right for your dealership, download our free Automotive Digital Management Guide.

How to track consumers along their car-buying journey

With a reliable digital management platform, your dealership can correctly attribute all of the touch-points that consumers interact with to bring them to your dealership.

By knowing where consumers go online when they are researching cars, you can make better-informed marketing decisions. This matters because understanding what is important to customers means you stop paying for things that don’t matter as much. This translates to driving people to your dealership more efficiently.

Without using cookies (which can be unreliable at giving true data), but by using a more robust digital tracking system, your dealership can track consumers not only cross-domain but cross-device. You need to know this to understand what ads ultimately end in a sale.

Dynamic number insertion (DNI) measures the number of phone calls from your digital marketing and connects the online consumer journey to an offline phone call. Simply stated, DNI is a phone number that follows your customer no matter where they go on the internet, regardless if they switch from a phone or tablet.

The rule of thumb for DNI is if something requires code, you need to be using DNI.

Learn more about your consumers’ complete journeys and your marketing performance success

Investing in your digital attribution with multi-touch attribution tracking empowers your marketing team and your dealership to have a fuller picture of the customer journey. This means your sales teams get more leads to close more deals.