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Uncle Joe's Make Over Diary

Wow, I just took a look at 5 year old list of the top 100 search phrases and their ranks

Short Tail:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-...YyLTg3YzctYzdmZjhlMGZhYzUx/edit?ddrp=1&hl=en#
  • Dealix's UsedCars.com use to kill it.:2quiet:
  • CarGurus.com was invisible (until you got to long tail). Not any more ;-)

Long Tail:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-...kzLTk3YWYtMzI3NGU0OTUwMmY0/edit?ddrp=1&hl=en#
  • Branded keywords like "Nissan used cars" are MUCH better, they return lots of car dealers. This is a big improvement from 2010.

It comes from the DR Blog post: "Look-Out AutoTrader and Cars.com, There’s a new Guru in Town"
 
Has anyone seen a dealer use it's staff in their VDP vehicle photos? Something like:

Staff photos could be Owners/Managers, Reps, Detailers, etc.

This idea just won't let go of me. When this happens, it usually is a winner.

Huge fan of including your people through-out your dealer website. Let's include a small snippet of a customer ratings/review in there as well.

Honda dealer in my hometown uses a local agency to design their website and they were doing a great job showcasing their "people" on their website.

When I was at Director of Marketing at a smaller Auto Group in my hometown, I had proposed a full-on transition in marketing across all the dealers where the premise of this ongoing campaign was to showcase their PEOPLE. Make it ALL about the personal experience you receive when you work with any of the Auto Group's dealerships.

A large proponent of this campaign was to include and leverage their reviews on DealerRater and Cars.com. Employee image photos were to be rotated through-out many designated spots on the pages of the dealership website, much like banner ads through-out. From the homepage, to the about us page, SRP and VDP. These employee images were to also be included in the display / re-marketing efforts as well. The same would stretch across billboards and TV. I had a clear vision on where I wanted to go with it... it went nowhere.
 
Shout out to our IT dudes.

Does your waiting room have a different IP than your sales reps?

Quick check: http://www.whatsmyip.org/

The way we have ours setup is 2 centralized internet connections at the data center.
1 runs all the phones, ReyRey, internet and communication for all the dealerships.
1 runs all the Meraki customer portal wifi connections.

This works best for us in terms of security and efficiency to ensure that they don't tax the main network.
 
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Just a quick note and something I have tried....you might find the results interesting.

If you have your customers on a separate network.....want to track and see some "show-rooming" activity? What sites they visit? More importantly what "dealer" or shopper sites they visit?

If you can get JUST customers to use your "customer" WiFi (not sales or other dealer employees), and can log the DNS request traffic via router/gateway - you can see what dealer sites your customers are going to. If your gateway/router doesn't allow logging, you can use a DNS service (like opendns) that will log/count domain requests.

As most people will use free WiFi instead of their data plans, you will have a good indicator of who your showroom customers are shopping you against, info sites, etc.
 
Wow. If you wanted to see where our industry is headed in the next 10 yrs, this is an epic read http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/31/us-apple-bmw-courtship-insight-idUSKCN0Q52CW20150731

It's filled with amazing insights on many levels.

Is Apple really thinking about getting into the car biz?
"...if only 1 percent of Apple's annual iPhone customers decided to order a car, it would need to make 1.69 million vehicles. That's more than the 434,311 vehicles Jaguar and Land Rover produced last year. Even BMW Group, which made just over 2 million cars last year"

gulp.