Where’s our traffic? We already know. The question, is now that we know where the customer is how do we become the one dealer or even the. Our real traffic is online, and even if every customer that drove to our brick and mortars bought a car our closing ratios would be misleading. You see, in the past buyers drove around to 4-5 dealerships before choosing where to purchase, which supports that 20-30% closing ratio. Today, the buyers are driving around online looking for an attractive place to click, creating online traffic for about 5-7 dealerships before choosing where to purchase, and once they narrow it down they are more often ready to buy. And although our showroom closing ratio may be significantly higher than past years, our true closing ratios really aren’t any higher. To make sense of the stats, we have to look a little further. After all, we have not suddenly reached the 80-90% closing ratio that it seems we would have to have across the board to support this statistic. Now we are hearing stats that say buyers are only visiting 1.2 dealers before purchasing. Our initial thought when hearing this may be “Impossible”. Historically, dealers have hovered around the 20-30% closing ratio.
