The Digital Dealer 2025 conference confirmed that the automotive industry is fully immersed in the AI age. Yet, the most urgent message was not about technology, but about operational fundamentals, data integrity, and the critical need for human-centered leadership. Dealers must adopt an “AI-Plus” strategy: automating for efficiency to free up time for high-touch, empathetic interactions.
What Does This Mean?
Automation for Empathy: Using AI for operational efficiency to free up your team’s time for high-touch, high-value customer interactions.
The “Plus” Factor: Integrating artificial intelligence with complementary immersive technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Spatial Computing to create comprehensive, dimensional customer experiences.
The Human-AI Disconnect: Why Technology Needs Trust
The biggest shift happening in the dealership is moving from automating communication to humanizing it at scale. Forget generic chatbots; the future of the BDC (Business Development Center) is rooted in authentic connection, driven by sophisticated AI.
The next evolution of your BDC involves real-time AI that understands and adapts to regional nuance. Dealers should look for tools with the ability to tailor the voice and accent of an AI agent to reflect the specific local market, automatically.
Why this matters: Consumers inherently distrust robotic voices and templated replies. Trust is built on human factors like cadence, tone, and context. As speakers emphasized, in the BDC, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” This technology allows BDCs to scale human-feeling conversations without sacrificing the critical regional touch that builds immediate rapport.
For AI to succeed in the BDC, dealers must address a dangerous operational failure:
- The Check-Your-Work Crisis: The stark warning, “The road to hell is paved with AI mistakes,” means that the time saved by AI is often wasted because nobody is double-checking the output. AI is not smarter than you; it is a new employee meant to remember and predict. You must train it with clear parameters and actively check its work.
- The Data Dilemma: Garbage in, garbage out. You cannot throw bad (dirty) data into an AI system and expect sophisticated performance. Furthermore, using any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in AI tools is a massive liability risk. Clean Data and Correct Data are the minimum requirements for successful implementation.
- The Future is Orchestration: The next wave, Agentic AI, will involve “armies of agents” automating entire workflows from initial chat messages to coordinated customer journeys. This shift, enabled by tools like Vibe Coding (which allows non-developers to create simple apps), lowers the barrier to entry but demands disciplined data hygiene and a clear understanding of the customer journey you are trying to automate.
The Electrifying Opportunity: Why Pre-Owned EVs Are Your Next Untapped Market
While the buzz around electric vehicles often focuses on new models and charging infrastructure, a far more immediate and underestimated opportunity is rapidly emerging: the pre-owned EV market. For dealers ready to lead, this space is wide open, with no clear market leader to date.
A Market Ripe for Disruption
Consumer apprehension still looms large over EVs. Concerns about battery longevity, range anxiety, and long-term resale value keep many buyers hesitant. This fear, however, is precisely what’s driving a unique and powerful opportunity.The automotive industry is on the cusp of a significant influx of underpriced, low-mileage EV lease returns. These vehicles are poised to flood the market.
Action Item:
If you’ve got the right tools, widgets, and digital presence, you can own the EV education and trust conversation. This isn’t about just listing EVs, it’s about creating confidence in your market.
Become the Trusted Source
Currently, there’s a significant “Trusted Source Gap” in the pre-owned EV market. Consumers need guidance, education, and transparent information to overcome their fears. Dealers who move fast to:
- Educate Buyers: Address common concerns about battery health, charging, and total cost of ownership.
- Offer Transparency: Provide clear information on battery degradation, warranty status, and real-world range.
- Leverage Value: Position these underpriced lease returns as an exceptional value proposition.
By offering the right tools, widgets, and a strong digital presence focused on EV education and confidence-building, you can establish your dealership as the go-to expert. This isn’t just about listing EVs; it’s about creating confidence and owning the entire EV conversation in your market.
The pre-owned EV opportunity is underestimated and wide open. Are you ready to charge ahead and claim your leadership position?
Unlocking SEO ROI: Navigating GA4 and Looker Studio
In the complex world of digital marketing, knowing your spend is only half the battle; understanding your return on investment (ROI) is paramount. Jasmine Good, Analytics and Reporting Lead for Dealers United, tackled a critical challenge for automotive marketers: how to measure monetary value for SEO efforts, especially when platforms or vendors don’t provide direct cost metrics.
Jasmine’s session provided a deep dive into leveraging Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Looker Studio to build robust, customized reports that connect SEO activities directly to business outcomes.
Beyond Vanity Metrics: What to Track
To truly understand SEO performance, you need to monitor a blend of SEO and website engagement metrics:
- Key SEO Metrics: Clicks, URL position, keyword position, and unique users.
Key Website Metrics: Click-to-call, lead forms, VDP (Vehicle Detail Page) views, chatbox leads, CTA (Call-to-Action) button clicks, and search results page views.
The Power of Customization in GA4
The real game-changer lies in customizing GA4 to track exactly what matters to your dealership:
- Custom Events are Crucial: Creating custom events in GA4 that align with your specific sales (ASC) events is fundamental for understanding ROI and building meaningful reports. Examples include:
- ctc (click-to-call)
- form_sub (form submission)
- item_pageview (VDP views)
- comm_sub (chatbox leads)
- cta_interaction (CTA button clicks)
- itemlist_pageview (search results pages)
- Custom Dimensions for Granularity: Jasmine demonstrated how to create custom dimensions, such as using VIN as the event parameter item_id, which allows you to track specific vehicle performance.
- Custom Metrics: Easily find and define custom metrics using your event parameters. For instance, itemlist_pageview can represent search pages, and comm_submission can capture chatbox leads.
Building Actionable Reports
Jasmine walked attendees through the process of building a focused report in GA4:
- Navigate to Reports > Search Console > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition: Session.
- Edit the report: Adjust dimensions, choosing “session source/medium” as the default.
- Refine Metrics: Remove unwanted metrics and select up to 12 new ones from the dropdown.
- Filter for Organic: Add a report filter to display only organic results.
- Save as a New Report: This preserves your custom view.
- Add to Library: To make your new report easily accessible, go to Library, find the relevant collection, and drag and drop your custom report into it.
Pro-Tip: Using your Google Analytics measurement ID with third-party platforms makes it more likely they will accept and integrate your data, enhancing your overall tracking capabilities.
The Cost of SEO: A Monetary Sacrifice
Jasmine acknowledged a fundamental truth: “Always a monetary sacrifice when you are doing SEO because it takes time and labor.” Unlike paid ads, SEO ROI isn’t always immediately obvious in a direct cost column. This underscores the importance of rigorous tracking in GA4 to quantify the value of organic efforts by connecting them to tangible conversion events and ultimately, sales. By meticulously tracking these custom events and dimensions, dealers can effectively measure the often-hidden monetary value of their SEO investments.
Built to Scale: Fuelling Marketing Ops with a Robust AI Stack
AI is more than just a buzzword; it’s becoming the operational backbone for top-performing marketing teams. Steve Barker and Bryan Nguyen from Autograph Analytics pulled back the curtain on how a forward-thinking dealer group has built and scaled a fully integrated, AI-powered marketing operations stack that delivers undeniable results. This session was less about theory and more about a real-world roadmap for operationalizing AI, driving performance, reducing waste, and directly connecting marketing spend to car sales.
The Integrated AI Platform: A Central Nervous System for Marketing
Steve and Bryan presented a powerful visual: an AI platform at the center, with branches extending to CRM, DMS, Website, Ads, and Inventory. This integrated approach is critical for success. And that’s the foundational requirement for such a system? Exactly what we mentioned above, Clean and Correct Data. This emphasizes the importance of proper UTM parameters and adherence to ASC Guidelines.
Key Strategies for Operationalizing AI:
- AI-Powered Nightly QA Sweeps: Implement AI to proactively identify critical issues before they impact performance. This includes:
- Tracking errors
- Broken UTMs
- Lost leads
- Data integrity issues
- Tailored AI Assistant Strategy: Design custom AI assistants aligned with your dealership’s unique data stack and marketing workflows. These aren’t just chatbots; they are internal agents that can:
- Surface insights from vast datasets.
- Build concise summaries for dealership leaders.
- Perform real-time competitive analysis.
- Optimizing Ad Strategy with Real-time Signals: Connect ad spend directly to car sales by optimizing campaigns using:
- Real-time inventory signals.
- CRM data.
- Automatically communicating value to dealer principals through AI-generated reports.
The “Tiny Teams Era” and the Data Stakeholder
In this new era, AI empowers smaller teams to achieve massive results by shifting from “doing the work” to “directing the work.” This highlights the power of having an internal AI Agent that thinks, adapts, and even makes changes.
A critical finding: only 20% of dealerships have a dedicated Data Stakeholder. This “Data Guy” or “Data Gal” is your go-to person for analysis issues and acts as the handler for your AI tools, ensuring data quality and effective output.
Empowering “Muggles” with Vibe Coding
The session heavily featured Vibe Coding, which is the ability to describe what you want out of an AI prompt and have it generate the code for you. Tools like Claude.AI allow users to paste requirements and produce functional code for custom reports or simple web apps. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry, enabling marketers to:
- Create proofs of concept quickly and visually.
- Build their own reporting apps.
- Customize reports to meet specific store needs.
AI as Your Data Analyst: Humans Still in Charge
While AI (like ChatGPT, Claude.AI, Gemini for analysis, or Proplexity for research) can act as a powerful “Data Analyst” on your team, a crucial reminder was issued: “Humans are still impactful. You will always need someone to check the results and the data that AI has generated.” This is essential because large language models (LLMs) can “hallucinate” and create data out of nothing.
The future is “Data First – AI Second.” By prioritizing clean, correct data and embracing AI as a tool for automation, insight generation, and scalable operations, dealers can build a robust marketing engine that drives real, measurable impact.
Attention, Please! How to Get, Keep, and Deserve It in Auto Retail
Digital Dealer speaker Rhys Albrecht, Head of Customer Success for sMedia, made one thing clear: in an age of decimated attention spans, dealerships must strategically earn a customer’s focus to survive. He broke the challenge down into three types of attention:
- Involuntary (The “Tube Man”)
- Be loud, consistent, and repetitive to build brand awareness.
- Invest in long-term, high-impression channels (like TikTok or traditional media) and align charitable giving with 2-3 core causes for amplified community impact.
- Social (The “Own Name”)
- Prioritize human connection over excessive automation.
- Consumers are rejecting automated sales funnels. Answer the phone and train your team to build genuine rapport. The greatest market inefficiency is becoming more human.
- Voluntary (The “Holy Grail”)
- Earn the right to a customer’s focus through consistent, smart investment.
- For low-funnel customers, Google Vehicle Ads (VLAs) are the single most efficient use of your ad spend, functioning as a direct, cost-effective replacement for traditional listing site placement.
And most importantly… “Answer the Dang Phone,” as per Mathew Growden’s The Change Optimist C.A.R.S. research confirms that walk-ins and phone calls far outweigh other contact methods. “The greatest market inefficiency in business right now is becoming more human when everyone is racing to become less human.”
The ultimate goal is to connect your top-funnel brand-building efforts with hyper-efficient, low-funnel conversion tools, ensuring you are present, human, and direct when the customer is finally ready to buy.
Dive Even Deeper into the Strategy
Ready to implement these strategies and take a 100% AI-Free deep dive? Read the full posts here:
- Attention: How to Get It, Keep It, and Deserve It in Auto Retail
- The Wacky Waving Tube Man Conundrum and Social Attention
- The Power of Voluntary, Lifted Attention (Even More Detail)
Final Thought: Tools Are Easy. Trust Is Earned. Action is Critical.
The Digital Dealer 2025 conference made one thing abundantly clear: the automotive landscape is undergoing a profound transformation. The technologies on display are smarter than ever, from AI that adapts its voice to hyper-local market insights and analysis from GA4. But the real, enduring challenge isn’t mastering the tools themselves. It’s about building and sustaining trust in an industry grappling with economic pressures, EV uncertainty, and the very real disruption (and potential pitfalls) of AI.
The good news? The roadmap for success in 2025 and beyond is strikingly clear:
- Be the first to strategically adopt AI, and the fastest to adapt its power to human-centric goals.
- Be the authentic voice your customers trust, not just another automated reply.
- Be the dealership that educates on emerging opportunities like pre-owned EVs.
It’s Time to Act: Beyond “Talking About It”
Rhys’ parting message echoes this urgency: “Thank you for your attention today.” We’ve learned that truly capturing and holding attention requires proactive strategies for gaining future customers, having consistent sales months, and most crucially, capturing that shoppers right in front of you by just answering the dang phone. In a noisy, AI-driven world, the dealerships that genuinely understand and invest in these fundamental types of attention will be the ones that truly connect, convert, and thrive.
AI is here and incredibly easy to adopt, but its power is unlocked only if you’re willing to clean your data, commit to training it like a valuable employee, and strategically use the time it buys back to be more empathetic, human, and present with your customers. The path to finishing 2025 strong isn’t just about implementing technology; it’s about leading with purpose.
Don’t Just Plan for 2025. Dominate It. Let’s Talk Strategy.
The time for theoretical discussions is over. The insights from Digital Dealer 2025 provide a clear and actionable roadmap for success. It’s time to seize these opportunities and translate them into decisive action for your dealership. Don’t let hesitation be the reason you miss out on the immense potential the coming year holds.
Reach out today, and together, let’s craft a strategy that helps you finish 2025 stronger, smarter, and more profitable than ever before.
And hey, if you made it this far in the read, consider this a bonus for your dedication. We’re extending our current show offers for a limited time, just for you. Don’t miss out on taking advantage of special pricing designed to help you implement these strategies and start seeing results fast.
➡️ Claim Your Exclusive Offer Here!
Want More Insights Like This?
Get our monthly newsletter packed with proven strategies, fresh trends (just the good stuff) to drive traffic, leads, and revenue right to your inbox.
👉 Sign Up Now
Great Reads You May Have Missed:
