Episode 14 - Kate Downing, COO of Williams Auto Group

🎙 Episode 14 — Kate Downing, COO of Williams Auto Group

In this episode of 100 Marketers, we sit down with Kate Downing, COO of Williams Auto Group, for a candid look at how modern dealerships are evolving from the inside out.

Kate shares her journey from agency-side marketer to dealership COO, the lessons she learned along the way, and how she blends advertising, operations, and customer experience to drive real results across multiple rooftops.

We dive into:
 • How nimble, family-owned groups can outmaneuver large publics
 • Why in-house marketing still gives dealers a massive edge
 • What she learned from NCM 20 Groups and Car Dealership Guy’s new COO circle
 • The real reason third-party platforms perform differently in each market
 • Her take on AI in auto — what’s hype, what’s actually working
 • How Williams Auto Group is preparing for their Techion transition
 • Why process + people + product still win in every department
 • And the metrics she believes will matter most over the next few years

If you’re a dealer leader, marketer, or operator looking for real, practical insights (not theory), this episode delivers.

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Contact Ashley: ashley@dealeromg.com and lets get your opinion out into the world!

Transcript

We are on a mission to talk to the 100 leading marketing minds in the automotive space. I'm Andrew Street, owner of Dealer OMG. Matthew Davis here. Why are we doing this? Well, we like automotive.

We like marketers, and we like retail automotive marketers. Our goal here is to give you the insights into what these leading marketers are thinking, planning, and doing.

When a dealership group brings in a COO from their ad agency that they've been working with to build systems and they're familiar with aligning people and fixing the real bottlenecks that the dealership's been facing, everything changes. On this episode of 100 Marketers Podcast, I sit down with Kate Downing and Matthew Davis But Kate Downing is a COO who turns all the scattered operations into clean, repeatable processes. We talk about the decisions that she makes behind the scenes and how she organizes the dealership's workflows to create growth that sticks. I'm Andrew Street, owner of DealerOMG. This is the 100 Marketers Project.

Could you tell us really quick a little bit about where you work and your role in TIDA? Yeah, sure. So I'm at Williams Auto Group in Charlotte, North Carolina, three days away from my eight-year anniversary. So I've been here eight years. I'm currently the COO of the group. Started here as the director of marketing. Then I was director of advertising, customer experience, operations, and then became COO earlier this year. We have a Buick GMC store, Subaru store and a collision center. So I work across all three rooftops, two days at each location, one day at home. I like to say my one day at home is when I get the most done. Cause I can sit at the computer and get everything that I wanted to get done that day. Whereas when I'm in the store, um, I might come in with a to-do list, but you just never know what's going to come up, you know, when you're actually on the retail ground, but I love it. Um, it keeps it really fresh working across the group at the corporate level, um, between the different rooftops and, um, yeah, I love it. So started in marketing. came from their advertising agency. That's how I was introduced to the group. And they decided that they wanted to have a marketing director in-house. And I jumped at the opportunity. And from there, have just taken on a lot of different operational efficiency roles. I'm still maintaining all of the marketing and advertising responsibilities in addition to just dealership operations in general, processes, all the technology that we use, et cetera. which is different like doing, excuse me, doing operations compared to being in marketing. It seems like totally different roles where like, there's creative, there's, you know, some outside the box ideas with marketing, but we're operations is like, let's make sure everything's systematically lined up and processed. Uh, and it seems like from your experience, you were in audit congrats on eight years, by the way, the first eight years are the steep learning curve. And then it's smooth sailing from here. I think. Yeah. Is that, is it eight? The magic number. Got it. I think so. That's what I'm banking on. Um, But it sounds like you were doing auto already, but from the agency side. So you had a lens in on what was helping solve problems from the marketing desk and then coming in and just having loyalty and sticking around and building up your chops, you're able to become the COO. Do you operate with like a CEO and a COO type relationship where it's like an integrator and a person coming up with the vision? Yeah, so we're family owned and operated. Our dealer principal is third generation. And then our general manager, who is over all three locations as well, is his son, so fourth generation. And so Hatcher is the general manager. Him and I kind of work hand in hand on all things retail. He grew up from the sales side of the business. So he's done in service. He's done kind of every on the ground position, whereas I never have. So I've never sold cars. I've never worked in the service lane, never answered phones here. So I try to maintain like a customer centric approach and mindset. And then, you know, when I come up with like crazy ideas that would be neat to do, he brings in the perspective of, okay, well, I've worked in sales, I've worked at this level, how could that work for us? And so with our two different backgrounds, I think that we're able to really come together on what is the best experience for our customers, our staff, in store, and all that. So yeah, we work hand in hand. And we had met at NCM, their most recent conference in Kansas City. And so are you guys part of NCM and doing twenty groups? Yes. So we are part of a twenty group. They have three meetings a year. I just went to the one in San Antonio a couple of weeks ago. It was all used car marketing centric. And then we also do the NCM Institute subscription. So we send our people to NCM for training in Kansas City. I've been to two classes myself. And then next year I'll be doing the GMEP program starting in April, graduate February of twenty twenty seven. So yeah, we are big fans of, of NCM. They bring a lot of fresh ideas and insights and really like rejuvenate our people. So we're, we love NCM. Yeah. And, and I love. a organization of any kind, but especially like a dealership who values continual growth, you know, and educating staff and putting them in opportunities to be able to level up their skill set and then to be networked because it's a little vulnerable sometimes to like send people that are valuable on your team out into the world and meet with other organizations. But I know that there's a pretty firm understanding with an NCM, you're not poaching staff and stuff like that. it's a it's a cool opportunity to be like okay look i really am buying into you and your future and your career with us i'd love for you to be you know like to be able to put some money and investment and time away from the store to go level up and it sounds like this one in san antonio was good anything interesting that that's whopping with juice car inventory and ideas that that might not be obvious yeah just doing the little things right um we talked a lot about recon time from taking a vehicle in to getting it frontline ready. Everyone has a different process. There's lots of different softwares you can use to help, but it really comes down to, it's not just about the software, but it's about the people who are using it. Like you can get all the fancy softwares that you want, rapid recon and whatnot, but it comes down to actually implementing a process that works. And we talked a lot about daily holding costs and the difference between ten days to frontline ready versus three days. And yeah, we talked a lot about marketing, too, and the different third party platforms. in each market has a different saturation, right? So like cars.com might work really well for somebody in one market auto trader for somebody in another market. So compared a lot of notes on third parties and what level of packages to be on and who's doing it the best and all that good stuff. So yeah, I think just keeping it fresh and constantly, you know, talking about what might be working, not working with your peers is, is super helpful. I just joined a car dealership guy, Twenty Group as well, the virtual circles that he launched. So I'm in a COO of Twenty Group there, which is awesome. Right now it's just like a text thread, but we just throw ideas out there and you get immediately like twenty people text you right back with fresh ideas from their market. And so that's been a really fun group that recently I became a member of. So it's just nice to have a network, right? people who you can talk to about what you're going through what you're what you're trying to address um especially with marketers who are also in a small dealership you know with more and more publics buying us up we have to we have to stick together and figure out what we can do to stand apart and be ourselves I have so many things I want to follow up on that There was there was a lot there. So first off, Andrew, I think we should launch like the hundred marketers triangle since circles is already taken. We can go with triangles. And then to your point, Kate, the way the phrase I like to say is people process and then product like you have to have great people to do anything right. And then you have to have an amazing process and you can do a ton. with those right there and then if you layer in great technology great product then it makes a big difference so on your point about the third parties working differently in different markets why why do you think that is I think it's just from their marketing. I think that they have done a good job in some markets and not in others. I also think that the staffing that they've done in different markets matters a lot. Our market here went without a rep from a particular third party for a really long time, and so they lost a lot of dealers. So when you lose a lot of dealers, now you have a less valuable product to consumers. The less cars you have on your website, well, people are going to be like, well, they don't even have a lot of inventory. I'm going to go to a different one. So it's a combination, I think, of the marketing that they've done and the staffing that they've done in each market. Yeah. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. I never considered that. It's like new social media platforms. I used to do ecommerce advertising in a previous life. And stuff would come across my desk, like, Hey, it's a social media platform for pets. And you put your pet on here and then you want to find other people who have similar pets and go to the, you know, the pet park. And I'm not a big pet guy, I guess, but you can tell because you called it a bit. It was like, you got to get somebody on there. Like, you don't want to be like, if you're the first person on there, what do you do? Who do you socialize with? And there's three people in different cities that are on there. And it doesn't, it's like, it's tough to develop that demand and get the critical mass. but it makes sense for like a third party marketplace. If you don't have a lot of your competitors already on there, there's just, it's going to be basically the same as one dealerships website of their inventory. Yeah. Well, what's it sounds like you've got a lot on your plate with the roles that you're occupying. And I love the idea of being able to like share experiences with other people about what's working for you guys, what's working for them. Then you had mentioned like the publics, like a lot of dealers have been either buying other dealerships or selling and, and it creates an opportunity for people like us, you know, like smaller, scrappier stores with more autonomy and less of a cookie cutter corporate venture backed private equity spreadsheet driven organization to do stuff that's different and not trying to compete with the big box stores, maybe even with budgets for marketing and things like that, but compete with them just by being different. Do you feel like there's a lot of white space in what public stores are doing that you might be competing with that as a more independently owned family owned dealer group that you can you can pull different levers. Yeah. I think there's so many benefits to being small. And I say small because I never want to like diminish what we have going on here. Right. But we are, you know, for all intents and purposes small, but being a lot more nimble, right? Like if I want to make a software change, we don't have to sit at a boardroom table and discuss it with stakeholders and investors and take a really, really long time to make this decision. And by the time we make the decision, we've changed our mind of what we actually want to do. Like we can be super nimble and make changes, of course, well thought through, but we can make changes that based on the data that we have in front of us, you know, we can make changes within a couple of days. I mean, that's one of the big things I think why dealerships should all have like in-house marketing people is When you rely on a third party like agency, it just takes so much time to get anything done. You have to request creative, approve, create or send back edits, approve creative. It takes like a week. Whereas when you have somebody in-house, who knows what they're doing with Canva, you can get stuff done like email blast, same day. New website slides, same day. And on a bigger scale, that's also what I see as a benefit to being a smaller dealership. You can just be nimble and make changes really quickly, adjust to market conditions as need be right away and not have to go through a huge chain of command. for the ultimate decision maker who's actually not on the ground to approve things. So I think that's a detriment to the bigger companies, the bigger groups. Now, of course, there's a lot of benefits to the bigger groups too. One of the things that they do that I really like is they use their stores as like sandboxes and playgrounds of let's try this out here and then compare it to this one. So they have a lot more data and a lot more comparative options than we do on a smaller scale. Yes, we can talk to our Twitter group. Yes, we can talk to our peers. But I think that those corporate groups that are able to kind of play with their stores and implement things in one and then compare it to another, that is one of their benefits for sure. You mentioned market conditions. What are you actually seeing happening in the market there? Well, for example, like last month there was a mid month APR change, but from the manufacturer. And so when that comes out, that email hits my desk, well, I can go right in and change the creative. Whereas for a larger group working with an agency that might take them a couple of days to update their TV creative and who do they call? And so that's what I mean. Um, just like the APR, things like that. Yeah. Is it you that's jumping into Canva and making those quick edits and updating the banners on the website? Indeed. Yeah, that's great. What actually is going on in your market right now? How are things? Depends between the two brands. So having Subaru and Buick GMC, they have a lot of similarities and they have a lot of differences. So one of the things that we saw a couple of months ago, it was really interesting. Like the Subaru buyer is so in tune with the economy. and a lot more cautious, I think, to make decisions with their finances. They really pay attention to the market. And so we saw a couple of months ago a ton of shoppers who were like, I'm looking, but I'm going to take my time. We need to see what's going to happen over the next couple of months. That was so prevalent at Subaru. Um, whereas this month the Subaru buyers are like, all right, we saw what was going to happen. Like we're ready to buy. Um, whereas like view of GMC is just a little bit more steady. The, the economy and the things that are happening in DC affect Subaru like a lot more than I think other brands. Um, and so, yeah, that's been a bit, a bit of a roller coaster for sure. Um, But we're doing good. We hit numbers goals last month. We're on pace to hit them again this month. We're really fortunate to be here in Charlotte in a metro. Yes, it's competitive, but it's just a lot of opportunity. Yeah, it's cool. And congrats, by the way. It sounds like you're doing a good COO job if you guys are hitting your numbers. Take credit for that. Yes. Yeah, and Subaru, wildly different than GMC. And if you've got people continually glued to the news versus more like shooting from the hip, I don't want to call my irresponsible buyer, but that's a buyer. Yeah. It's kind of... That's always been sort of my approach too. What are some things that are exciting you right now that you're looking at on the horizon or like some stuff that you're testing out? Yeah, we're going through a really big onboarding shift right now. We're moving to Techion in March for DMS and CRM. So I'm you know, just buried kind of in like the onboarding of making sure that all of our third parties are integrated and we have all of our forms set up and our products and all the things because we're going to be transacting, you know, out of Tachyon. So that's going to be a really big change. I'm really excited to see the lifecycle marketing opportunities in there. From what I've seen, they're really robust, kind of similar to like a HubSpot style, which I'm pumped about. you know for a while i was interested in a cdp not as interested anymore i feel like that was like a really big buzz and then it's kind of died down um so and techion kind of has like some cdp-esque capabilities so i'm really excited to dig into that so march seventeenth one hundred and twenty four days we're counting down that's a lot of work it is a lot of work, but I also really enjoy it. And Andrew, you had said earlier, like marketing's really different from operations. I always say I really love advertising marketing. I struggle with marketing is really creative and fun and cushy. I love advertising. I love Google analytics. I love Excel. I love numbers. I love attribution. And so that kind of like works really well with, with operations. Um, so that's how I, kind of made that crossover into operations because of the, you know, the processes and the A plus A equals this and that kind of thing. So, yeah. What tempered your excitement or enthusiasm or expectations around a CDP? It was just flashy, right? Like it's just flashy and cool. And it's something that I think other industries have had for a really long time. And then they put like this acronym on it for automotive and people were like, oh, I need that. And so that's like HubSpot. ten years ago but yeah this is what i love about having people coming into dealerships from outside of the automotive arena you know you had an ancillary you know finger on the pulse of auto but coming in and you know, being part of like lead nurturing sequences and, you know, CRM capabilities that aren't necessarily some of the leading CRM companies just for dealers, but for how to score people based on their relationship with the dealership, how long they purchase and having not without overthinking and it's easy to overthink, but just like what's that cadence of communication gonna look like with those customers, with those lost leads, with the prospects that have different scenarios or people who've defected, who came in and they purchased a vehicle, they still live in Charlotte, but they're not servicing and it's been a year. Like what can we do within our CRM to set it up hopefully once where we're not having to continually go back and manually trigger those types of campaigns, it's cool having like the mindset of hubspot because i'm like so into hubspot and then like the more i get into it the more i realize like we're not using it completely maybe we're at eight percent i don't know yeah percent and it's like cool we can do webinars we can do all these other things from like an agency side um but it's cool coming in testing out techie on And it sounds like they have a lot of cool opportunities to help increase your customer loyalty, your lifetime value of your customers. Are those metrics that you guys are following right now or planning on starting to follow is like what's your customer retention rates, stuff like that? Planning on starting to follow more accurately, right? It's really fragmented. I think that's a word that would describe auto just in general. Incredibly fragmented. You can pull the same metric from different platforms and get a different number. So I'm looking forward to having everything in one place, as they say. I put it in quotes because we aren't live yet. So I don't want to put too much stock into it. But from what I've seen, you know, you can search a customer and you can see everything that they've done with your dealership across all departments. Right now, I do not have that. You know, we can go into the DMS. We can go into the CRM. We can go into X time. But it is and they talk to each other because they're all owned by Cox, but they actually don't. Um, and so having that truly in one place, I think is going to be really, really valuable for us because we'll be able to see a baseline to your point of lifetime value and retention. It's difficult to find right now. I dig that as like advertisers. And I like the distinction between marketing and advertising for sure. And it's like, um, can we measure cost per click and click through rate and traffic and time on site and goals and events and, and S you know, really get a good system set up for like really having a smart inbound, at least feel like we're having a really smart inbound, uh, advertising program. But then like, can we also look at other metrics with your agencies or with your marketing people of, um, Okay, here's all these, you know, proxies for success that we can generate through analytics. But let's look at stuff at the store level of that customer retention level. And right now we're getting a forty percent return rate from our buying customers that are coming back. Okay, now we kind of know that. Let's see if we can do for six months, we're going to run this relatively cheap, small campaign to everybody who's buying, everybody who's defected. And then in six months, let's agree that when we have a conversation, we're going to look at that number again and see if this little advertising push we're doing, email, SMS, social, display, however we can get in front of folks, is making an impact on that forty percent. And if it is, let's quit our jobs and start a company that just does retention. I wonder where we were going. Yeah, it's always about starting up something. Yeah. Okay. Let's briefly discuss what's happening with AI. Where are you guys? What are you doing? What are you testing? What's hype? What's real? That's another one where I'm sitting back because AI can mean so many things. On a very personal ground level, I use ChatGPT every single day. I use it to reformat text messages to customers, email blasts to customers, Give me ideas for creative. So I think individually, there's a few of us here who are like using that. But then in terms of company wide systems, we use Numa. We have used Numa for three and a half years in our service department. And She is incredible. We love Numa so much. I am such a Numa advocate. We were really early adopters because we had a need. We had a staffing crisis and it was like the phone is ringing like crazy and we need to do something about it. And so we we looked at a few different ones. We tried Stella. We looked at Brooke and we ultimately signed on with Numa and we have been just incredibly happy, happy with her. for the past three and a half years. She's great. What I really like about Numa is the customer support and the just continuous improvement of the platform. And they truly ask their dealers for input. I feel heard when they ask, like, we're thinking about doing this. What do you think? And that's just been an incredible partnership. We've looked at lead handling by AI, again, I'm like, I don't know, somebody else try it and let me know. So I'm cautiously looking at it, not actively signing up for Impel and all the things. For the people not familiar with Pneuma, break it down for us. What is she actually doing for you? So NUMA handles unanswered phone calls in our service department. She can handle them as the first line of defense as well if you don't have any staff. But the way that it works for us, phone rings. If our staff is busy, NUMA picks up. Completely customizable. She says, hi, are you calling to schedule an appointment? If you say yes, she offers to schedule that for you, which is new. That's like within the past six months. She's tied into X time and she can schedule an X time appointment with the same parameters and restrictions as customer could on our website. It's not totally wide open, but she looks at the website basically for availability and she can schedule. If the customer has a noise concern or something that is . I dropped my fidget on the floor a little. I thought you had like a cat or something or a pet. They're locked out in the other room. Yeah, so Numa, she can schedule appointments or she can take a message and transcribe that message. And what's neat about it is as the customer is on the phone with her, it is live in a platform dashboard for us to look at. As they say a word, it's coming up on the screen live and our agents can jump in at any time too and talk to the customer. But it's alleviated a ton of, I'm calling to check on the status of my car for our advisors. So when a customer calls and if they say, no, I'm not calling to schedule an appointment, calling to check on the status of my car, NUMA looks up their phone number, matches it to an RO, and then sends a message to the assigned advisor that, you know, Ms. Jones is on the phone right now and she wants an update on her vehicle. um and the advisor can text the customer right then and there while they're on the phone and our customers love the texting capability because at the end of the day they don't really want to pick up the phone and talk to us they would much rather they just want to know they just want to know right you don't want to go through a call tree and then have a bunch of phone rings and then have it go quiet or whatever happens with dealers so our employees love it too there's a you know the positive impact of freeing up service advisor time has there also been a downstream impact of just more service appointments booked and you have to go hire more techs because more is getting answered Not easy to necessarily correlate directly. However, yes, over the past three and a half years, our service department has grown incrementally. We've hired more techs. We've hired more people to answer the phone. We've hired more advisors, gone from three advisors to five. Technicians, I think, from twelve to sixteen BDC, one to three. So, yes, we we are growing as a Charlotte. I mean, Charlotte is growing like crazy. And so we're seeing a lot of just new people in, you know, in our immediate area and a lot of them drive Subarus. So that's been that's been fun. Yeah. Yeah. You're in the right market and you have a couple of good brands to be to be working with, it seems like. Also close to the mountains up to Asheville, which is perfect for taking your Subaru up for your hiking and biking, right? Yes, absolutely. Well, what else? Like, is there anything kind of that you're abandoning right now? Like, did you sign up with the CDP and then pull the reins back? Or were you just having trouble deploying stuff? Never signed up for CDP. One of the things that I really enjoyed over the last year was Clairvoy. Clairvoy we worked with for twelve months to of what we're currently getting and then peeled back some vendors, added some vendors and got a new baseline of what it was able to do for us. Clairvoy ties into your sales data and is able to trace back every single VIN that you sold that customer's journey up to two hundred and fifty touch points. And so they were able to show us again, this is like the advertising data operations side of things. show us on a spreadsheet exactly what we're getting from what sources. And what I found the most interesting is that we were selling cars on third-party platforms that we were not on. So for example, Sullivan, and you look at all of the customer touch points, that customer was on Edmunds, cars.com, CarGurus, our website, somebody else's website, back to CarGurus, back to Edmunds. Well, we're not on Edmunds. We're not on cars.com. But they ended up buying our car. So what it showed me was customers are shopping all over. It's not one-to-one anymore. And they're not only shopping one third party. Gone are the days when customers are like, I'm an auto trader shopper or I'm a car guru shopper. Well, now they're an internet shopper. That's what everybody says when we come in. How'd you hear about us? The internet. Yeah. um and they're shopping all of these third parties so what i kind of took away from that is you don't need to be on all of them because the customers are looking at all of them anyway. And so it felt to me like as a dealer, we only need to be on one or two of those because customers are going to find your car, find what they're looking for. And unfortunately, it's a really fragmented space for shoppers and they need to look at all of the platforms in order to find what they're looking for. But dealers do not need to be on all the platforms. The shopper is going to find your car as long as you're on one or two of them. So we were selling cars like to people who were looking primarily on cars.com, but then ultimately found our car on a different third party site. We don't pay for cars.com. And then conversely, we were paying for Trucar and found that the people who were submitting leads to us on Trucar and the sales from Trucar, we would have gotten anyways. So we were able to cut out our Trucar budget. completely and then we reallocated our paid search budget to primarily focus on VLAs and come off of those general more higher funnel model terms because those clicks are more expensive and we're not resulting in car sales. So there's a lot of really cool learnings from it and it's one of those things like I really appreciate everything that Clairvoyant was able to show us But unfortunately, it didn't feel like a platform that I wanted to keep long term. Right. Like I got what I needed out of it for those twelve months and I will go back to it again in the future as different things like evolve and develop. But I didn't feel like it was something we needed, you know, month in and month out. But you feel like you squeeze you squeeze the lemon and then all the juices out. But you got a lot of the juice initially. That's cool. So were you guys able to cancel some of those third party marketplaces? Yeah, true car, we canceled. And then we just shifted around our paid search budget to be more efficient. And if I'm the cars.com rep, am I hearing this and being like, oh, I need to talk to Kate because people are finding our stuff there, so you should spend with us now. Nope. No, what I learned from it is that I don't need to spend on all the third parties. I only need to be on one or two because the shoppers who are on cars.com don't see what they want. They find it somewhere else. Hmm. And when you're talking about blue or you're talking about the text ads not working well, are you talking about like within Google for the blue link ads? Yeah. Like a traditional text search ad sponsored result. I don't know what they're calling it these days, but the VLAs vehicle listing ads produce a lot more sales than those traditional text ad campaigns. So you're able to pull down on the paid search, text ads, increase budget for vehicle listing ads, and then maybe have some budget leftover that you were spending in previous months. So what we did was we shifted pretty much everything to VLAs. So I took away from the text ad campaigns that were not producing sales and added them back into the VLAs, which seemingly are like infinite as far as what you could possibly spend. So it wasn't like we were hitting a cap or a ceiling on the VLA. So I just moved everything over. It is interesting. It's like at some point, not a scientist but i imagine within a market that you'll hit diminishing returns that people aren't going to search that much but google and facebook and all these advertising platforms are pretty good at being like well if you're willing to spend it we'll we'll find a place we'll take we'll find a way to consume it yeah did you did you feel like so you gained some efficiency and improvements there with your ad spend was there anything downstream else that you saw like did you is it resulting in more service appointments more car sales each month Incrementally, yes. It's a little bit more difficult to look at it like one-to-one exactly. But to me, just the efficiency in our advertising spend was worth it to know that we weren't wasting money on clicks, if you will, and wasting clicks and money on things that didn't result into car sales. But the way that service appointments are and service schedulers, because they're iframes on your website, super hard to track one-to-one conversions with appointments. You can track visitors to that page, but then you lose them because of the way that iframes are and the way that Xtime makes us put their data on our website. So service appointments are a little bit difficult to track, unfortunately. That is so funny. Like it shows up every few sentences that you have some digital agency background as far as looking at an attribution and things like that. And understand that there's a guardrail sometimes that you just can't look past. And dealers are like, what? Why not? Like, that's frustrating. Well, we have to use this platform. like well i can see people got to it i don't know if they filled it out do we see now we're like looking at like qualitative stuff of like do we get an increase in service bookings by us going after everybody who's not doing services and trying to go after other people driving gmcs are there an increase in services and then if it is it's like okay maybe the average sounds like maybe the advertising is working are there new customers coming in educated guesses yeah yeah So what's popping? We talked about AI already. We've talked about looking at cross sections of the customer journey. We've jumped into your experience looking at paid search. And it sounds like you've got a rich background with like looking into the analytics and really trying to help your dealerships deliver a return on investment. Is there something else on the horizon that has got your interest? A couple things that I think, not necessarily on the horizon, but are things that can keep you in check and keep efficiencies up. Like I regularly look at a four or four report and analytics to see like our advertisers clicking to our website and finding pages that are no longer existent. So for example, I was able to identify that car gurus, um, RPM display ads, part of our package that we pay for with them, they were clicking people to four or four. So their links were outdated. So if you're in GA-FOR and looking at that data, that's something that's super powerful that I feel like is one of those unknown things that not very many people are paying attention to. And a lot of people think that you can't possibly track that, but you can. You can set up reports for things like that. So I was able to identify, you know, CarGurus is sending people to four or four pages, get a refund, you get money back. Similarly, with VLA is looking at the four or four report, we identified that we had a feed delay. So VLA ads were clicking to cars that are already sold. So cleaning up your feeds to make sure that when you are giving data to your providers who are you know advertising on your behalf that it's fresh data then tracking that back making sure that the customer experience is good you're not wasting ad dollars etc so it's like a lot of little things doing a lot of the little things right and keeping your digital presence really in check um is one of those things that I don't want to forget about and I think people can forget about it. Like sometimes I like to think about when I first started working here, I went through and like audited absolutely everything. Like checked off all these boxes, check everything. Well, that needs to be done regularly because just because you fixed it one time does not mean that it's not going to break six months down the road from who knows what. So I think taking a step back and continually just auditing your own business as if you're a customer, as if you're a visitor. Search for a car on your website. Can you buy a car that you would prefer to have, like color options, interior options, features, do the filters on your website work? Like little things like that, I think dealers who are in it every single day sitting here in the dealership forget to do. So it's not necessarily like anything shiny and new, the basics, man, they're so important. I love it. I love that we can talk about the glossy stuff all day and throw whatever marketing acronyms we want, AICDP, but if you're not executing on those fundamentals, you're wasting time, you're wasting money. That's the nitty gritty of marketing, which I think you're right, a lot of people miss, but it's fundamental just to run on a smooth ship. Yep. Matthew probably knows this, but how do you easily do a four Oh four report on a website? Is there like an easy button that dealers could do to, to see what traffic's getting drawn to their website and what hits the four Oh four? Yeah. If you look at a, um, a, report in GA for by page visits like URL report. You can type in any sort of URL string and it'll look for all the hits to your website that hit that string. So you have to figure out what is your four Oh four page because dealer.com dealer on, they use a different string. Everybody's is different. Some of them say four Oh four, some say page dash error. So you gotta figure that out. Then in GA four, you put that in as a filter. So all URLs that contain this filter in this timeframe, and then it'll, it'll show you. And you then ref I refer the source. Yeah. You'll see the source of who is sending four or four traffic to your, to your site. And then I'd like to think that there's a conversation to be had with the vendor of like, can we task you guys at being responsible for finding this? Because there's one out of sixteen thousand. There's one out of sixteen thousand dealers who's actually looking at their four of four traffic. And I think you happen to be there because you're looking at it. Yeah, it's like other vendors. Have the capability to offer that as a not even a service, but just, hey, I want to keep a finger on the pulse of unhealthy traffic, whether it's coming from our advertising that we're doing or from other vendors, just so you guys are aware that customers aren't having a great experience and we're probably losing incremental sales and CSI and all the beautiful stuff that comes with a good, a good shopper. I'd like to propose a marriage of our two of our mini discussion topics here to solve that. So we're going to build an AI agent that can then go and run those reports and send it to Kate automatically. There you go. There you go. That's actually not stupid. Copyright. That's my favorite kind of compliment to get. Yeah. Well, Kate, I know we had talked and we got we got disconnected earlier and now we're back on picking up after a weekend of shenanigans. But is there any way that you want people to just follow you on LinkedIn or plug in your TikTok? Definitely not TikTok. No, definitely LinkedIn. I'm trying to be super active on there, follow along with our journey. Yeah, Williams Auto on LinkedIn, Kate Downing on LinkedIn, follow me. And yeah, keep up with us. We're trying our best. And yeah, more conversations like this, I'm always open to too. Cool. Well, Kate, thank you for your time today. 

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