As franchise automotive dealers increase their investments in online marketing, industry leaders need to provide clearer guidelines and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to assist marketing decisions.

U.S. Franchise dealers have learned the hard way. Unscrupulous agencies selling digital services have taken advantage of the naivety of dealership managers. PCG has uncovered many online strategies sold to dealers that failed to produce any measurable ROI.

It is our hope that European dealers avoid some of the costly mistakes their U.S. peers have made by learning how to inspect that quality of traffic generated through paid advertising strategies.

PCG recently completed a survey of 500 U.S. Dealers regarding their deployment of Google AdWords. The published results from the PCG survey and additional interviews indicated that dealers are still not confident in the current digital agency model.

This document, first released at a conference in Rome serving Italian auto dealers, is designed to start a robust discussion with our peers in Italy regarding online marketing strategies and the need for dealers to be able to inspect what they expect.

Report was first released in Rome