A model of new management brought to you from Central Wisconsin

Below you’ll find an email exchange among dealer Keith Kocourek of the Kocourek Auto Group in Central Wisconsin and various managers from both his organization and AutoTrader.com.  As you read the exchange ask yourself whether the subject matter of his communications is commonplace in your organization.  If it is not, please be assured that you may be missing some of the most incredible traffic generating opportunities that exist anywhere in the dealership environment.  The opportunity of which I speak is the subject matter of the Pixel section in my new book, Velocity 2.0:  Paint, Pixels and Profitability.  I would encourage everyone to speak to Kocourek, their AutoTrader rep and/or read my new book to learn what you may be missing.  This is the type of conversation that I think needs to take place in every dealership across America.

Keith – here are your November scorecards.  Please call me if you have any questions. Thanks! – Jeff (AutoTrader)

Keith – Tim and my self have been looking at this Auto Trader detailed page view difference.  Attached are the scorecards for each store for the month of November.  December’s scorecards will be out the first part of January.  I talked with Jeff Flack from Auto Trader and he is going to be looking into this further for us but here is what he shared with me, Auto Trader refers to the “m” factor.  This figure is number of page views divided by number of searches.  Normal for the country is 3% and a very good job is 4%.  We here at the Chevy store have been running 3.4%-3.6% over the last couple of months.  This month we are running 7.1%.  Some things to remember for this are; the inventory at the Chevy store is larger than any of our other stores, we have 27 pictures of each unit and we are the only store in our area to have video of each car.  All of these factors help to drive detailed page views.  Also we’ve noticed last month our detailed page views for new were 116, so far this month they are up to 1,542. People are looking at our new car product more as well.  Another thing we discussed was, we also have leader boards in the Green Bay and Madison market areas.

V Auto does not have an inventory demand index application.  They currently get this information from us, which is provided from Auto Trader.  The attached scorecards do have the inventory demand index broken out by model for each store.  The scorecards also have an average demand index number for each store.  Chevy is 119, Ford is 106, Kia is 173 and Imports is 137. 

We are continuing to work with James and Jeff from Auto Trader to help us understand the spike in detailed page views.  We feel it is a combination of all of the above but will certainly keep you informed of any further information we are able to come up with.  – Jeff (Kocourek Auto Group)  

Dale – FYI, this is great news if I can figure out how to duplicate it at the other stores.  I will let you know when I find the answer. – Keith K.