Industry-recognised metrics are needed to help car dealers measure impact of their online motor finance offering, according to iVendi.

James Tew, chief executive of the expert in online finance, believes that the wide variance of measurements currently used is of varying use, with some focussing purely on online visits and others at a single element, such as approval rates.

He said that there is a clear need for a wider set of metrics, however. Tew said: “Different dealers often desire subtly different things from online motor finance but, fundamentally, what they all really want is to pull more customers from a wider area onto their web site to sell more vehicles. It’s that simple.

“The question is how, for a relatively new area of retailing for motor industry, we settle on measuring whether that is happening?

“As a motor finance technologist, we can see the impact that our tools have on dealers and they almost always agree it is positive - but it would be useful to be able to discuss what is happening using a widely-accepted set of metrics.”

iVendi’s vice-president for data and insight, Rob Severs, has been working on this issue in recent months and has produced a new dashboard that shows a variety of measurements.

Severs said: “We use a series of graphical and numerical representations to look at how motor finance is driving traffic and where that traffic is coming from before drilling down into some of the key motor finance metrics.

“In addition, the report illustrates the disconnect between the online buyers and the offline dealership, showing how each business is performing against its online peers, and also provide details on out-of-hours activity, which is one of the advantages of online motor finance.”

Severs said that iVendi’s new dashboard was being trialled with a variety of different dealers and would be adjusted based on their feedback to produce a definitive version.

He added: “Ideally, we’d like to create an industry standard but, at the least, we think we can establish a way of looking at online motor finance that places all the key metrics in context, providing a very useful tool for dealers.”