For the sixth consecutive year, Foureyes released its new automotive industry benchmarks. This data is intended to help dealers and dealer groups compare their performance against the industry and track trends in how leads behave – all in an effort to help you know what it takes to beat the competition and exceed your sales and marketing goals in 2024.

This year, Foureyes tracked, analyzed, and aggregated data from January 2022 - November 2023, which included more than:

• 900 million dealer website visits
• 29 million unique pieces of inventory
• 22,000 automotive dealership websites (including group sites)

To provide clear benchmarks, this report filters out website activity from bots, solicitors, job seekers, service customers, and other non-sales leads that dealers nationwide received.

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Mishandled Leads

Dealers don’t want to leave prospects hanging out to dry, but it still happens. Overall, 43% of qualified leads were mishandled – that means in-market shoppers weren’t logged to CRMs, had their calls missed, or experienced delayed follow-up. This metric has slightly dipped from last year's report (37%)

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Hello??

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Looking more closely at “mishandled” leads, Foureyes found that 13.1% of a dealer's new in-market leads were never logged to dealer CRMs – most of those (27.7%) stemming from website calls. This number continues to rise (10.6% in 2021, 11.7% in 2022, 12.4% in 2023).

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Don’t you forget about me :(

This 65% statistic has held fairly constant over the last several years, according to Foureyes data. Dealers have dedicated resources to improving the sales process and customer experience, but aren’t necessarily seeing the fruits of their labor.

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Lead Attribution

Here’s a funnel breakdown of more than 80 million dealership website visitors across the United States.

Calls via dealer websites generated the most total “Leads,” however forms accounted for the most “Qualified Leads” (i.e. in-market) and “Sold Leads."

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Here's the total view from top to bottom. In all, dealer closed deals with less than 1% of their website visitors, and 4.3% of all their web leads.

Days to Close

Among qualified leads that buy, 58.9% do so within three days of filling out a form, chat, or website call. This is trending upwards in comparison to previous years.

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Leads by Channel

Which channels are dealers using to not just generate leads, but generate the right leads that will actually buy? (i.e. those who are in-market)

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While Organic and Paid channels accounted for generating the most "Leads," it was Direct that ended up accounting for the most sales.

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Beat These Benchmarks

Take advantage of these industry insights to keep a pulse on what’s happening in the market.

But you don’t have to do it alone. Foureyes quickly helps dealers and their groups close more of the leads they already have (in their CRMs, and from their website activity and inventory).