Top Automotive Marketplace Accelerates Sales Leads by 6%

Editor's note: The original author of this story wished to remain anonymous.

My company—a leader in the automotive industry—connects millions of buyers with dealerships to simplify one of life’s major decisions: purchasing a car. For customers, a new vehicle represents freedom and opportunity. For dealerships, every lead is a chance to thrive in a highly competitive market. And with 25 million visitors to our site each month, the heart of our work is clear: to provide a seamless car-buying experience for users, and to provide tools that drive success for dealerships.

Data has always been the fuel of our operation. But fuel alone can’t drive a car to its destination—it needs an engine. For us, that engine is our analytics tool. As Lead Analyst, I work to ensure that our analytics engine keeps purring away so every team in our organization can access data and use it to drive smart decisions.

When I joined the company two years ago, though, our Adobe Analytics engine was in need of more than a tune-up—it needed an overhaul.

Cracks in our Adobe engine block

For over a decade, we had relied on Adobe Analytics as our primary tool for measuring site performance and guiding business decisions. Even though the platform served its purpose, it was so complex that only a handful of specialized analysts could effectively use it—just 10, to be precise. These 10 people were responsible for building dashboards, interpreting metrics, and fielding requests from every other department. Our limited capacity created a bottleneck that was stressing our team and stifling creativity and decision-making across the organization.

Things came to a head when, shortly after I joined, we re-platformed our website from an older content management system to a more advanced one. To keep our customer experience running smoothly, we had to maintain both the old and new content platforms at the same time.

However, that meant we also had to use two separate data tracking systems: one built for the outdated platform and another tailored to the new one. And to make matters worse, these tools didn’t speak the same language—each tracked and organized data differently, so it was nearly impossible to get a clear, unified picture of how the overall site was performing.

With increased workloads and inefficient pipelines compounding the issues of our already limited capacity, we realized we were going to hit engine failure if we didn't make a change. It was time for a single, streamlined solution that could handle all our insights. After exploring several options, we found that solution with Amplitude Analytics.

Shifting to Amplitude for 10x accessibility

We chose Amplitude for its user-friendly design, powerful features, and ability to transform complex data into clear, actionable insights. It had everything we needed to fix our replatforming pain, alleviate our bottlenecks, and supercharge our analytics for the future.

What really got us firing on all cylinders though was Amplitude's Professional Services, a team of seasoned experts who helped us map out an implementation process. Xin Cao, Amplitude’s Principal Customer Success Architect and our dedicated consultant, provided workshops and assistance so our teams could use the platform confidently and correctly from the start. Customer Success Manager Nicole Morrison and Digital Marketing Lead Kelsey Cannon also provided critical support, helping us refine funnel logic, create tailored dashboards, and unlock even more value from the platform than we would have been able to get on our own—and much faster!

Our first step was to unify our tracking systems using Rudderstack, a data pipeline platform. Simply put, Rudderstack acts as a central hub that brings together information from different sources, making it usable for platforms like our data lake and Amplitude. Implementing it reduced the inefficiencies caused by maintaining two content platforms with separate schemas, making the transition to Amplitude that much smoother.

Once we had Amplitude up and running, data was no longer restricted to a select few—it became a shared resource that everyone could use. From product to marketing, teams that previously depended on analytics experts for basic insights began to build their own dashboards, explore user behaviors, and make data-driven decisions. Within months of implementation, over 100 team members were actively using Amplitude—a stunning 10x increase in accessibility compared to Adobe.

New insights to improve performance

This newfound agility allowed us to shift our focus to initiatives that would improve our business performance (also with Amplitude), like fixing a major problem with our lead forms.

When a customer is interested in a dealership's car on our site, they fill out a lead form with their information. We send that to the dealer to follow up and make a sale. Our revenue comes primarily from dealerships paying to list with us and get those lead forms—so when we noticed a high rate of form submission failures, we needed to dig into the details.

Through Amplitude’s funnel analysis, we uncovered the issue: The “Check Availability” button on our lead forms was causing confusion. More than 80% of failed submissions came from users who expected it to show real-time inventory updates, which seemed logical—especially in a post-pandemic world where virtual inventory checks have become more popular. Instead, clicking the button opened a new form to contact the dealership. Puzzled, users would end up leaving many fields blank, which resulted in error messages and incomplete submissions.

Thankfully, two simple adjustments were enough to address this issue: We redesigned the form to show which fields are required, and we replaced the CTA with a clearer “Send Message.” And just as Amplitude helped us identify the source of this major issue, it also showed us that our fixes were working: submission rates improved by 6%, error rates fell by 30%, and we even improved customer satisfaction by 4%.

This increase in ease of use and shopping confidence underscores how a more intuitive, streamlined experience can positively impact both buyers and dealerships. We were able to build that thanks to Amplitude.

Fueling the future: Driving growth with data

Today, Amplitude is part of our everyday operations. More than 100 team members use it daily, making data a shared resource that powers smarter decisions at every level.

After a year of using Amplitude, I can confidently say that when you remove barriers to data access, people naturally gravitate toward solving problems. While sophisticated analytics tools like Amplitude are essential, the real breakthrough happens when teams feel empowered to question, investigate, and improve the user experience on their own terms.

Our Amplitude analytics engine is supercharging how we use data to drive growth. That’s not just a win for our organization—it’s a win for every customer trying to navigate a major life purchase and unlock the freedom of transportation.