Situated along the Merrimack River, Manchester, New Hampshire, serves as a hub for the state's diverse car market. With its mix of urban streets, suburban neighborhoods, and rural highways, the region's geography shapes the preferences of local car buyers, creating demand for a wide range of vehicles, from compact sedans to rugged SUVs and trucks.
Manchester's unique automotive needs create a competitive market where dealerships must balance inventory and customer service. In this environment, online reputation management becomes a critical tool for success. With buyers increasingly turning to online reviews and ratings to inform their decisions, dealerships that maintain a strong digital presence have a distinct advantage in earning customer trust and standing out in a crowded marketplace.
Car dealerships in Manchester demonstrate a wide range of commitment to the customer experience. Using our Automotive Reputation Index—which ranks dealers by volume, rating, and response rate—we’ve identified the dealerships with the best online reputations in Manchester.
- Toyota of Nashua leads the pack of overall dealers with outstanding marks across the board. With the highest review volume and an excellent average rating of 4.77, This dealership leaves little room for improvement. Its response rate is solid at 96%. Increasing this to 100% would solidify its first-place foothold by that much more.
- The number six dealership on our list is AutoFair Honda. A solid review volume and high adjusted rating are undermined by this dealer’s poor response rate of 77%. Adjusting its response strategy to ensure every review is replied to would see this dealership climb in the reputation rankings.
- In ninth place is MINI of Bedford. A great average star rating and perfect response rate are not enough to make up for this dealer’s low review volume. Working with a reputation management partner to implement a review solicitation strategy is something this dealership should consider to improve its score.
- Ira Toyota of Manchester slots into the number three spot of our non-luxury dealership rankings. While both volume and responsiveness are high, its adjusted star rating of just 4.1 leaves much to be desired. Using analytics to see what departments or reasons there are for its negative reviews is a great place to start when creating a strategy to improve this figure.
- MacMulkin Chevrolet Cadillac ranks tenth in the non-luxury category. With a 4.4 adjusted rating, a 96% response rate, and a low monthly review volume, it trails behind its top competitors. To improve, we recommend focusing on increasing review volume, which should also help boost the overall rating. The good news? Most of its existing reviews are positive!
- Porsche Nashua easily claims the top luxury dealership position. Strong review volume for a luxury dealer and a strong response rate of over 96% are just the beginning for this dealership. Its adjusted star rating is at an excellent 4.81. This dealership knows how to take care of its valued customers.
- The dealership at the bottom of the top ten, Tulley Buick GMC, tells a very different story. Low volume, a response rate of just 86%, and a low adjusted rating of 3.73 stars are not enough to keep this dealership competitive with the top regional dealerships when it comes to reputation. Luckily, addressing your online reputation doesn’t have to be a daunting task. Partnering with an expert firm like Widewail is a great way to turn this weakness into a strength in 2025.
*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.
