Setting Automotive Industry KPIs to Drive Dealer Success

• Competition is fierce: with new OEMs entering the market, every customer becomes more valuable. 
• Customers are more costly to acquire: due to customer expectations for seamless omnichannel experiences across an increasingly complex sales cycle.
• Uncertainty around the pace of electric vehicle (EV) adoption: following the removal of subsidies and tax breaks.
• Gradual growth for new car sales²: which is squeezing OEM profitability margins.

How Can Automotive Industry KPIs Help you to Boost Sales?

Key dealer metrics help you cut through the noise of 10 different systems and spreadsheets with 100 different rows, just to see what’s going on in your dealer network. Now you can instantly spot where to focus your attention. 

• Real-time information: means no more time wasted searching for, and collating data.
• Greater transparency: means everyone is reading from the same page.
• Trend identification: means everyone can act earlier to change the outcome.

 
How to Drive Growth Within Dealerships Through Daily Visibility of Automotive Industry KPIs?

With the right tool you can give your dealers daily visibility of their network performance indicators. Now, they can see progress against target to:

• Eliminate guesswork: dealers know exactly which vehicles to stock, promotions to run and how to personalise customer experiences.
• Identify new and emerging trends: they can anticipate what’s likely to happen next, based on historic data and what’s happening now in other dealers, to take earlier action.
• Increase forecasting accuracy and lead management: they can respond quicker to customer enquiries, reduce inventory overstocking and provide accurate updates on service status.

What Auto KPIs Help You Track Lead Management?

When it comes to lead management, it's vital to track lost leads, because it helps you to understand why you missed opportunities. Only when you know why leads didn’t convert, and what stage of the sales cycle they were in, can you enact change and improve your process to avoid it happening in the future. 

How Can You Boost Conversion Rates by Understanding Lost Leads? 

As market competition intensifies and customer acquisition costs increase, business KPIs help dealers to pinpoint moments in the sales journey that can be improved to aid customer conversion. For example:

How quickly was the lead followed up?
How many test drives convert?
How effective was the handover process between the sales and service teams?

With visibility and understanding of auto performance insights, you start to see how you can influence them to gain a competitive edge – even the tiniest change can make a massive difference. For example, the average digital marketing campaign conversion rate for automotive businesses is 2%, but high performers can hit 16%⁵. By simply changing the call-to-action on a web form, from ‘call us’ to ‘book a test drive,’ in could result in a tidal wave of new leads.

Is it Possible for KPIs to Promote Customer Retention? 

Using automotive industry KPIs to support customer retention is a strategy that shouldn’t be overlooked. Research shows 8 in 10 customers who have a positive sales experience return to the dealer for regular servicing, and 9 in 10 return to purchase another vehicle⁶. Therefore, in a highly competitive market where new car sales only demonstrate gradual growth, automotive KPIs present an opportunity to help your dealers establish a stable, predictable source of aftersales revenue.

How Can You Protect Profitability in a Tough Market Using Retention?  

Despite gradual growth in new car sales and EV market share projections reducing⁷, there’s a big opportunity to grow revenues by capturing more of the aftersales market. Right now, within the existing customer base are opportunities to upsell. For example:

What percentage of sales customers have returned for annual servicing?
What is the uptake on add-ons, like finance agreements, paint protection and extended warranties?
Which customers may be looking to trade-up their car in the next 6 months?

Knowing this information and executing targeted campaigns to market to these customers, can boost revenue and profit in other areas of the business to make up any shortfall you may be experiencing.

Also, do you monitor dealer performance metrics for used cars? 

Dialling up the visibility of this key profit centre can underpin stable performance. When customers trade in vehicles – particularly ones a dealer originally sold and subsequently serviced – it creates a steady stream of quality used cars that attract high resale values. Used cars enable dealerships to extend their target market and capture other, lucrative demographics who prefer not to buy new. And again, this opens more upsell opportunities with financing, extended warranties and after-sale services.

How do You Get Visibility of Your Underlying Performance Indicators?

A balanced scorecard with dealer performance and composite data is the best way to maintain the health of your network. And with multi-system compatibility, you can populate the scorecard using DMS data sets, CMS information, vehicle reg data, vehicle orders, programme performance results (and more!), so you, your field team, and dealers all have access to the same vital, actionable information that drives success overall.

This is what Loop gives you.



Our 20+ OEMs and 45,000 dealers love Loop because it:

• Allows them to simply get on with the job: rather than get stuck down deep in data, they can coach dealers or serve customers.
• See all the headlines from a single dashboard: by placing a wrapper around existing systems, users can drill down into individual systems to investigate further when needed.
• Encourages accountability: placing actions against automotive KPIs means everyone knows what needs to happen next to improve.
• Creates a culture of no surprises: everyone sees the same accurate information, which builds trust. 
   

Measure Key Dealer Metrics to Start Driving Dealer Success Today

The right network insights give you instant answers to crucial business questions that drive the business forward:

Who should I visit this week based on performance gaps or missed targets?
Are we generating and converting enough leads to hit our order targets?
What’s happening with EV sales across the network?
Are our dealers on track to hit their targets and meet bonus?
What difference would a 5-point scorecard boost make to performance?

With Loop, you connect sales, aftersales, and CX data in one place – across the whole network – turning insights into smart actions that drive continuous improvement across every dealer. Volkswagen Group has improved their network performance by up to 10% using Loop. Discover what it can do for you.

Automotive Industry KPIs FAQ

What are the Best KPIs to Track?

The best automotive measures show you where you have the most potential to influence the outcome. For example:

• Sales forecast accuracy: to manage inventory, budgets, and resource allocation.
• First time fix rate: to assess the operational efficiency of the service team.
• Customer satisfaction: to drive loyalty, retention and new customer acquisition.

Who Does Daily Visibility of Network Insights Benefit Most?

Daily visibility of automotive industry KPIs benefits both OEM and dealer, because when a dealer can visualise their ‘gap to target,’ whether in numbers of £value, it nudges them to do more. For example, when they can see they’re 2% off target, which equates to a certain spend on spare parts, they’ll take action to stretch and secure their bonus – a win for them and for you.

Why Should You Use Performance Metrics for Customer Retention?

Using KPIs to support customer retention is a smart strategy:

• Cheaper: acquiring new customers costs 5-25x more than retaining existing ones⁸.
• Greater revenue: upselling to existing customers has a success rate of 60-70% (compared to 5-20% for new customers)⁹.
• More profitable: increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25-95%¹⁰. 

Why Aren’t BI Tools Suitable to Track Automotive KPIs?

BI tools, like PowerBI or Tableau, are management tools. Their weakness is how they display information, which is often too complicated for the average user to extract actionable insights from – even commercially-minded ones.

What are the Benefits of Using Loop to Measure Your Dealer Network Performance?

While there are several benefits of using Loop, we believe the top 5 are:

1. Unprecedented visibility: aggregate data to dealer, group, regional, national and even country levels.
2. Data interrogation: commercially-minded users don’t need to be data scientists to understand data and extract actionable insights.
3. Actionable run rates: rather than wait until the end of the quarter to know you’ve missed target, you can spot gaps earlier and have time to do something about it.
4. Productive meetings: everyone has access to accurate information in advance, so conversations dive straight into how to drive business forward.
5. Benchmarking: quickly identify your top performers and share their best practices across your network.
   
   

1 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/a-road-map-for-europes-automotive-industry 
2 https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/Industries/consumer/research/consumer-tracker/automotive-sector.html 
3 https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/6943066
4 https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/catch-them-if-you-can-how-leaders-in-data-and-analytics-have-pulled-ahead
5 https://www.driftrock.com/blog/driving-growth-strategies-to-increase-automotive-conversion-rates
6 https://www.bettercarpeople.com/resources/industry-updates/customer-retention-in-the-automotive-industry-why-it-matters
7 https://www.lazard.com/media/4k4gnvco/global-automotive-supplier-study-2025-summary.pdf
8 https://www.spglobal.com/automotive-insights/en/blogs/2025/02/strategies-to-grow-customer-loyalty-automotive-industry
9 https://www.outboundengine.com/blog/customer-retention-marketing-vs-customer-acquisition-marketing/#:~:text=Acquiring%20a%20new%20customer%20can,customer%20is%205%2D20%25.
10 https://www.bain.com/insights/retaining-customers-is-the-real-challenge/