State of the Automotive Industry's Marketing Efforts - Mongoose Metrics

In our recent research data series, The State of Automotive Marketing, we set out to evaluate and address some of the challenges that automotive dealers face today in connecting with customers and potential customers via social media. With the results from this series our goal is to help automotive marketers better understand and leverage best practices as part of the overall marketing mix. We want you to have the confidence when forming your plan and justifying marketing spend.

How did we retrieve the raw data?

Using Jigsaw.com?s API we were able to retrieve the company information of 17,669 automotive dealerships. ?We then crawled the domains of each dealership website and downloaded the homepage source code. By downloading all source code we were able to analyze which social media platforms were the preferred choice and how they are being utilized. Taking it one step further: With our retrieved data we were able to use Facebook?s Open Graph API and Twitter?s FollowerWonk to measure dealership engagement ratios.

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What did we find in our research?

• Facebook has the largest presence of the auto industry with 6,628 dealers (38%)
  • Marketing among dealers is concentrated on the east coast, Midwest and west coast
  • Most dealers have between 5-222 fans
  • Most dealers have < 0.58% engagement
• Twitter has the second-largest presence of auto dealers with 4,164 (24%)
  • Twitter marketing is also concentrated on the East coast, Midwest and West coast
  • The average dealership Twitter account had between 3-144 followers
  • Over time, the average follower count tends to stagnate
• YouTube showed the third largest presence with 4,066 (23%)
• In terms of Google+, 1,344 (8%) of dealers have a Google+ page.
• Only 270 (2%) of dealerships had a LinkedIn company page.
• Facebook and Twitter are commonly used together with 3,940 (22%) of dealers utilizing both networks to market.

While many dealerships are taking advantage of various social media platforms the question becomes; Are marketing efforts effective and what is the process for measuring effectiveness? In our upcoming blog post we will review engagement ratios in comparison to ?like? or ?follower? counts.

For further details about the research or to receive a copy of the presentation contact Pamela.mcgowan@mongoosemetrics.com. For more information visit the research series page of our website.

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Tags: automotive, Call Tracking, facebook, measure marketing, mobile advertising, ROI, tracking, Twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2012 at 8:26 am and is filed under Features, Tips, & Announcements. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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