9:50 am, February 6, 2017
IVENDI is calling for a set of industry-recognised metrics to help dealers measure the impact of their online motor finance activity.
At present, explained CEO James Tew, there is a wide variance, with some common methods being much superior and business-relevant than others.
He said: ‘Different dealers often desire subtly different things from online motor finance but, fundamentally, what they all really want is to pull more customers from a wider area onto their website to sell more vehicles. It’s that simple.
‘The question is how, for a relatively new area of retailing for motor industry, we settle on measuring whether that is happening?
‘Some use traditional web metrics and, while they have some relevance, they tell only part of the story. Others look baldly at the motor finance approval rate but, again, that is just a single element.
‘As a motor finance technologist, we can see the impact that our tools have on dealers and they almost always agree it is positive – but it would be useful to be able to discuss what is happening using a widely-accepted set of metrics.’
Tew added that a major part of the measurement problem was that the wider technology industry often measured the quality of the user experience by the level of user engagement.
‘This approach almost feels paradoxical to us as surely a good experience should require less effort from the user? That’s certainly the view of iVendi based on the high levels of potential buyers who are visiting different sites to view similar cars at similar levels of finance, and then repeating the same kind of activity.’
iVendi’s VP data and insight Rob Severs has been working on this issue in recent months and has produced a new dashboard that shows a variety of measurements.
He said: ‘We use a series of graphical and numerical representations to look at how motor finance is driving traffic and where that traffic is coming from before drilling down into some of the key motor finance metrics.
‘In addition the report illustrates the disconnect between the online buyers and the offline dealership, showing how each business is performing against its online peers, and also provide details on out-of-hours activity, which is one of the advantages of online motor finance.’
Severs explained said that the new dashboard was being trialled with a variety of different dealers and would be adjusted based on their feedback to produce a definitive version.
‘Ideally, we’d like to create an industry standard but, at the least, we think we can establish a way of looking at online motor finance that places all the key metrics in context, providing a very useful tool for dealers.’
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