Clevland, Ohio, known as the “Home of Rock and Roll,” is the second largest city in Ohio and the largest city on Lake Erie. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it became a central hub for industrial growth, trade and commerce due to its proximity to waterways and railroads. The city's past growth has led to a booming automotive industry, with many dealers competing for the best online reputation in Cleveland.
The leading dealerships are thriving with strong Google star ratings coupled with a high influx of monthly reviews. High Google star ratings show that the dealers provide customers with top-notch experiences and services. High monthly review volumes show the dealers' popularity. Dealers in Cleveland must maintain these high standards while increasing review response rates to rank highly among the top 10 dealers in Cleveland.
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Spitzer Kia Cleveland earned the top-ranking spot in Cleveland. While it has the second lowest response rate of all dealers, it holds onto the #1 spot largely due to its outperformance in relative monthly review volume and its highest score in relative lifetime review volume.
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With a low adjusted rating, Ken Ganley Ford West ranks #7 among the top 10 dealers in Cleveland. This dealership should focus on increasing its monthly review volume. Typically, actively soliciting reviews leads to a greater representation of the overall customer base, which elevates ratings.
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Sitting at #10, Jaguar Westside shows us that a perfect response rate isn’t enough to rank highly in Cleveland. The dealers' ranking will stay suppressed unless it generates more reviews.
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Metro Lexus safely secures the spot as the top-ranked luxury dealer in Cleveland. It achieved this with a perfect response rate and the highest scores across all the reputation metrics.
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Turning to the bottom of the rankings, Audi Middleberg Heights lags across all categories. With a 93% response rate, this dealership could immediately improve by responding to all reviews moving forward. It could further gain in the rankings by increasing its review volume.
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Deacon's Chrysler Dodge Jeep RAM, #2 in the rankings, earned a higher adjusted rating than all the other non-luxury dealers and has a perfect response rate. The dealer could easily surpass the #1 spot, Spitzer Kia Cleveland if it focused on asking every customer for a review to earn more monthly reviews.
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Ken Ganley Ford West and Spitzer Hyundai Cleveland tie in the overall rankings with a health score of 61. Spitzer Hyundai Cleveland has the lowest response rate of non-luxury dealers and could easily pull ahead in the rankings if it achieves a higher response rate.
*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.
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Lifetime Volume
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Scaled Volume
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4619
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1
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4065
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0.88
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3922
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0.85
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1783
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0.38
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1001
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0.21
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810
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0.17
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164
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0.03
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101
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0.02
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22
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0
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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.
