ATLANTA — Chip Perry, the president and chief executive officer of AutoTrader.com, shared some dramatic data about the plummeting decline of click-through rates for dealers' online advertising.

Perry stressed that manufacturers and dealers alike must transition away from leads and clicks as success measures. He insisted that that industry professionals learn to understand the Internet as an influencing medium on vehicle shoppers. 

"Click-through rates have plummeted since the advent of online advertising, dropping from 30 percent in 1994 to just 0.2 percent in 2008," Perry indicated on Tuesday for a presentation at the 2010 NADA/IHS Global Insight Automotive Forum in New York.

"Considering those numbers, we in the auto industry must rethink how we measure online brand metrics and advertising influence among the 99.8 percent of viewers who do not click on an ad, whether it is in the form of a display or an online classified listing," he continued.

Perry went on to differentiate how consumers shop online for other goods as well as vehicles. He conceded that for lower-involvement, lower-cost purchases such as books, CDs or consumer electronics, the click-and-buy model has thrived and revolutionized the economy.

However with complex, high-cost, time-consuming transactions such as a vehicle purchase, Perry believes the Internet has not had a strong track record as a transaction service.

The AutoTrader.com CEO circled back to reiterate that the Web has thrived as a vehicle information source, providing an outlet for dealers and OEMs to spread the positive attributes about products.

Perry recommends better targeting of messaging, something that will drive deeper consumer engagement.

"By better engaging vehicle shoppers, dealers and manufacturers will have a greater influence on consumers' preference for specific brands and dealers," Perry pointed out.

"The impact of advertising upon online shoppers goes further than simply clicks and leads, but we tend to measure things — like clicks and leads — that are easy to measure," he went on to say. "Shoppers are heavily influenced by online research beyond what clicks and e-mail leads would indicate."

AutoTrader.com offered three other potential roadblocks that are keeping the industry from harnessing the capability of Web advertising:

—An over exuberant focus on clicks and leads is stifling the ability for marketers to influence consumers and drive brand preference.

—Much of the influencing power of the Internet is being under measured and underutilized.

—Marketing organizations need new resources, skills and tools to fully leverage the power of the Internet.

"According to studies, shoppers exposed to online advertisements have raised awareness of a product and have an increased positive opinion of the brand they saw advertised, which leads to a higher likelihood of purchase," site officials noted.

Some specific data AutoTrader.com referenced was how brand awareness increased 15 percent for ads placed on non-automotive Web sites and 25 percent for ads placed on general automotive sites. 

Executives believe even better results came from ads placed on AutoTrader.com. They said brand awareness increased by 51 percent through exposure, a factor that led to a 78 percent increase in purchase likelihood among shoppers.

"These results are critical for manufacturers and dealers who remain focused on click rates and e-mail leads for measuring the success of an online campaign," AutoTrader.com insisted.

Perry mentioned yet another recent study that showed little growth in the number of consumers sending an e-mail message during the shopping process.

Although 75 to 80 percent of vehicle shoppers go online during their shopping process, Perry explained that e-mail leads increased from 20 percent in 2004 to just 22 percent in 2008.

However, AutoTrader.com found that dealers think much of their showroom traffic comes from e-mail leads. The site mentioned a 2008 report that stated dealers believed 17 percent of their traffic came via this method.

The same report that also surveyed consumers revealed just 2 percent of those individuals ended up on a dealer lot because of an e-mail message. Officials said a whopping 81 percent simply arrived at the store.

"Without an effective way to track these walk-in customers and then correlate them back to the Internet, dealers fail to correctly identify the sources of their traffic on the lot and may be making marketing decisions with flawed data," Perry explained.

"Much of the power of the Internet is underutilized and a campaign or advertisement that didn't result in a lot of clicks may actually have been very effective when measured by different criteria — namely how that online ad influenced awareness, purchase intent or walk-in traffic," he concluded.