Marketing analytics and DMS integration guide

What to check before you decide

Then the match. Get an answer on how the analytics tool links a DMS sale to a lead, a call or a web visit.

It may use email, phone, name and address, or a customer ID passed from the CRM. Each method misses some people.

Ask for the match rate on a month of your own sales, and see it displayed on every report.

Check the data it needs from the DMS: sale and service records, gross, dates, vehicle and the salesperson. Look at how often it refreshes and what it does with unwound deals, and who may see gross, since not every marketing vendor should.

Look at the cost side. Ad spend, vendor fees and co-op reimbursements should be brought in so that cost per sale is real. Ask how shared costs are split.

Be careful with claims. Compare the platforms' claimed conversions with actual sales, and track the gap. Disclose the limits of the match to anyone who reads the report.

Test with fifty sold deals. Have the vendor show, for each, the source it found and how. Where it found none, find out why.

Assign an owner who can answer, in plain words, how each number is built.

Publish the definitions and the match rate at the top of every report, in plain words, so that a general manager reading the page knows what a lead, a sale and a source mean in your store and how much of the sales picture the report can see, which prevents decisions based on a partial view.