Correlation between sales and website traffic

[joe.pistell]

When you say Traffic are we talking sessions, users, or pageviews or all of the above. Sounds like you may have reached critical mass meaning you are running at your peaks in terms of internet closing, website lead provisioning, etc. What is your SEO and SEM like? Are you optimized to for more eyeballs or more conversions. Are you advertising way beyond a reasonable distance to drive and do business? These are some questions I would be asking in your situation.

Yep. This high level stat reflects EVERYTHING.


#1). Overall Market conditions (spooked shoppers in 2008 vs "Leasing is back!" in 2014).
#2). All of your OEM's efforts (fresh products, marketing to drive traffic, incentives to convert)
#3). All of your OEM competition's efforts (fresh products, marketing to drive traffic, incentives to convert)
#4). All classified shopping sites ability to replace the need to visit to your website.
#5). All of your dealership efforts (right product mix, marketing to drive traffic, your sales teams ability to convert)
#6). All of your retail competitor's efforts (right product mix, marketing to drive traffic, their teams ability to convert)
#7). Your svc. dept's traffic.




Caution!! Once you try to look across rooftops & compare (like Stefan and Bill's examples), it's bad practice to rank stores against each other because you need to factor in more variables. A few are "distance from major market", # of cars that drive by, competition (all), inventory profiles, franchise shopper behavior (i.e. jaguar = lots of wanna be shoppers) and on and on...






HTH
Joe

 

[Amy Eddins Hughes]

What I'm getting at is how do we know that your "1 million page views" influenced more sales rather than the market being strong at those times and therefore more people were searching for cars as a whole and you sold more cars.

The reason I am asking is my website traffic, page views, VDP views, email leads, etc. are all up significantly YOY and continuing to trend up. That said, our sales, while they are up YOY, they are not up anywhere near as much as our website traffic. So...I'm getting a TON more traffic to my site but only a slight increase in sales. Which has me wondering, what is the value of traffic to the site?

I get more web traffic in June then I do in January and I sell more cars in June than January, but that doesn't mean that web traffic causes sales obviously (again, I think lot traffic would probably be a better metric to use instead of sales). So, again, other than bragging about how much site traffic you can bring to a site, how can you demonstrate the value of this traffic?

Can I suggest one way to calculate the specific value of traffic? Check out this blog... http://blog.stringautomotive.com/how-to-calculate-value-per-page
Our platform calculates this for you with custom inputs per conversion/lead source, but the blog shows a do-it-yourself version for all.

As one who spent years trying to draw this correlation using only GA and total media spend, we've come a long way to have this debate in an automotive forum. I had a dealer in Pascagoula, MS actually comment to my superior once, "If she talks to me about the damn website traffic once more, I'm going to throw her out of my office." So, I am happy to hear the battle is still raging to draw the correlation.

I'm just not sure I fully buy into the Sales per Thousand Visitors (SPMV- we might as well make an acronym out of this, right?) as a standalone metric on which to ACT. If the reaction to this metric is "Great, so I just need to drive more traffic to my web site," the dealer is missing a ton of insight. Isolating engagement metrics at a campaign/landing page level will help you identify the highest converting sources of traffic. Also, looking at trends in relation to change in advertising mix and budget are key.

That said, we do see proof points everyday that as traffic increases at a zip by zip level, sales increases in those same zip codes. Inside PMA outside, etc. That type of data is not only actionable, it should inform the ENTIRE strategy at the dealership. Not just the digital budget, but the overall advertising spend can be optimized when those metrics are easily accessible.

Bill Simmons, the invitation still stands. Happy to throw those metrics into the DPS and drill down in order to add more color to the conversation. #noinvoicerequired