$100 reward

Here’s a used car IQ test question: How many page views per vehicle in stock should a typical dealer get from one of the leading third-party site providers?

In order to calculate this number, start by going to the dealer reporting tool offered by your site provider. If you don’t know that such a thing exists, you’re in trouble out of the gate. If it takes you more than 10 minutes to find someone in your dealership that knows the log in and password, you’ve got a problem.

Once you’re in, take the number of page views that your vehicles have received month-to-date and divide it by the current date of the calendar. For example, if you’ve had 2000 page views by the 10th day of the month, and today you have 75 vehicles on line, divide 2000 by 75 (26.6), and then divide that number by 10 (10th day of the month). This means that you’ve been averaging 2.6 page views per day, per vehicle.

Without doing the calculation, do you have any clue as to whether a good benchmark is 2.6, 26.6 or 266 per day? If you have no idea, you’re among the not so elite ranks of our industry. The problem is that unless you know, you really have no idea as to whether your investment with the third-party site is providing a fair return, nor do you really have any notion as to how effective is your overall internet presence.

I would welcome any one and everyone to comment with their average per day, per unit number. If and only if our industry gets a handle on what this number should be can we all begin to truly understand the environment that drives traffic to our dealerships. I will pay $100 cash reward at the end of the month for the blog contributor that provides me with the closest average page view per vehicle.

Good luck.