Nestled on the banks of the Ohio River, Cincinnati is home to a bustling and competitive automotive landscape. However, one dealership group in particular stands out from the rest. The Jeff Wyler Automotive Family dominates the rankings, earning 4 of the 5 top spots overall. They are a group renowned for their dedication to customer satisfaction and, as demonstrated by our analysis, reputation management.
The top 10 dealerships in Cincinnati boast high average star ratings and high review response rates. Ranking highly in Cincinnati will require dealerships to maintain a high monthly volume of reviews and prove their relevance and popularity to prospective customers.
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Jeff Wyler Superior Honda has a superior monthly volume of reviews, placing it at the #1 spot among dealers in Cincinnati. This dealer has a high rating and a strong response rate. Maintaining a high monthly volume of reviews will help this dealership boost its lifetime review volume, solidifying its place at the top.
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Jake Sweeney Chevrolet possesses both a high monthly volume of reviews and a large lifetime volume of reviews. However, this dealership has a lower review response rate, earning it the #8 spot in Cincinnati.
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Kings Kia responds to the highest number of reviews compared to the other top 10 dealerships. To improve, Kings Kia should boost monthly review volume by asking a higher percentage of its customers for reviews.
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Jeff Wyler dealerships dominate the top non-luxury dealers in Cincinnati list, earning 4 out of the 5 top spots.
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Jeff Wyler Superior Honda ranks #1, receiving a high volume of reviews per month. Jeff Wyler Honda of Colerain ranks #2, with a lower monthly volume of reviews than its sister Honda store.
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Currently ranked #3, Beechmont Ford could outrank Jeff Wyler Honda dealerships by improving its monthly review volume. Increasing its response rate could also help boost its ranking, as Beechmont Ford isn’t far behind #1 and #2 in this area.
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BMW of Cincinnati North surpasses all other luxury dealers in Cincinnati and earns the top-ranking spot. Earning many more reviews per month than any other dealer, BMW of Cincinnati North shows that its customers visit frequently and are highly engaged. Still, this dealership could benefit from boosting its review response rate, as this metric is lower than any of the other dealers listed.
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Battling for spots #4 and #5 are Infiniti of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Cadillac. Cincinnati Cadillac has a larger lifetime volume than Infiniti of Cincinnati. However, the Infiniti dealer beats Cincinnati Cadillac with its high response rate. Infiniti of Cincinnati responds to more reviews than any other Cincinnati luxury dealer, showing that it’s highly invested in reputation management and its customer base.
*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 considers 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 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%)
Rating has a substantial impact on if a business shows up in local searches 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.
