Top 10 Jacksonville Car Dealers: Automotive Reputation Leaders in FL

Jacksonville Florida, known as Jax, is known for its 22 miles of beaches, rock'n'roll culture, and top-notch museums. 

Jacksonville’s placement on the St. Johns River and Atlantic coast offers it access to the deepwater ports that played a large role in the economic growth of the city. Currently, and due to its location, Jacksonville is a top US importer of automobile parts, some years leading second in the US for auto imports.  

Currently, dealerships in Jacksonville showcase strong review response rates, high Google star ratings, and significant review volume. To earn the best reputation in Jacksonville, dealers must provide top-notch service and remain committed to the customer experience/ 

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

• Earning the #1 spot is Arlington Toyota. This dealership surpasses the others by far in monthly review volume. Although it doesn’t have the highest average rating, its monthly review volume demonstrates that this dealership has many patrons. 
• Vying for spots 2 and 3 are Coggin Toyota at the Avenues and Keith Pierson Toyota. These dealers could improve their response rate, as neither one is perfect. Generating many reviews per month will boost lifetime review volume over time. 
• Beaver Chevrolet has a higher monthly review volume and lifetime volume than the dealer ranked just ahead of it, Mercedes-Benz of Orange Park. The reason this dealer is ranked #8 instead of #7 is because of its lower response rate. Mercedes-Benz of Orange Park holds a 100% response rate, solidifying its place on this list. 

• For luxury dealers in Jacksonville, the category with the widest variability and the most opportunity to improve is relative volume per month. The number of reviews a dealer gets monthly is a sign of an active dealership with an engaged customer base.
• Mercedez-Benz of Jacksonville has an impressive lifetime volume of reviews. Yet it ranks lower on the list because of a smaller relative monthly review volume. This dealership might be able to outrank the top 3 dealers by improving its monthly review volume. 

• Arlington Toyota has the greatest lifetime review volume of the top non-luxury dealers in Jacksonville. Other dealerships can work to boost lifetime review volume and catch up to Arlington Toyota by finding more opportunities to ask for reviews, such as after service visits, after test drives and after a new car purchase. 
• Strong review response rates among all these dealers show how essential it is to respond to reviews to rank in the top 5 dealers, especially when there is a wider variability in relative review volume per month.

*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 are unlikely to 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 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 search 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.