How car dealers boost sales with dynamic call tracking

Almost half (46%) of calls into car dealerships originate from a Google Business Profile listing. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve seen a strong increase in telephone calls and website visits, with a particular trend towards the use of organic and social channels to drive calls into dealerships.

Where do your prospects find you?

It’s vital to ensure that your marketing strategy is based on solid data, and your marketing spend is being used efficiently. Understanding where your inbound enquiries are coming from is central to that.

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

How do dynamic numbers work?

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.

^{Multiple numbers are assigned to each marketing source. Every visitor to your site sees a number that’s unique to them and their visit.}

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.

Make smarter marketing decisions

Some stats that are sure to pique your interest…

• Phone calls in January 2023 delivered a 22% year-on-year growth
• Organic and PPC make up 17% of calls, versus 3% from AutoTrader
• 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.

Using dynamic telephone numbers on your website shows you where your phone enquiries are coming from. This means you can easily prove whether your investment in listing on Auto Trader is 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 Business Profile (GBP) listing
• SEO / organic
• Email campaigns
• Remarketing
• Referral websites (e.g. AutoTrader)
• Social media

Don’t forget: It’s crucial to tag links to your site on your GBP page, so you can track clicks from your listing and differentiate them from clicks on organic search results.

What’s more, by attributing your inbound calls to different departments, call tracking highlights inefficiencies in your marketing spend. For example, you might notice a high volume of calls from your PPC campaigns are being transferred to your service department. 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 enquiries – and is not being spent on your existing customers.

Operational benefits of call tracking

The amount of actionable insights and data you can get from your phone calls is staggering. It’s incredibly valuable in so many ways, including helping you streamline your operations and boost you profit margins.

By implementing call tracking, you can instantly see how well your operations performing, and where you can tighten up the sales process and improve the customer experience. You can tell:

• How long it takes your team to answer the phone: Are they prompt, or do calls go unanswered?
• When calls come into your dealership: To 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.

You can also 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, voicemail boxes, and missed call alerts – to make sure you never miss an enquiry.

Who would have thought that a simple call could generate some much useful data to help you run your dealership more effectively?

This article was first published on the Bluesky Interactive blog. It was revised and updated in August 2023.