Columbia, South Carolina, has emerged as a key player in the regional automotive industry, thanks to its strategic location near major transportation hubs.
The city's automotive sector encompasses both production and distribution, with a notable role in automotive logistics, especially in supporting the BMW manufacturing facility in Spartanburg.
Columbia is also investing in infrastructure, workforce development, and sustainable transportation, further solidifying its position as a growing center for automotive innovation in South Carolina.
Using the Automotive Reputation Index, which ranks dealers by review volume, star rating, and review response rate, we’ve identified the Columbia dealerships with the best online reputations.
- Midlands Honda is the clear overall leader among dealerships in Columbia. An adjusted star rating of 4.7 and high monthly and lifetime review volume propel Midlands Honda far beyond the competition. While in the #1 spot, Midlands Honda still has some room for improvement in terms of response rate, which is at 92%. Responding to every review would widen its lead even further.
- JT’s Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram of Columbia slides into the second to last position in our overall rankings. While its review volume and response rate are strong, its adjusted star rating is low. This dealer would benefit from asking every single customer to leave a review, in turn increasing positive review volume. Further, they should take care to address their negative reviews, as this would give them a chance to turn things around. Both strategies will work to improve this dealer’s reputation.
- Again we see a clear favorite, this time in the luxury dealers category. Jim Hudson Lexus Columbia has an excellent adjusted star rating of 4.81 and a near-perfect response rate of 99.5%. Their combination of responding to reviews while consistently generating more is working to make their dealership stand out among the rest.
- Dick Dyer Mercedes-Benz is ranked seventh here. Its decent adjusted star rating and respectable monthly and lifetime review volumes are undermined by its very low response rate of just 1.5% Creating a plan to address its response strategy would see this dealership competing for the top position among luxury dealers.
- After Midlands Honda, the non-luxury dealership rankings seem pretty stable; but there are some points to note. Ranked second, Lugoff Toyota boasts both a strong adjusted rating and solid monthly and lifetime review volumes. But its response rate of just 68% leaves a lot of room left for improvement. Responding to all reviews is a straightforward way to show your customers you care and improve the health of any online reputation.
- Peter Boulware Toyota of Columbia is another example of a health score being held back by poor review response practices. Responding to 100% of its reviews (as opposed to the current rate of 87%) thoughtfully would help to improve its adjusted star rating of 4.3. Taking the time to address negative reviews and resolve issues for your customers often sees them changed from 1 to 5 stars.
*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.
|
Lifetime Volume
|
Scaled Volume
|
|
4619
|
1
|
|
4065
|
0.88
|
|
3922
|
0.85
|
|
1783
|
0.38
|
|
1001
|
0.21
|
|
810
|
0.17
|
|
164
|
0.03
|
|
101
|
0.02
|
|
22
|
0
|
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.
