Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a city rich in American history, home to iconic landmarks like Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. These sites played crucial roles in the nation's founding, symbolizing freedom and democracy.
Beyond its historical significance, Philadelphia also contributed significantly to the automotive industry. It hosts one of the oldest auto associations in the country, the Automobile Dealers Association of Greater Philadelphia.
in the 1900s, the city's growth paralleled the rise of the auto industry. The Lincoln Highway, the first interstate designed to accommodate the burgeoning car industry, passed through Philadelphia, leading to the establishment of gas stations throughout the area. In 1906, the Quaker City Motor Club was founded, initiating automobile racing at the Point Breeze Racetrack. Following World War I, Philadelphia's "automobile row" became home to dealerships for brands like Ford, Cadillac, Hupmobile, and Oldsmobile, marking the city's pivotal role in the automotive sector.
Philadelphia’s automotive history has resulted in a competitive automotive dealer industry today. Philly dealerships showcase strong review response rates, high Google star ratings, and significant review volume. To earn the best reputation in Philly, dealers must provide top-notch service while actively soliciting customer reviews.
Using the Automotive Reputation Index, which ranks dealers by volume, rating, and response rate, we’ve identified the Philly dealerships with the best online reputations.
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Barbera’s Autoland cruises into the top spot among overall dealerships in Philadelphia. The only perceivable weakness in its score is its response rate of 94%, which still only leaves a little room for improvement.
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Scott Honda of West Chester ties for fourth place in the rankings, with solid scores in every category except relative volume per month. By taking steps to consistently ask for more reviews, it would certainly see its ranking improve.
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Fort Washington BMW commands the top position amongst luxury in and around Philly. With no weak points in its score, this dealer is going to be tough to unseat.
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Coming in third place is BMW of the Main Line. Unfortunately, its excellent review volume isn’t enough to propel it any higher. Improving its middling adjusted rating of 4.34 stars and its poor response rate of 79% is the clear path to an improved overall ranking.
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Bush INFINITI of West Chester ties with Lexus of Chester Springs for fourth place among luxury dealers. Opposite the issues experienced by the 3rd place ranking, Bush INFINITI of West Chester boasts a high adjusted rating and response rate, anchoring it firmly in the top five. A low review volume, however, keeps this dealer from climbing any higher. Developing a strategy to solicit more reviews would certainly help it improve its score.
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Of the top five non-luxury dealers in the Philadelphia area, CarVision of Trooper has the lowest adjusted rating of 4.47 stars. Though not a bad score, getting more reviews from happy customers would certainly help boost it.
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Nissan 422 of Limerick sits in the fifth position. Its 92% response rate is the lowest of the top five non-luxury dealers. Prioritizing a review response strategy would work to improve this dealer’s overall health score.
*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 takes into account 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 simply 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.
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Lifetime Volume
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Scaled Volume
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4619
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1
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4065
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0.88
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3922
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0.85
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1783
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0.38
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1001
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0.21
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810
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0.17
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164
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0.03
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101
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0.02
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22
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0
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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%)
The 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.
