[Ali]

Everyone:

I've been a reader of Dealer Refresh for years, but never posted. The time has come where I have found something so extraordinary that I just have to share it.

I wanted to wait to create his thread until I had both my Dealer.com and DealerOn websites launched, but I can't wait any longer. So, here's the deal: I currently own 2 dealerships which have been on Dealer.com for about 2-3 years. We gained huge exposure through our Buy One Get Two campaign on Dodge Trucks back in November 2008 and our Dealer.com sites were integral in launching and promoting that campaign. I was personaly on Cavuto, Fox News, etc. I graduated MIT and worked for Goldman Sachs back when that was a good thing. I know marketing and I know analytics, which is why I put together this "competition" of sorts. Despite all of our efforts, our search engine rankings and our conversion rate dipped drastically with new and better websites coming out.

Towards the end of February 2010, I asked DealerOn to create a contract for me on www.universitydodge.com. I also asked Dealer.com to create a new contract with their most updated platform including video blogging and the whole whammy for my other dealership, www.hollywoodchryslerjeep.com. Both sites have similar traffic and similar conversion and are located 3 miles from each other in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale DMA. I was going to pit them head to head on conversion and SEO for 6 months and to the victor goes the spoils.

At DealerOn, I dealt directly with the CEO of the company. Email me at sales@southfloridadodge.com and I'll get you in touch with him. He is also on DealerRefresh and is great to deal with. He turned around a contract in hours and my site was live within 2 weeks exactly the way I wanted it.

I am still waiting for my Dealer.com site to launch and when it does, I will share some of the stats, but I couldn't wait to share my DealerOn stats with everyone.

UD.com was the old Dealer.com platform going to new DealerOn Platform
HCJ.com was the old Dealer.com platform still waiting to go to new Dealer.com Platform

TO THE STATS:

The Starting Point:

Google Site Explorer: UD.com 250 HCJ.com: 272
Yahoo Site Explorer: UD.com 1,787 Pages & 2,461 Inlinks HCJ.com 734 Pages & 11,207 Inlinks
2009 Conversion Rate: UD.com 5.3% HCJ.com: 5.2%
2009Q4 Monthly Visitors: UD.com 6500 monthly HCJ.com 5500 monthly
2010Q1 Dealer.com Conversion Rate: UD.com 3.3% HCJ.com 2.8%
2010Q1 Monthly Visitors: UD.com 7600 monthly HCJ.com 6300 monthly

April 2010 Old Dealer.com HCJ.com Visitors/Conversion: 5600 / 2.7%
April 2010 New DealerON UD.com Visitors/Conversion: 6500 / 4.95%

May 2010 Old Dealer.com HCJ.com Visitors/Conversion: 5800 / 3.2%
May 2010 New DealerON UD.com Visitors/Conversion: 7000 / 4.22%

I will share my numbers continuously throughout the next 4 months. Needless to say, My conversion is up 50% on www.universitydodge.com from 2010Q1 to April & May 2010. My conversion on the www.hollywoodchryslerjeep.com Dealer.com site actually went down from 2.8% to 2.7% in April and up to 3.2% in May

All website traffic is verified independently through google analytics to be accurate. Conversion numbers are leads only. This doesn't include map views or bogus stuff like that. Phone traffic has been steady for each month among each site and is tracked with independent numbers for both sales and service/parts.

Stay tuned for more updates and some tricks for getting the highest converting sites from DealerOn, let me know. I'll share some secrets and I'll put you in contact with the CEO of the company directly. My email is sales@southfloridadodge.com.

I am not affiliated with either of these 2 website companies. I am the dealer principal of the 2 dealership listed above.

Ali Ahmed
Dealer Principal

[Matt_Murray]

Ali. Thanks for your post. It’s great that you’re taking the initiative to delve deep into your web stats and share your results. It’s a good start to a very difficult process of testing.

Though it’s tempting to measure visits, conversion rates, pages indexed, etc., against two competing sites, the stats can be misleading. When performing A/B testing, there are many variables to take into consideration.

Take for example, domain names. Domain names don’t develop trust from the search engines equally. Meaning, Site A might have a trustworthy domain name whereas Site B does not. This can directly affect the number of pages indexed, and the relevance of your traffic as well as conversions.

When comparing sites, it’s advisable to compare dealerships that sell the same number of brands and/or type of brand, as each site will be optimized for the brands they sell. Therefore, it will be difficult to compare two sites equally if one sells only Dodge and the other sells Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep.

When measuring visitor data from Google Analytics be sure to separate search engine traffic from all other traffic. And remember that many things affect website traffic, like offline marketing, television & radio ads, sales, etc.

Testing on the web is very difficult, and that’s an understatement. If you do decide to test, we recommend doing so with as few variables as possible (scientists only test one at a time, but this isn’t feasible on the web), and testing them on many websites to help ensure the accuracy of your conclusions.

Here is some more information on A/B testing.

[Jeff Kershner]

Ali, it's great to hear you are getting great results from your DealerOn dealer website.

I'm not going to comment on the debate of conversion between dealer.com and DealerOn since as Matt pointed out there are many many variables.

However, I adopted a DealerOn website when I took on this new gig and I too am witnessing some excellent conversion rates from the website. And this is excluding any type of plug-in lead drivers on the site. So far I've been impressed with the performance and we have been working together on a few projects to increase conversion even more. We will see where it goes.

[Ali Amirrezvani]

Jeff and Ali,

Thanks for your kind words and continued support. I have some new stuff being released soon that I am sure will blow you away. I will personally call and show you them as soon as they are ready.

Once again, thank you for your business!