Facts Only
April brought changes near the bottom of the list of automotive website chat vendors, as ranked by market share. Moving into the 6th spot was Gubagoo, and falling off the list was Dealer eProcess. Overall adoption continued to grow, climbing to 26.5% of dealers. Relevant industry news included a press release by Contact At Once! [...]
Each quarter we stop to take a look at dealer adoption of live chat software. Adoption has trended upward every quarter that we’ve been tracking it, but the first quarter of 2013 produced the biggest jump in adoption yet, as depicted in the graph below. Starting at 23.6%, adoption climbed to 26.0% by the end [...]
February data shows a dramatic acceleration in dealer adoption, from 23.9% to 24.8% in just one month. This jump is likely the result of two things… The first – Chrysler’s decision to put co-op funds behind chat, as described in last month’s post. The second – expansion of our dealer website URL database, thanks to [...]
The new year is off to a great start in the world of dealer live chat, both in terms of metrics and in the news department. The data shows that the percentage of dealer websites on which live chat is deployed continues to grow and is now 23.9%, up a third of a percent month-over-month. [...]
Another year has come and gone so it is time to reflect a bit. For the year, the top four market share leaders didn’t change, though some swapped positions. Contact At Once finished atop the stack, just as they started the year, with a commanding lead in market share. Activengage finished second, having swapped [...]
November was an interesting month in that, although there were no changes in rankings among the top 7 vendors, certain of them gained and others lost market share in a way we have not typically seen. Historically, except for Outsell’s somewhat steady market share decline over the past year, all other vendors in the top [...]
October was a busy month for the auto industry with many OEM’s, dealers, agencies and vendors converging on Las Vegas for events such as the Driving Sales Executive Summit, the JD Power Internet Round Table, and Digital Dealer 13. Many of the website chat vendors had a presence at these events and it was evident [...]
The quarterly measurement of adoption shows that more and more dealers are using automotive live chat software on their websites, as depicted in the graph below. There were no blockbuster announcements by any of the automotive live chat vendors this quarter, but from the data it seems clear that all of the vendors are benefiting from [...]
Notable this month is the ascent by BoldChat to #5 in market share, surpassing Dealer eProcess and CarChat24. BoldChat was acquired earlier this year by LogMeIn. The company has traditionally been a very small player in terms of market share but is apparently making a push into automotive live chat using their now-larger sales force. Outsell, [...]
Highlights of July included: Outsell market share fell following a short-lived resurgence, ceding share to Contact At Once! and Activengage. Outsell’s ranking dropped to #3. Overall dealer adoption continued to climb, with at least 230 new dealers licensing chat software during July. In other related news, Google has launched a trial of “chat in ads”. [...]
June proved an interesting month, and with the end of the second calendar quarter we have included the quarterly adoption trend data in this post. June’s data was enhanced as we added nearly 6,000 additional dealer website URL’s to our crawler database, bringing it to well over 30k URL’s. Adding such a large number of [...]
More of the same in May! Outsell continued losing market share, while Contact At Once! and Activengage gained. Of note, dealer chat adoption topped 21% for the first time. Look for the quarterly adoption data and analysis in next month’s post.
April dealer chat market share data revealed several items of note… First was a continuing trend among the top three vendors – Contact At Once! (#1) and Activengage (#3) gaining market share, with Outsell (#2) losing share. In April, Contact At Once! market share was up the most…a healthy half of a percent. The other [...]
Every quarter we measure the adoption of automotive dealer chat. The Q1 data shows that over 20% of dealer websites now have chat software, as shown in the graph below. The adoption “curve” is fairly linear at this point, showing strong and consistent growth. Whether there is an “inflection point” at which adoption accelerates dramatically, [...]
February results are in and we’re including more vendors in our rankings this month. The vendors gaining automotive dealer chat market share included Contact At Once!, whose overall lead continues to widen, and Outsell, who bounced back slightly after losing share for ten straight months. Market share losers in February included Activengage and Dealer.com. Our [...]
The January measurements of automotive dealer chat market share are now available. Both Contact At Once! and ActivEngage saw slight increases in market share, while Outsell and Dealer.com saw slight decreases, but none of those changes were enough to affect the relative rankings.
Happy New Year! The year 2011 was certainly a great one for dealer chat. Adoption of dealer chat software grew 26% and was accelerating as the year ended, with 19.4% of US auto dealer websites utilizing chat software. As we look back on 2011, we see several drivers behind the accelerating adoption of dealer live chat [...]
We’re back! We experienced some technical difficulties with our crawler that kept us from posting results for September and October, but the November results are posted here. Since our last post, there have been some important developments around dealer chat. The first is an increase in dealer adoption of chat software. The percentage [...]
There were several notable dealer chat events during August. The first was an announcement by EveryCarListed.com, an up-and-coming national automotive site owned by SuperMedia, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPMD), in which the company stated that their dealers were experiencing a 40% increase in customer interactions as a result of dealer chat. According to the announcement, EveryCarListed.com has [...]
Adoption of chat on dealer websites continued to grow as depicted in the chart below. In terms of dealer chat vendor market share there was a shift in the #6 spot with Smartchat, a product from DealerTrack/eCarList, replacing LivePerson, but otherwise no movement amongst the market leading vendors as shown below.
No major changes in June according to our data. Contact At Once! grew their market share slightly while Outsell and Activengage both lost a bit. Many continuing thanks to the dealers and chat vendors who have submitted dealer website URL’s to our crawler in order to enhance the quality of our results. Dealers – please submit [...]
Car Dealers continued adding chat to the dealership websites according to our May data that shows 16.8% of the 20,000+ car dealer websites crawled have live chat software, up from 15.4% in January. In terms of dealer chat vendor market share, Contact At Once! expanded their lead in May. The vendors chasing Contact At Once! [...]
Our April data reveals continuing growth the in the number of car dealer websites utilizing chat. The April percentage grew to 16.5% from 15.8% the month before. We have begun graphing the trend, as depicted here. Though it is still early days and our tracking data spans only the first three months of 2011, it [...]
Note: Today we officially announced the launch of this blog via a press release. To those visiting for the first time we say “welcome!”. We hope you find the data and information useful. You can read more about our methodology here. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think. March Update [...]
The use of dealer chat software to connect online shoppers with car dealers is a major industry trend. Our February 2011 data indicates that approximately 15% of the 22,846 dealer websites crawled are currently using dealer chat software, as depicted in the graph below. Moving forward we’ll be measuring and reporting on adoption frequently, watching [...]