Dallas, the ninth largest city in the US, boasts a strong automotive market alongside its excellent arts and entertainment scene.
Its historic roots in the automotive industry date back to the early 1900s. The Ford Motor Company ran a manufacturing plant in Dallas from 1909 to 1970, which produced over two million trucks and cars. Today, Texas ranks 7th in the nation for automotive manufacturing.
Along with Dallas’s contribution to automotive manufacturing, the city also houses a competitive dealership market. Dealerships in the Dallas area showcase strong review response rates, high Google star ratings, and significant review volume.
However, to earn the best reputation in Dallas, 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 Dallas dealerships with the best online reputations.
Clay Cooley Nissan Dallas cruises into the top spot as the best dealership in Dallas, TX. A high monthly volume of reviews and a 100% Response Rate make this dealership a regional reputation leader.
The #2 position is narrowly held by Toyota of Dallas and is bolstered by a high Response Rate (97%) and a high lifetime volume. The low Adjusted Rating of the reviews this dealership pulls in and poor monthly review volume are the weak points holding Toyota of Dallas back from competing for the top position.
BMW of Dallas commands the top of the Dallas rankings for luxury dealers in Dallas. A high monthly and lifetime volume of reviews, and near-perfect Response Rate make this dealership an excellent model of successful reputation management.
Park Place Motorcars Dallas, a Mercedes-Benz dealership, boasts mostly high marks, leading it to the #4 spot on this list. If this dealership improved its Response Rate (currently at just 81%), it would be a contender for the #1 luxury dealer in Dallas.
#5 in our luxury dealer rankings is Park Place Land Rover DFW. Though this dealership has a high Adjusted Rating and Review Response rate, it struggles to pull in the volume of reviews necessary to truly compete for top billing. By enhancing its review solicitation strategy, this dealership would certainly begin to climb the ladder.
As with the overall rankings, Clay Cooley Nissan Dallas strongly commands the top position among non-luxury dealerships in Dallas. High volume, Adjusted Rating, and Response Rate all contribute to an excellent reputation management strategy.
A tightly contested race for #2 is obvious when examining this graph. Toyota of Dallas holds the second position due to its high Relative Lifetime Volume, but Cowboy Toyota is right behind in third thanks to its fantastic adjusted rating of 4.66. Increasing its monthly volume would easily push Cowboy Toyota closer to the top of the non-luxury dealer rankings.
*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.