Cars have been a recurring thread throughout my career, from dealership operations and sales systems to the practical software problems hiding behind everyday automotive work.
This page collects automotive projects, observations, and the occasional detour into the machines themselves. The earlier Auto Sales BDC Portal is one example of where those interests intersect.
I understand why email open rate dominates campaign conversations. It appears near the top of the funnel and usually produces a large number. It is also one of the easiest campaign metrics to misunderstand. An “open” is typically an image request. The recipient’s mail client requests a tiny tracking image, and the analytics system records … Read more
I had already accepted that attribution was incomplete. That still left a practical problem: what language should appear next to a number in a report? I settled on four labels. They are not sophisticated, but they stop a dashboard from quietly upgrading evidence as it moves from an event log to a presentation. Measured Measured … Read more
Analytics dashboards make it easy for me to become overconfident. A chart shows visits. A campaign shows clicks. A tracked link shows engagement. It is tempting to keep walking the conclusion forward until the dashboard appears to prove revenue, appointments, leads, or sales. Sometimes it does. Often it does not. I wrote the Matomo measurement … Read more
Video and email have never had an easy relationship. A dealership may have a short MP4 that works on social media or a landing page, but inserting that file into an email campaign is unreliable across clients. An animated GIF is less sophisticated, yet it remains a practical common denominator for short motion assets. The … Read more
Automotive email campaigns look simple from the outside. A vehicle photo. A price. A button. Maybe a logo and a disclaimer. Send it to customers and move on. Inside the workflow, it is messier. There are single-vehicle offers, multi-vehicle inventory campaigns, holiday promotions, service offers, re-engagement emails, legal disclaimers, tracking links, logos, phone numbers, footer … Read more
Two strings looked redundant in an automotive email builder, but one identified a campaign and the other identified a saved revision.
Small internal tools have a way of becoming production tools before anyone admits it. That is dangerous because the assumptions are different. A development tool can tolerate rough edges. A production portal that handles images, campaign links, customer-facing email HTML, and authenticated workflows cannot. The BDC security audit forced me to admit that transition had … Read more
I built the BDC image tool as a practical helper. Email campaigns needed images in predictable sizes. Vehicle photos, logos, footers, banners, and promotional graphics all had to fit templates. Manually resizing and converting assets over and over was wasted effort. So the tool handled the repetitive work: Upload an image. Resize it. Convert it … Read more