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Pay p/Click -vs- 3rd party Classifieds

I am a marketing guy, not a sales guy. My job it to rev up the entire machine, so my job (and goals) maybe different and not match yours.

If your job description includes you revving up the whole company, You need a post-sale survey to smoke out that silent majority and shine a light on them!!

Here's a post to some of my survey questions: http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f40/...isms-really-track-success-498-2.html#post3413


Number One Report.
Create post-sale survey (example below). This report will show you (and management) that 80-95% of your buyers were on your home site before they bought. So? Management doesn't see the site as a "gateway" to the show room. This report makes this an undeniable fact. The quality of the info and tools at this showroom gateway either makes the phone ring or they move on.

How much potential is at this "gateway to the showroom"?

Number Two Report.

Using End of Month numbers, divide number of unique visitors to your website by number of sales. This report will show you that you only sell .5% to 1.5% of your dealership's website audience. In other wods, 99 walk and only one buy. Where did the other 99 visitors go?

These two reports will give you an idea on how much upside there is to "working your crowd". You'll need this to help justifying increasing the budget. It will also help you give you a focus on what stats can help you sell more cars.


Post Sale Survey:
A very short and simple one page survey, Multiple Choice answers, made mandatory at delivery. A few on my survey are:

  • Have you bought from us before?
  • If yes, How many vehicles?
  • As best as you can recall, how long have you been looking for a new vehicle?
  • While you were car shopping, where did you get most of your ideas? (check all that apply)
  • How did you hear about us? (check all that apply)
  • Do you consider yourself a frequent internet user?
  • Did you visit internet automobile shopping sites? (please check all that apply)
  • Did you visit our website, ________.com?
  • How did you locate our website, ________.com?
  • Did you find ________.com helpful?
  • How can we make ________.com better?
 
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Your management team needs an "ah ha" moment. They need to see the NEW BATTLEFIELD as clearly as our brilliant John Guinn sees it:

Good lookin' guy, kinda fat? I think I met him once... I think he was drunk. :)

Joe -- we're there... 'bout 75 days into a trial -- strictly used inventory-based PPC. Long story short? Good conversion. More leads.
 
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Hey Joe,

Sorry for late reply -- got caught up these past few days.

Anyhow, I like your approach to measuring success of the website. I believe we have plenty of work to do in terms of figuring out the best way to calculate the success/failure of our "digital storefront". We used to administer a post-sale survey but it wasn't as comprehensive as yours and to be honest with you, nobody really wanted to do it because they didn't see any benefit for themselves. Then you have the little marketing guy in the corner like me, saying "hey, it would be great to understand where all the sales came from so we know where to spend our money". Our finance department (who used to give the survey) claims they are too busy yada yada yada so now we don't do it anymore. Trust me though, I definitely see the value in the survey -- it's just the implementation that's the problem.

But I can sure take some of the pointers on measuring website interaction, so thanks.

Appreciate the link too. Thinking it might be time to run some a/b tests...
 
Joe, when you 'administer' the post sale survey is it just a single sheet of paper or do you have a spiffier way.

I'm attempting to put my own survey together based on this thread as we have no way to really track exactly where our purchasing customers find us at etc. We have cars/atc call tracking but everything else is up in the air!
 
flosho,

I use a single sheet of paper to record the survey info. Once its recorded, we have a temp key it into a survey system. You can by pass the paper all together and key it in online*.

In my world, I wanted our reps use the paper to interview the shopper. Some of the questions can make some folks suspicious, so I liked the "non-threatening feel" of an old school low-tech survey.


*The finest survey system on the planet is SurveyGizmo - Online Survey Software : An online survey tool for creating surveys, quizzes, polls and forms. Very easy to use, very easy to create reports. 2 thumbs up, way up!

If you get surveygizmo, not only can you create your own post sale survey, but you can think of an idea, build a form in 10 mins, send the link to your webmaster and have them add the link.

I did it with my tradein form The Used Car King, New York | Trade-in Form it was a home run, the I had the webmaster build me one and built it into the site (rather than have it pop up).

Surveygizmo also has MEGA horsepower to create conditional surveys (i.e. if answer to question 2 is B, then change question 3 to question 3c)

HTH