It's back to the future for car shoppers, who now much prefer to contact dealerships with an old-fashioned phone call rather than via the Internet.

Two years ago, Internet sales leads were gaining on phone leads, dealers and digital marketing vendors say. But ubiquitous smartphones changed all that.

"Our phone calls are going through the roof," said Mark Holian, general manager of Gulf Coast Auto Park's Ford, Nissan and Toyota stores 40 minutes from Houston.

Today, most car buyers carry smartphones. And it's easier to use a click-to-call phone link in a dealership ad than fill out a Web site information form or send an e-mail, said Holian, whose stores sold 304 new and used…

The answer for the question of whether or not to have a top-notch live chat on your dealership is the same as having a sharp website: to convey information to your prospects in a manner that generates quality leads and ultimately sells more cars. It's really that simple. In the mid 90's, you could get away with a cut-rate website and impress your 20 Group with it when the technology was new. At that point, putting inventory online was cutting edge, and having actual inventory photos was akin to traveling to the moon. Nowadays you wouldn't think of using a website designed by the neighbor kid or skipping inventory photos.

The same is true with live chat. If you just want to say you have chat and occasionally capture some contact information, by all means grab the free or cheap service. If you want to engage your buyers in a manner that starts them on the path to a purchase, shop for the one that will generate…

Alan, let me begin by saying that you are one of my favorite trainers and I highly recommend your training to any dealership.  Your training is exceptional. However....the vast majority of salespeople are not effective at handling Internet leads or phone calls. In fact, they are horrible at it. The average turnover of the salesforce in the car business is extraordinarily high and the main reason for this high turnover is the lack of training that new salespeople get.  They are set up to fail from the start. Is it any wonder that when a new salesperson fails over and over in the beginning of their careers that they start to look at other options?  As an industry, we are not even training new salespeople how to sell cars. What makes you think that we are going to do a good job training…

Here’s a question for you –

Is your BDC the result of a failure in training?

That should have your attention.  If I’ve ever written an article that will be misconstrued, this will be the one! As I’ve talked to dealers over the years, I’ve seen many BDC’s spring up out of knee-jerk frustration. While there are obviously exceptions to the rule, this is something I’ve seen repeated in the industry over the past several years.  A dealer says “we tried training our salespeople, but they’re still terrible at handling phones so we’ve hired three people and all they’re going to do now is handle our inbound sales calls as well as…

The bad part about search engine optimization in the automotive industry is that there are so many companies that report on what they do for SEO rather than what they're accomplishing with their efforts. We've seen this hundreds of times when bringing on new clients and it's time to set the record straight.

It isn't hard to track the key performance metrics through which to hold your SEO or website vendor accountable. The most important thing to remember as the client is that you should have control over the data that you want to receive in reporting. That's the whole point. Letting them show you what they want you to see is not as effective as letting them know what you want to see.

There are plenty of things that go into SEO that a dealer could ask for in reporting, but I've broken…

We love bringing you the top news stories and blogs for the auto industry each week! Staying up with the trends and changes in the industry and car buyer behavior makes our business better, and we know it can really revolutionize yours too! So enjoy these articles and pat yourself on the back for realizing that the world isn’t standing still. Keep moving forward and keep learning!

10. What Can Car Dealers Learn from Billy Beane?

DS News’ Dave Martinson delivers a great analogy between Billy Beane’s strategy for making a better baseball team and how dealerships can use big data to bring their dealerships to a whole new level in the game against their…

by Ben Brockhaus-Hall, Cobalt SEO Specialist

More and more businesses are incorporating SEO into their marketing budgets every day and car dealerships are a big part of this emerging trend. In this new world where people Google everything before they buy, it is more important than ever to adapt with new strategies that set your dealership apart from the competition.

The million dollar question is: how do you do this?

There are only so many mentions of your brand and hometown you can put on your website. There are only so many backlinks you can get to your site. Let’s face it, Google and Bing have gotten smarter and continue to do so.

To everyone’s surprise, Google overhauled their entire algorithm for ranking websites…

How does shopper NOT take action?

http://www.tysinger.com/new-Hampton-2015-Hyundai-Genesis-5.0L-KMHGN4JF8FU021962

I am sure many of you have heard about the recent customer service debacle involving Comcast over the past week.

In case you aren’t familiar with what happened, a customer called into their service center attempting to cancel his service after almost a decade. He was transferred to a customer retention department and, unfortunately, was connected with a person who did the exact opposite. The customer’s patience during this call is amazing. The Comcast representative hounds him for almost 18 minutes (only 8 of which were recorded) repeatedly asking the same questions in his efforts to either keep the customer or understand why the customer was leaving. The customer eventually succeeded in…

This photo cracks me up because it looks as if the guy wants to make sure that you've noticed how good he looks in the reflection of the car!

What a stupid, selfish, conceited sounding question, right? "What do you think about me?"...

Yet this is what I see on the majority of dealership websites that I visit. 

A whole lot of "We're so awesome" and "Look at how pretty…