Navigate Your Dealership’s Reputation Metrics and Take Action
Staying on top of your dealership’s reputation is crucial.
With inventory, incentives, and pricing returning to pre-2020 norms, the market in 2025 is more complex than it was at the height of the pandemic. Dealerships now need to juggle everything from EVs to hybrids and traditional internal combustion engines (ICE)—while still delivering top-tier customer experiences.
But how can you track the success of your dealer group’s reputation with so many factors at play?
Enter Widewail’s Brand Reputation Scorecard—a tool designed to give you a comprehensive view of how your group is performing in the eyes of your customers (or search engines). Using this scorecard, you can gauge your reputation across critical factors, helping you identify where your dealership, dealer group, or OEM excels and where there’s room to improve.
Let’s break down how it works.
To provide an accurate picture of your dealer group’s reputation, Widewail measures your performance against benchmark data comprised of industry averages. Benchmarks are based on an analysis of 4 million Google reviews from 18,000 new car dealers across the automotive industry in 2024.
Performance benchmarks determine how your group compares to others on a national level. The scorecard identifies trends in customer feedback and highlights where your dealership is outperforming the competition or where it may need improvement.
At its core, the Brand Reputation Scorecard is an assessment of how your dealership’s reputation compares to others in the industry. It takes into account customer reviews on Google, both positive and negative, to give you an overall picture of your standing in the market.
The Widewail Reputation Health Score, which is rated on a scale of 0-100, is made up of four major components:
These components are weighted to calculate an overall score and allow dealer groups to better understand their reputation performance relative to others:
Watch this video for more details on how the health score calculation:
Widewail uses AI-powered topic analysis to go beyond the numbers and uncover deeper insights into customer feedback. Every review that enters our system gets tagged with any key topics mentioned (like "inventory" or "staff"). This allows Widewail to track how often topics are mentioned and whether they’re discussed positively or negatively.
For instance, if "inventory" is a common theme in your reviews, the scorecard will show the frequency of positive versus negative mentions. This is then compared to industry benchmarks, giving you an idea of how your group is performing in that topic across the industry.
Again, the Brand Reputation Scorecard draws data from over 18,000 dealerships and more than 4 million Google reviews, offering a comprehensive view of industry standards and what reviewers are saying across the board.
Here is a video we included on the topic analysis section of each scorecard:
The Brand Reputation Scorecard also highlights key areas GMs tend to prioritize. These are divided into three main categories: Inventory, Staff, and Facilities.
By comparing your dealership’s positive and negative performance in these areas to the national benchmark, you can see where you’re excelling and where you might need to make improvements.
Top Topics in the Auto Industry: What Customers Are Saying
The Brand Reputation Scorecard Report identifies the most commonly mentioned topics in automotive reviews, splitting them into two categories: Positive Topics and Negative Topics. This helps you understand the themes influencing your dealership’s reputation.
For negative topics, performing below the benchmark is ideal. This means your dealership has fewer negative mentions than the industry average.
For positive topics, being above the benchmark is preferred. This indicates your dealership has more positive mentions than the average.
The Brand Reputation Scorecard measures performance across a total of 27 different topics, giving you a detailed view of both the positive and negative sentiments expressed in your customer reviews. By comparing your group’s results to the industry benchmarks, you can see where you rank and identify actionable areas for improvement.
*Remember, the goal is to stay below the benchmark for negative mentions and above the benchmark for positive ones.
The video below further outlines how to understand the topic section:
One of the Brand Reputation Scorecard's most insightful features is its competitive ranking. For all of the groups within the AutoNews Top 150 or any of the 32 top OEMs, Widewail has provided rankings based on:
This ranking helps you understand where you stand in comparison to your competitors and highlights areas where your dealership can continue to improve or double down on success.
Your Brand Reputation Scorecard is a powerful tool for understanding how customers perceive your dealership's reputation. By using the insights provided—benchmarked against the entire industry—you can take meaningful steps to strengthen your dealership’s brand, improve customer satisfaction, and outpace the competition.
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