The Road to Mapping every Franchise Car Dealership
There was likely an easier way to do this — an existing product with similar data, or the ever-available Google Maps. But none of it let us map car dealerships across the United States the way we wanted.
Our real use case is pulling in dealership data so we can catalog every dealership and its website provider, then run nationwide tests on Core Web Vitals. Is poor performance isolated to select brands or web providers? Or is it an industry problem rather than a vendor one?
Our first national report will come out before the end of the year, and we're solely focused on getting that out the door. But it doesn't hurt to take a step back and look at this map in a bit of awe at all the possibilities that exist when data is laid out like this.
Not just competitive market sales or demographic data, but registrations, population density, internet and mobile provider availability. Every other conceivable data set you could put on a map could show us something we never looked at or thought to ask in this industry. And don't get me wrong — I have no doubt other vendors have already done this extensively, since automotive is an extremely data-heavy industry. But none of it is ever made public.
It all comes from public or readily accessible data sets. Hiding it doesn't earn you a competitive advantage; it just gatekeeps information that was already out there.
So why would we, Dealer Data One, take the odd stance of openly publishing detailed industry information?
We believe the first step in moving the industry forward is pulling back the curtain and sharing what we know.
Whether you're a customer looking for dealerships around you, a vendor selling to dealers, or a dealer trying to get a better grasp of franchise density in a market to target marketing spend, you can see every franchise dealership in the United States on our map.
