Do you actually need a portal as a car company or not? Many dealers and automotive entrepreneurs have a love-hate relationship with portals, and that’s a shame. Sure, I don’t enjoy spending every euro either, but marketing is simply necessary to keep a car company visible in this online world. After all, you can’t win offline if you don’t win online first!

Now you could write books about it, as my friend Rolf Westgeest recently did, to show how portals work. And of course, you can let the data speak for itself.

Over the past few years, I have already written many articles about how to view the value of a portal. One thing I believe 100% is that the portal is not responsible for the sales you make. The portal is only responsible for one thing: giving you opportunities by generating VDP views, favorites, leads, and calls. With the latter two being more of a bonus in my view.

Core Task of the Auto Portal

By definition, the portal’s task is to make my cars visible through a VDP view. If opportunities then arise because people walk in, email, or call, it’s the sales reps’ turn. Dealers and car companies that have 50 leads and sell one car need to refine their sales process, not blame the portal for ‘bad’ leads, because those won’t suddenly get better…

My view is that VDP views are the core and value of a portal. If I put a car on Marktplaats, I definitely check the next day how many views it received. Then, at the bottom of the page, you can see how many VDP views and favorites it generated. If a car has no VDP views, nothing happens.

So I’ve actually been doing that for a very long time. The only question I asked myself was: why don’t I do that automatically?

ROI Calculator for Auto Portals

That is why I created an ROI Dashboard Calculator for Marktplaats, as well as AutoScout24, AutoTrack, Gaspedaal, and ViaBOVAG, to see all data in a single dashboard and analyze how my inventory performs across the different platforms. I can upload the invoices and CSV files, and the system shows me the state of my marketing ROI.

Marketing ROI, that is. I spend €1,000 on portals, but what do I get in return? How many VDP views, how many leads, how many calls, and how much is that worth? After all, Gaspedaal is included as well… A click to your website represents a value of €0.34 there, which is ultimately also a VDP view.

In my calculation, these are the numbers:

• VDP view: €0.05 (which is extremely low)
• Favorite: €0.25
• Lead/WhatsApp: €25.00
• Call: €25.00

Even though I as a car company in Doesburg might get 50 leads and ultimately one sale, the marketing ROI can still be great. In addition, about 30% of sales in Doesburg come from ‘walk-ins’ who want to look at a specific car they saw online via a VDP view. They didn’t call, didn’t email, there’s no trace, but I still have an online customer.

Daily Dashboard

But I want to see what is happening with my current inventory! That’s why I built a tracker that shows me every morning which cars have the most VDP views, which cars have the most favorites, and perhaps more importantly, which have the least. After all, those need the most attention! In addition, I can now see the effect of the basic package compared to the premium package, daily highlights versus no daily highlights, and much more. In these screenshots, you see the real data from Experience Store Doesburg (Tuesday, August 4).

In addition, the system calculates for every sold car how many VDP views, favorites, and leads it had. If I subsequently have a similar car, I will soon know what that car needs to get sold. Then I can choose to place a basic ad and wait 45 days, or a premium ad with daily highlights and bumps so that I can reach the required 792 VDP views within seven days. Online automotive is no longer a matter of gut feeling, but of marketing data.

And if you still have 50 leads and one order, you need to examine your lead and sales process, not your marketing process. Specifically for this, we have developed online courses; see: https://marktplaatscursus.pauldevries1972.nl/