Same dealership, same staff: internet leads set appointments at 32%, phone-ups at 73%

Across roughly seven hundred dealerships, new-vehicle internet leads were contacted at 60% against 73% for phone-ups. Those two figures are close enough that most dealerships would call the internet process adequate. The next stage is where they separate: 32% of contacted internet leads were converted into an appointment against 73% of phone-ups. Show rates then run 56% and 62%, and 41% of shown customers buy. The data is from the second half of 2023 and should be cited with that window, but the shape of it is the point: the same building, the same people, a 41-point difference that opens after contact has already been made.

A 13-point gap in reaching people becomes a 41-point gap in booking them, with the same staff in the same building.

1. 01

   The gap opens after contact, not at contact

   Reachability explains 13 points of it. What happens on the call explains the other 41. A phone-up arrives having already chosen to speak to somebody and usually about a specific car. An internet lead is contacted cold, often by somebody working from a name and an email address, and the conversation starts from nothing rather than from the vehicle.

2. 02

   Used-vehicle internet leads behave like a different product

   Used internet leads contact at 67% and set appointments at 48%, against 60% and 32% for new. The used shopper has usually already chosen a specific car and is checking availability; the new-vehicle enquiry is often still choosing a category. The same follow-up script is typically used on both, which fits neither.

3. 03

   The shopping has already happened somewhere else

   Buyers spend 13 hours 13 minutes shopping, 7 hours 11 minutes of it online, across an average of 4.6 sites. Third-party sites are used by 75% of buyers against 59% for dealership sites, 41% search engines, 26% social, 25% manufacturer sites and 12% AI tools. The lead arrives with a comparison already formed, which is why a first contact that starts from scratch loses to one that starts from the vehicle they were looking at.

4. 04

   Only 9% of purchases happen entirely online

   53% are a mix of online and in person and 38% are entirely in person. The job of the digital journey is to produce a good appointment, not a transaction, which makes appointment set rate the correct primary metric and lead volume a vanity one.

5. 05

   Two figures this category asks for are not available

   Automotive cost per lead on Meta is not published in the leads-objective benchmark table, and there is no automotive-specific speed-to-lead study. The canonical response-time research covers 1.25 million leads across 42 companies and is from 2011, in no way dealership-specific, and should be cited with its date rather than dressed up as a dealership finding.

New-vehicle appointment-set rate: internet leads 32%, phone-ups 73% (Foureyes, Q3–Q4 2023). Most-current combined read: ~40% internet vs ~75% phone (Foureyes 2024–25) — phone still converts ~2× internet.

The model rebuilds the internet lead handoff to resemble the thing that already works. The first response carries the vehicle — stock number, photographs, availability — rather than an introduction, because the phone-up conversation starts there and the internet one does not. New and used get separate scripts and separate owners on the basis that the published contact and appointment rates differ materially between them. The single ask in every first contact is an appointment with a time attached. Reporting is by stage — contacted, appointment set, shown, sold — for each channel separately, so a change in one stage is visible rather than absorbed into a lead-volume total.

1. 1

   Weeks 1–2

   Stage baseline

   Contact, appointment set, show and sale measured per channel and per new or used, on the dealership's own data

   Owner: OmniFlow + dealership CRM

2. 2

   Weeks 2–4

   First-response rebuild

   Response templates carrying stock number, photographs and availability; one ask, with a time attached

   Owner: OmniFlow

3. 3

   Weeks 3–5

   New and used separation

   Separate scripts and owners for new and used internet leads

   Owner: OmniFlow + sales management

4. 4

   Weeks 4–7

   Routing and clock

   Ownership and a response clock per lead, with escalation when a stage stalls

   Owner: OmniFlow

5. 5

   Week 12

   Review

   Appointment set rate per channel as the headline, lead volume reported last

   Owner: OmniFlow

The model reports appointment set rate by channel as its primary number and lead volume as context, because the published data says the loss concentrates between contact and appointment rather than at the top. The reference figures are from the second half of 2023 and are used for shape rather than level; the dealership's own stage rates replace them inside the first fortnight. No speed-to-lead target is set from published research, because none exists for this sector and the general study most often quoted is from 2011 and not about dealerships.

Modelled. Inputs: Foureyes, Dealership Data Study (~700 US dealerships, Q3–Q4 2023 data); Cox Automotive, 2025 Car Buyer Journey Study (2,344 buyers); Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, Harvard Business Review, March 2011 (1.25M leads across 42 US companies). Modelled outputs are not a forecast or a guarantee of results. Cited: Foureyes *Dealership Data Study* (≈700 US dealerships).

Every figure below is published research, not a client result. They are the inputs to the arithmetic above, listed so it can be checked rather than taken on trust. The bracketed number points to the full citation at the end of this page.

These are the surfaces this engagement is run and measured from, shown with representative figures built around the benchmarks cited on this page. Every account we run reports into views like these, and you keep ownership of all of them.

Each figure on this page, the system it is read from, and the definition and window it is measured over.

Not applicable — this is a modelled engagement. Its weakest input is the age of the dealership data: the second half of 2023 was a market with different inventory conditions from today's, and the set pools rooftops with very different CRM discipline, which is likely to widen the published gap. The direction is almost certainly still right and the levels should not be quoted as current. The baseline phase exists to replace every one of them with the dealership's own stage rates before anything is changed on the basis of them.

A modelled capability, not a client account. Figures illustrate what the model produces and are labelled as modelled wherever they appear. See all our work

Full citations for everything cited on this page, with the sample and period each study covers, so you can go and read the original.