DIGITAL marketing agency AdTorque Edge is relaunching ALICE, its well-known and versatile advertising, marketing, leads and sales analytics platform off the back of years of evolutionary development that has so far resided at no cost within the agency’s regular dealer services.

At its core ALICE dealers can plug in what it is costing them to advertise across all kinds of media and compare the effectiveness of each dollar – including for Google, social media, local newspapers etc.

This enhanced bird’s-eye-view marries leads and sales success data with oversight on the cost invested in various media to achieve those results.AdTorque Edge has now upgraded ALICE adding many new features prior to putting it out to market as a fee-for-service set at $49 a month.

While it began in automotive, ALICE is industry-agnostic and equally relevant for caravans, marine, motorcycles, and other retail sectors. The relaunch sees ALICE now being offered to caravan, marine and motorcycle dealers.

ALICE is already used by between 700 and 800 dealerships, representing 18 per cent of the market.

It integrates with all major DMS and CRM systems, marketplaces, dealer websites, and advertising channels. It brings stock, leads, and customer journeys into one view, and connects marketing spend directly to sales results. 

Nicholas Johnson, head of growth at AdTorque Edge, told GoAutoNews Premium: “With pressure on margins across retail, we see a real gap that ALICE helps to close – giving dealers a complete bird’s-eye view of all leads and operational data in one place.

Nicholas Johnson, head of growth at AdTorque Edge

“Dealers value ALICE because they are able to see exactly when somebody has come through paid media and they have converted to a lead and then into buying or into test driving. That’s something that’s definitely a part of Alice that we know dealers love. “It has been quite basic in its understanding of, yes, somebody bought the car and yes, somebody tested the car. We have now expanded on that where we are able to give a bit of a one-to-one customer overview of how a person has actually interacted with the dealership; offline, online, X amount of times over the past X amount of months, and then they’ve converted. 

“So a dealer can get to the end of the quarter, end of the month, or whatever period they choose, and look at the ROI specific for that channel or that medium. 

“ALICE helps educate dealers that actually all these different pieces and moving parts to somebody buying a car can be seen in the one place and they all contribute to that end result that everyone in the dealership are working towards.”

Aaron O’Neill, who manages the ALICE program, told GoAutoNews Premium that the decision to go to a paid model followed the progressive rolling out of software upgrades over the past five years.“Having done all these releases, we thought that with the amount of effort we have invested into it, this really should be a paid product. 

“We released Alice 2.0 at the end of last year which saw our biggest visual overhaul and we completely redid the entire user interface and the user experience.

“In the past year, we have released about 20 different individual features including a big new feature like a customer page or our enhanced Reporting Suite and bigger AI enhancements where we are really leaning into the automation aspect of it.”

Mr O’Neill said that whenever an inquiry or a lead comes into ALICE through website form fill it is listed as a customer in ALICE. “So from that, you can track that customer and every touch point they’ve made to your dealership, whether they might have booked a service, made a vehicle inquiry or made a phone call. That can all be tracked against the customer and that exists already in ALICE. 

“We are now enhancing it so that you can assign statuses to the customer on whether they have been won or lost; depending if they’ve been contacted, given notes to the customer, being able to contact them from ALICE and assign a salesperson to them from within ALICE. So that is a really big module coming up.

“We’re also overhauling our existing reporting pages so giving more information, looking more towards things like demographic data. For example, device data; are people visiting on mobile? What sort of vehicle age ranges are people looking for your site? More in-depth, detailed looks at what kind of customer is visiting your site and how do we reach that sort of customer? 

Aaron O’Neill, manages the ALICE program

“We also have a tool in there called AI summaries, which is the first stage of including AI into ALICE. So it’ll be like a little chat bot that sits within ALICE. That’s the end goal for us, where you can really work with the AI and help understand your data and planning and insights.”

Mr Johnson said: “In layman terms, just putting data in ALICE makes a dealership’s life easy, whether you are a sales manager, a dealer principal, a general manager, a marketing manager or a service advisor. We really have everything feeding in there, covering all departments within a dealership.

“So those are the big ones that are coming. They will be within the next three months, which is our timeline to market with this paid product. And then after that we have a whole roadmap full of things that are on the way,” Mr Johnson said.