Call Track Manager gives you insights, even if it is unwanted…

Recently we started with the Call Track Manager, a new service that, besides specific telephone numbers for your marketing efforts, will also get the inbound calls screened. In other words, the virtual BDC of the #DCDW records the conversations and listens to them for you. In this way, we check whether our customers get the most out of the opportunities. Because we do this, things also come up that were always there, but were not really visible to the naked eye. Some things are obvious. Why should a customer, who is calling specifically for the sales department, still have to go through a choice menu? After all, we know that the sales department is being called, because the telephone number used is only used by that department. But there’s more. The Call Track Manager and the recording of the conversations also show something different with some portals …

A tollgate in your own name

If you advertise on certain car portals, you will get a company page there. This page is a so-called landing page. Now it is the case that you can lead traffic to it. You can do this through SEO, but also through AdWords, and that’s a problem for me. After all, is it the task of a portal to route traffic that is actively searching for the contact details of a car company, via an AdWords campaign on your trade name, to create a tollgate to give the customer back by a detour? Today’s customer simply clicks on the first result where he sees the trade name, and the car company gets less organic and direct traffic on his website than is desirable. On the landing page there is a telephone number (call track), on which the customer will make a call to the company. For example, a visit via a loop is suddenly a lead from a portal on a trade name of someone else…

If you listen to these conversations with the car companies, you will hear that most calls are about maintenance. These are calls from customers who did not want to call through a portal at all, but simply clicked on the best result from Google (AdWords). And indeed, that search result is influenced by an AdWords campaign with the trade name of the relevant car company. So you get a claim from a partner who says that he has created value and extra opportunities, but in reality made a tollgate, where you pay for customers who were already looking for you. You can compare it with requesting access for every passer-by arriving at the McDrive…

How to prevent it?

It shows once more that our new services actually provide insight into the opportunities you get. What is also clear is that you have to measure. You can also kindly, but very urgently, ask the parties who do this not to parasitize on your trade name. Portals should offer you extra opportunities and those are not the opportunities that you yourself had already created. A party such as Marktplaats does not apply this method for those reasons. If portals reach the first places based on SEO, the value is increasing. If the portal intentionally advertises with your trade name, then something is wrong in the relationship between the portal and the car company in question.

About Paul de Vries

Paul de Vries became a Key Automotive Spokesperson at eBay (Marketplace) after selling Nieuweautokopen.nl to eBay back in 2015. Paul is the founder and CEO of the #DCDW Academy and the presenter of the #DCDW Podcast. He is also a by dealers and importers frequently asked speaker in the online automotive industry. Paul is the winner of the prestigious Lighthouse Award 2016 in the U.S.! `Lead the Way op de digitale snelweg’ is Paul’s new book, which can be used as a guide in the online automotive industry. More information is available at: DCDW.nl.