Top 10 Atlanta Car Dealers: Automotive Reputation Leaders in GA

Atlanta, Georgia is home to a thriving automotive market that just keeps growing. Named after the Western and Atlantic Railroad, and housing the world’s busiest airport by passenger traffic, it's no surprise that Atlanta's roots in transportation also produced a booming automotive industry. 

Sitting at a prime location in the southeast, Atlanta’s auto industry is thriving with $21 billion in investment in the past few years and 26,000 new jobs. 

Dealerships in the Atlanta area showcase strong review response rates, high Google star ratings, and significant review volume. However, to earn the best reputation in Atlanta, dealers must be committed to the customer experience. 

Using the Automotive Reputation Index, which ranks dealers by volume, rating, and response rate, we’ve identified the Atlanta dealerships with the best online reputations 

• Rick Hendrick Toyota Sandy earns the spot as best dealer in Atlanta, primarily because it has a huge advantage over others in terms of monthly review volume. For other dealers to improve, they will need to seek out other opportunities to ask for reviews and boost monthly volume. Recommended times to ask are after a sale or service visit, after a test drive, or after working with the finance team.
• Response rates are high across the board in Atlanta, but none are at 100%. This is an area for improvement for all Atlanta dealerships and it is worth pursuing as a strategy to outrank others. 
• Although 10th on the list, Curry Honda has an impressive lifetime volume and it has the highest response rate of all top Atlanta dealers. This dealership could improve its overall rating, though, as this is notably lower than its competitors.

• Global Imports BMW earns the top spot in Luxury dealers in Atlanta. This BMW dealer has a high lifetime volume of reviews and a strong star rating. Both Nalley Infiniti of Atlanta and Mercedes-Benz of Atlanta South have a higher response rate than this top dealer, however, indicating some opportunity for improvement. 
• Ed Voyles Acura earns 3rd in top Luxury dealers in Atlanta. With the highest monthly review volume, this dealership is on track to ourtank Nalley Infiniti of Atlanta and Global Imports BMW. However, the Acura dealer needs to work on its response rate, as boosting this even slightly would put this dealer at the top.

• Rick Hendrick Toyota Sandy dominates the top non-luxury dealers in Atlanta, because of its strong monthly review volume. This dealership is clearly generating many reviews, but its response rate needs improvement if this dealer truly wants to stand out from others.

• Ranked #4, Jim Ellis Ford Sandy Springs has the highest response rate of this group, showing that this dealer is highly engaged with its customers online. This dealership should work on boosting monthly volume in order to jump ahead in this market. 

*Note from the editor. The Automotive Reputation Index offers substantial coverage of the nation’s dealerships, but it’s still growing. If your dealership is not yet listed on the Index and you’d like to add it, submit your information and we will add it during a regularly scheduled update, roughly once per month.

Widewail's rankings are based on the Widewail Automotive Reputation Index. Explore the full dataset:

Ranking Methodology

To rank these dealerships fairly, we chose a method that considers the fact that dealerships on our list receive a wide range of monthly review volume, in part due to varying levels of opportunity. For example, luxury brands can never sell as many cars as non-luxury brands, the price point limiting a luxury dealership's market.

To compare two dealerships with very different review volumes directly wouldn’t be fair. A dealer with two 5-star reviews doesn’t necessarily deserve to be ranked higher than a dealer with 200 reviews and a 4.5-star rating. With few reviews, the former doesn’t offer enough data for us to use to understand its performance. However, we couldn’t just ignore locations with very few reviews, as that would introduce bias into our rankings.

To solve this, we used "adjusted ratings" in our calculation of dealership ranking. In essence, "adjusted rating" is a dealership's star rating that takes into account how its review volume compares to that of other dealerships in that area. We calculated adjusted ratings by using a technique called additive smoothing which we explain below.

Additive Smoothing

The approach we’ve used is a form of what’s called “additive smoothing.” This process allows for an unbiased way to rank two otherwise unequal dealerships. At its core, additive smoothing levels the playing field by artificially increasing the number of reviews each dealership has by adding the same number of reviews of each star rating to every dealership.

Customer Engagement

Additionally, we take into account the percentage of reviews that a dealership has responded to in our calculation of ranking, as Widewail strongly believes that review response is indicative of a strong reputation strategy.

Activity

The last component revolves around how much review volume a dealership receives, which can be broken down into two parts - their lifetime volume and average monthly volume. Lifetime volume can be thought of as a popularity metric. It’s an important metric and one of the first numbers that a potential customer will see when they start looking at reviews. The second, average monthly review volume, is representative of how active the dealership currently is. We can think of it as follows, lifetime volume captures a historical view of the dealership whereas average volume gives insight into the current status. The final component for the volume metrics is to scale them so there is a more meaningful comparison. To do this we use what is known as min-max scaling. First we group dealerships by their respective city and then find the dealership with the most volume and least volume. Then for each dealer in the group, we subtract the lowest volume and divide by the difference between the highest and lowest volume. The formula for this can be seen below.  

x' = x - min(x)max(x) - min(x)

The main advantages of this approach are that all the volume metrics can be mapped to a value between 0 and 1 and the relative difference between dealership volumes can still be preserved. 

Below we see an example of this where we have 9 dealerships with differing lifetime volumes, which we then scale. Notice that the relative distance between the actual volumes and the scaled versions is the same. 

Below we have an example of ten dealerships, their review volume, and the adjusted relative volume. We can calculate the relative volume by sorting the dealers by review volume and determining the percentage of dealers that have fewer reviews. Here we see that dealer D had the most reviews and so they get a score of 1.  

The Ranking Formula

(adjusted rating / 5) * 0.3 + (response rate) * 0.3 + (lifetime volume) * 0.15 + (avg monthly volume) * 0.25

Weighting Rational

We chose to weigh each feature as follows: adjusted rating accounts for 30% of the overall score, response rate also accounts for 30%, and review volume is 40%, which is further broken down into lifetime volume (15%) and average monthly volume (25%).

Weight selection is based on Widewail’s depth of expertise in the industry and we believe is a fair representation of what should be considered a standout reputation. 

We’ve broken the weighs into three categories:

Activity (40%)

We believe the amount of review activity is the most important indicator of reputation health for a business, and is a leading driver of local search rankings. We’ve broken this category into two components: lifetime volume (15%) and frequency (25%). Lifetime volume is our “popularity” metric. 

Engagement (30%)

Engaging with customers by responding to reviews is a key component of a healthy reputation.

Quality (30%)

Rating has a substantial impact on if a business shows up in local searches and if that business is entered into a prospect’s consideration set. Rating is a key identifier of business health.

Calculation Details

If a company has an adjusted rating of 4.2, responds to 10% of their reviews and has an adjusted lifetime volume of 0.90 in their city and 0.87 for their scaled average monthly review volume, then we would calculate their overall rating as follows

(4.2 / 5) * 0.3 + (0.1)*0.3 + (0.9)*0.15 + (0.87)*0.25 = 0.252 + 0.03 + 0.135 + 0.2175 = 0.6345 * 100 = 63.45

Note: Since response rate accounts for 30% of the overall ranking, if a dealer doesn’t respond to any reviews that automatically caps the max value they can receive to 70.