Digital advertising spend has been on the rise over the past decade. In fact, a recent study conducted by Proxima group found that 28% of total budget in the US is now dedicated to digital marketing. Unfortunately, the percentage of budgets being wasted has also grown – it’s now 60% across the globe! In order to combat wasted ad spend, dealers need to focus on achieving transparency in their digital marketing campaigns. This means getting a clear picture of exactly where their money is going, as well as what the return looks like.

A great way to make sure you’re not wasting money is to perform a VIN-view analysis of your inventory. You’ll gain transparency into which VINs on your lot are getting traffic to their VDPs – more specifically, exactly how many views each source is delivering to each VIN. The process is simple. And, for most dealers, the results are truly illuminating.

Our research shows the average dealer is driving 89% of paid web traffic to only 25% of their inventory. Instead of evenly distributing spend across all vehicles, ad dollars are flooding to a very small portion of inventory, which is then receiving more traffic than necessary (it takes 30 VDP views per VIN to turn that VIN on time). If the majority of your cars is receiving far less than 30 VDP views, and you’re paying $26 per day to hold each car, then you’ll likely find that by the time that VIN sells, your costs will have far outpaced your profit.

Every VIN on your lot will sell…eventually. The question is, when it does – how profitable will you be?

Completing a VIN View Analysis for your dealership is the most important digital marketing task you can undertake today. Before you spend another dime on digital advertising, use the free VIN View Optimizer™ tool from LotLinx to see where you should really be focusing your digital dollars.