Top 10 Milwaukee Car Dealers: Automotive Reputation Leaders in WI

Milwaukee, WI, known to many as the “Cream City” is the birthplace and home to many iconic American institutions. It boasts the Miller Brewery, Harley Davidson Headquarters, and the Summerfest music festival. 

Milwaukeans are no strangers to the automotive industry, either. The Milwaukee Mile is one of the oldest operating motor speedways in the country and has been hosting races since 1903. 

For automotive enthusiasts, the Milwaukee Auto Museum offers a vast collection of classic and vintage cars. This attraction showcases the evolution of automotive design and technology, further emphasizing the city's connection to the auto industry.

The largest city in the state—and less than 100 miles from Chicago—Milwaukee presents a competitive auto retail market. The city's automotive industry encompasses manufacturing, design, and retail, making it a significant hub for the sector in the Midwest. In cities like these, online reputation is one thing that can really set dealers apart.  

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

• Schlossmann Honda City leads all dealerships in the reputation health index for Milwaukee. This dealership has a near-perfect response rate of 98%, an excellent average star rating, and a frequent and high influx of monthly review volume. Monthly review volume inflates this dealer’s lifetime review volume, making Shlossmann Honda City tough to surpass.
• All of the dealers ranking in this list boast outstanding star ratings and response rates. The only reason Toyota of Brookfield is not in the top spot is due to its low monthly review volume. Implementing a consistent and comprehensive review solicitation strategy would put it in contention for the #1 position. 
  
  

• Kunes Buick GMC of Oak Creek stands atop the list of Milwaukee’s luxury dealers with a significant lead. A high adjusted star rating and impressive monthly and lifetime volume put it ahead of the competition. However, its response rate of 94% leaves some room to improve its lead.
• Jaguar Waukesha clocks in at the tenth position among Milwaukee’s luxury car dealerships. This is another great example of how much rating and response rate influence reputation health. Investing in a strategy to get more reviews, for example, asking every customer for a review post interaction would help this dealer rise in the ranks. 
  
  

• Wilde Toyota is in the fifth position among non-luxury dealerships in Milwaukee. Though far from the bottom of this list, it does have the lowest average star rating compared to its competitors. Increasing review volume and proactively addressing negative reviews are two ways to generate more positive reviews down the line.
• Sommer’s Subaru has the lowest monthly review volume among the top ten non-luxury dealers. It could improve its online presence by increasing its customer review count. This approach could involve consistently asking satisfied customers to leave reviews after their purchase or service experience or providing easy-to-follow instructions for leaving reviews on popular platforms, especially Google. 
  
  

*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.  

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.