Major makeover for ALICE

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 in the agency’s regular dealer services.

At its core, ALICE dealers can plug in what it’s costing them to advertise across all kinds of media and compare the effectiveness of each dollar – including for Google, social media, display, video, digital audio and so on.

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 upgraded ALICE by adding many new features before putting it out to market on a fee-for-service basis set at $49 per month.

While it began in automotive, ALICE is industry-agnostic and is equally relevant for caravans, marine, motorcycles and other retail sectors. The relaunch means ALICE is now being offered to caravan, marine and motorbike 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, pictured above, head of growth at AdTorque Edge, told Autofile Online: “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.

“Dealers value ALICE because they can 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 is 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’ve 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. 

“A dealer can now 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 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 is working towards.”

Aaron O’Neill, who manages the ALICE program, says the decision to go to a paid model follows the progressive rollout of software upgrades over the past five years.

“Having done all these releases, we thought that with the amount of effort we’ve invested into it, this really should be a paid product. 

“We released ALICE 2.0 at the end of 2024, which saw our biggest visual overhaul. We completely redid the entire user interface and user experience.

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

O’Neill explains that whenever an inquiry or a lead comes into ALICE through its website form fill, it is listed as a customer in ALICE.

“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 have recently enhanced it so you can assign statuses to customers on whether they have been won or lost, if they’ve been contacted, whether they've been given notes, if dealers have been able to contact them from ALICE and also assign a salesperson to them from within ALICE. 

“We’re also overhauling our existing reporting pages to give more information, looking more towards things like demographic data. 

“For example, with device data – are people visiting on mobile? What sort of vehicle age ranges are people looking for on 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? 

“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 chatbot 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.”

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

“ALICE has come a long way from its initial launch and will continue to evolve to meet the needs of dealers. We have a whole roadmap full of things that are on the way.”

To find out more about ALICE, visit www.adtorqueedge.com/alice/ | To watch a video, click here.