I have to agree with Scott and Timothy. Our site, which rolled out the last week of March, has been one minor frustration after another. From not being able to get the CarFax link changed to my AutoCheck link (3/23, still not done) to coding errors like linking the new car specials button to a dead page due to a typo.

For April, our average time on the site for 2333 visitors was only 248 seconds. That's less than 11 seconds per visitor. They are seeing the index page and leaving, or they click on the peel down coupon, which is very plain-looking, close it and leave. 77% of our vistors bailed out before ever looking at the inventory or even seeing a price, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't crappy pictures, poor descriptions or inflated prices. They never got to see how crappy or high we were or weren't. That's 1485 vistors that ran off into the woods.

Now here's the kicker, of the 1252 that didn't leave in the first page, 72 found their way to the used car inventory. 28 leads were submitted for used cars. That's a staggering 39% conversion rate. Of the 28, 7 bought a used car, or 25% lead to close. How many could we have sold if only 10% of the 1485 who left, could have found what they came to the site to find? Based on these numbers 148 would have submitted 56 leads and we would have closed 14 of those. If those numbers are too high, cut them in half and it's still 7 car deals or $16,000 in missed used car revenue, before pack. That means my salespeople missed the chance to make an additional $4,000 in commission. I don't know much, but I do know my sales team deserved the chance to make that money. They closed 14% of their total leads last month. All they needed was an at-bat to hit a homerun. It was already there. We didn't need more advertising, comments, photos or anything else.

To their credit TK is working to fix these and the other problems. It has not been the smoothest process. I think I'd have rather had an unneccessary prostate exam. Hopefully, once we are through the growing pains it won't be as frustrating.

I have seen a good amount of TKCarsite websites before and I have a question involving the SEO that I have just never understood. I would say over 80% of TK sites I have seen have a javascript file (usually links.js) that is full of functions that use javascript to change the current page URL. Instead of just using normal SEO friendly anchor (A) tags, every single link has its own uniquely named javascript function.

Although some aspects of SEO are very open to interpretation based on individual results for a company's strategy, it is well known for fact that javascript is not SEO friendly AT ALL.

I was wondering if there is some secret behind using javascript instead of anchor tags before I just don't understand?

Do vendors (not going to name names yet) ever up the price of the contract for service after you've already gotten all of the big wigs in the company to sign it and fax it in?

This seems like bad business to me.

You would think they would just eat the small difference to save the utter embarrassment on all sides.

I for one can speak to Scott's issues. Our initial cutover to tkcarsites was an absolute nightmare. It was particularly frustrating because everyone at tk was extremely nice - they just seemed overwhelmed with new business to the point that they were incapable of delivering on the over promised sizzle of their sales reps outlandish claims. Richard got involved and certainly was a big factor in cutting through the bs and getting results moving more quickly.
It seems to me that they have tried so hard to be able to provide a great product to dealers who have relatively no tech savvy personnel, that when they encounter a store that is on the cutting edge or has key personnel that are VERY tech knowledgeable, that their process gets in the way of their results.

Rather than speaking directly to the people doing the actual work they have what I call glorified message runners. And it seems that they even have message runners for the message runners. What happens is that so much is lost by the time it gets to the tech department that priorities aren't properly set and much gets lost, overlooked, falls through the cracks and ultimately leads to a bad customer experience for the dealer. I've spoken to Richard about this, i hope they are making strides to continue improving in this regard. While we are light-years ahead of where we were, it continues to take far too long to get trouble tickets and requests for work to be completed - one request has been in the works for over a month now.

The single biggest reason we have stayed is their SEO prowess. Now this is a subject which I have a deep understanding of. I won't go into details here, but their chief advisor for SEO is a certifiable genius in this area. They are so effective at using inbound links that they seem to be able to get away with a lot of no-no's in the seo world. Like using iframed inventory (a big pet peeve of mine) Using repeating title tags that are vague.) Some of what they do would also be very much in the grey area of googles webmaster guidelines. My feeling is that - much like myself - they are betting on the reality that dealer websites will continue to fly under google's radar because of the relatively low traffic dealer websites see (when compared with the amazon.com's and ebays of the world) thus, google will never have the time to deal with enforcing these loosely interpreted rules. None of that matters - google "Nissan Dealers" and you'll find Marlboro Nissan in the number 2 or 3 spot on google page one. Now this isn't a particularly important term for us, but that key phrase is extremely competitive and its a NATIONAL term. What this means for those who are less SEO savvy - its real freakin' hard to get on page 1 for a term like that. We were on page 1 for that term by our 2nd week with tk.

To give you an idea of just how effective their TK5 sites are I will give you some info about our sites. Prior to moving to tk our Nissan dealer site already received, on average about 3-4k unique visitors/month. Last month we topped 11k uniques and over 20k total visits. Now the lead conversion is nowhere near tk's 5% claims, but we are certainly busy. In this horrible economy we had a better January than last year and our Feb is going to be right about the same. We sold 69 cars on President's day weekend - 48 were directly sourced from our online marketing efforts.

Now if they could just build in the killer analytics package dealer.com uses - maybe the carflix dealer.com has and ok and the dominator ppc program they have, as well and a more robust back end tool for user customizability they would have the ultimate web solution.

I would warn you of this though. TK is so effective at driving traffic to your website that you better have a good process in place. If you don't you'll end up seeing a ton of bad reviews on dealerrater.com who's web link will be just below your websites location on google page 1.

Hope this helps!

Timothy P Martell
Director of eCommerce & Marketing
Marlboro Nissan
Woburn Jaguar
[email protected]
(888) 251-3813

We built a portal page with TK to be the flagship site for our company to include our four area locations. When TK says that their websites are completely customizable they truly mean it. When we first started building our site, I sent them a rough “blue print” of the site that I had pictured. They were able to work off of my rough layout to help us design a truly one-of-a-kind site. The “power of 5” sites are simple to navigate, and make for an easy shopping experience for the consumer. We have only been live for a few days, yet we have seen a rise in leads. I am definitely looking forward to the new business we will acquire with this site.

Amanda Marsal
Internet Sales Manager
John Jones Automotive Group

Alright so as I said to Richard in his follow up calls to me I want to set the record straight on my new site. First off we love the look and feel! We all know it's about the first impressions.... That said once Richard and I connected things began to move! He does indeed get the process moving and the issues got cleared up for the most part. We still have a couple of minor items but everyone is working to resolve them. I am sure that we're going to be very happy with the site's results. I'm already seeing some changes in the search engine positioning. And we're seeing decent lead traffic. I'm sure as the site gets crawled and the search engines index it traffic will go up. I appreciate Richard's getting involved and inspiring his people. I look forward to a long and prosperous relationship with TK.

Scott Dube

Scott,

Tried to contact you. You are not available. I left you my cell phone number so you can contact me at your convenience.

Richard

Scott,

I will contact you direct to discuss your issues.

Richard

We are in the process of switching over to a TK site form our Dealerskins site. This is without a doubt the worst experience of my career with regard to building a site. They claim everything is custom yet you can't get what you want. The claim they have a very well defined process yet we're now nearly 2 months behind schedule. That's bad enough but they claimed the site was ready to go live but it wasn't even close but too late we let them go live. It's out there now in all of it's splendor broken links database errors etc. Over 4 days that way now with virtually no progress. I have tried to get people higher in the company involved they seem only remotely interested more interested in defending there lousy project manager. I have many more issues with them but I will give them a chance to resolve these issues before completing the rant. I can tell you our online as well as offline reputation would be as bad as Bill Heard if I treated my customers this way! RICHARD PLEASE GET INVOLVED AND FIX MY SITE! It's an embarrassment to both of us!

Scott

Since going with TK Carsites our two dealerships have seen a HUGE increases in website traffic. Their SEO department has brought our sites up from page 5 or 7 on the organic search engines to the first page. The other website provider we were using just didn't seem to want to work with you. If you needed changes it would take weeks sometimes, that is if you could get in contact with your rep. TK reps will return your calls immediately and get the job done, usually within 48 hours. It has been such a pleasure to have TK on my side in this economy. My sales rep, Jen Schrader, also has been an great asset to have. She is there for me at the drop of a hat, even coming to the dealership to help me out with whatever I need.

Due to our Toyota websites look and feel, we are the ONLY recommended Toyota dealer in Northern Michigan endorsed by AARP.

What I have been able to do since bringing TK on board is increase my sales leads coming directly from our sites and drop my paid leads to zero. The leads that we get directly from our sites have a much higher closing rate than any paid service that we have been using. We currently close an average of between 20% to 30% of our internet leads, which obviously makes the owners VERY HAPPY! That is almost a 80% closing increase from what our internet department did prior to taking on TK. With the integration of Homenet Inc. WebIOL it makes everything a breeze. Instead of having to use several different programs for uploading photos, updating inventory and printing window stickers, now I can do it all in one place. The simplicity of it is so wonderful and it makes my job so much easier. Convenience is a must when you are one person dealing with three separate dealership inventories.

I recommend TK to everyone that I come across as the quintessential website hosting provider and WebIOL as the best online inventory manager out there. I cannot say enough about this company. If you are not happy with your current provider I advise you to give TK a shot. Let them show you how they can increase your web presence and help you to generate not just more leads but turn them into sales. They haven't been votes "Best Website Provider" 4 years straight for nothing. TK Caresites has earned that distinction for a reason!!!

Scott,
Thanks for your subtle approach to getting a truthful answer by insulting those of us who actually work in the retail selling environment. Though a TRUE sales professional will obviously let that slide. Honestly, I have been reading this post in detail too. I believe the TK team is doing its best to answer questions and respond to constructive criticism. I am sure BZ and TK and many others are tweaking the way they do business to build custom sites for dealerships. Jeff made a good point about "cookie-cutter sites". JEFF: "I do want to take a second here and try and defend some of the vendors. From my experience, I would say 99% of the dealers out there are NOT willing to spend anymore then $700-$1200 a month on a dealer website. What do you get for that? Templated websites!" Though Scott this is "input" I do not have a specific story to tell about TK. BUT, Because they customize a website; I would like to recommend that you keep your conversion rate as your top priority. I went with a website that I could change easily at any time of the day without help from the vendors tech team or customer service and I am not talking changing code. If that is important to you I would like to recommend (JAZEL.COM) Also most website vendors come with SEO programs and CRM tools included. I am sure someone here will give you an honest answer about TK. You have certainly come to the right place to do some research. I hope some of our fellow bloggers step up to help you. Good luck Scott!

Scott,

If you are looking at TK Carsites or any other website provider, you should do your own research before listening to what other dealers tell you. Although there are many savvy people on this forum, doing your own research works the best, because you can focus on what is important for you.

What is your primary reason you are switching from BZ Results?

Do you feel like you are getting the traffic you should get? (Is it SEO related)

Do you want a website that converts better?

Do you want a website that has a better GUI?

Or a website that is easier to manage?

If SEO is your hot topic, then search the search engines for your brand or other brands and see who the dealers use that are on top of the rankings. Also use google's advanced query searches to find out how many of their pages are indexed (you can type site:www.yourdomain.com for this)

If you want a website that converts better, then find out what other dealers' websites are converting at and how they measure it (compare apples to apples.) You can also add a popup form to your website instead of changing providers (we saw an increase of about 2% in our conversion ratio by adding the famous popup/popunder script to our front page)

Do your research then ask questions that are to the point...

I am looking at this company and all of you are giving conflicting stories. Who is telling the truth? I would like to hear a real honest story and it can be bad or good but the truth would be nice. I know that you all are car salesmen so truth is not in the vocabulary but give it a try you might even like it.

Scott

Even after talking to Richard, I still get that junk too. I setup an email rule to have anything mentioning TK Carsites going to the junk mail. I don't even read it anymore - it is always the same message.

Here's the latest example (I get these daily). Trust be Barbie doesn't delete my name. Stop spamming!

"If you want the automotive industries best websites and search engine optimization, but are currently under contract with someone else, we can help. Simply reply to this email.

For an immediate response, contact our marketing coordinator Barbie Turner.

Barbie Turner
Marketing Coordinator
714.937.1239 x 270
[email protected].

If you wish to be removed from receiving future emails, please reply requesting us to do so. If you have already requested to be removed but you are still receiving emails, feel free to contact me direct at [email protected] or 714.937.1239 x230. Chris Christiansen, Controller

TK Carsites, Inc.
1940 W. Orangewood
Suite 106
Orange, CA 92868
714.937.1239

E10066"

Hey tkcarsites, stop the spam. I am not a customer and I have sign-up for anything on any of you sites. I have asked twice that you stop emailing me.

Stop the spam

The rep at TK that contacted me was top notch BUT I just could not use them because the graphics and inventory was just not good enough.

It's too bad that they have a really great system in ease of doing business with them but are stuck on not remodeling their product and services.

In the website business you truly get what you pay for and I crack up knowing when multi-million dollar operation don't get it that if your willing to spend $$$$ on that waterfall in your showroom but $.02 on your virtual one.

Richard also called me and left an apology voice mail for all the spam - sorry I missed you Richard. Thanks for the voice mail though!

I agree with Joe - it is a big step in the right direction.

Sorry for not being available, or on DealerRefresh, lately - I'm the point man on a new CRM install and it is taking some time.....but all for the good!

Update:

Richard Valenta called me yesterday and personally apologized for the errors. He was genuinely concerned about the SPAM issue and assured me that he'd be following it up personally. He finished with an offer to "make good" on the error by offering me a gift certificate of some sort.

I didn't expect a call from the RV, the apology was genuine and the gift offer was unexpected.

Kudos to RV,
THIS IS A CLASSIC ACTION PLAN FOR INTERNET REPUTATION MANAGEMENT.

#1). Quick Personal Response by highest management/owner
#2). Sincere empathy from management on breakdown
#3). A promise to fast track the repair
#4). A peace offering

I recall a survey of auto buyers on their likelyhood to be a repeat buyer. One of the highest repeat buyer scores was to a customer that had a problem that was corrected to their satisfaction. Amazingly, this problem customer had a higher loyalty score than the customer that had no problems at all. In retrospect, this makes sense becuase you've educated the customer on how loyal you are to him which makes the customer understand how things will go in the future.

I can't tell you how many management meetings I've been in telling them that policy is NOT a negative, it's a rock solid investment and should have a dedicated/written action plan complete with ROI tracking.

Thnx for the lesson RV!
Joe

Ali,

I certainly apologize if you feel I have ignored you. This is not my intention as I do not hide from anyone.

I sincerely appreciate every customer's business as if it were our only customer and will always pick up the phone whether you have 1 location or 30 locations.

I have no idea how this has happened. I just tried to contact you at the store but you but you were gone. I left my cell phone number with Osiris and you can call me any time this weekend.

Richard

Richard Valenta,

I am glad you have so much time to post since you will not return my calls. I have numerous problems with my website that has been live for 9 months now. I have had customer complaints that they could not find what they want in the inventory (your sort by price feature did not work), my traffic to the site is almost all derived from SEM because you are way behind the curve in SEO even after 9 months and numerous calls with Jim Rucker, and most recently, I had a customer blow up in the box about their 0% financing that is shown on my incentives page that you created and framed in and I have no access to change. We haven't had this offer in months. The list goes on, but I'll keep it short.

You think you would get it right after it took you 6 months to create my website to begin with. I want you to give me a call because I am a very dissatisfied customer. And to handle me, you put me off to your dedicated "Customer Retention Officer" who had been there for less than a month. Why do you need someone dedicated to "retention"? You have my number or you can get it from Chelsea.

Here is a snapshot of our webstats and SEM efforts:
www.southfloridadodge.com/webstatsUD.pdf
www.southfloridadodge.com/DominatorUD.pdf

Ali Ahmed
Vice President
University Dodge

I should also give you guys a hand in figuring out how to take me off your list. You send stuff to a whole lot of people at Checkered Flag (@checkeredflag.com) and those people all forward your message to me - I'm the only one who should be getting stuff from you anyway. I have no idea where you got email addresses on some of these other folks. When you send one broadcast, I see it at least 10 times - usually more than 20 times. I generally have something colorful to say about you everytime I hit delete. Joe's a little more attentive than me because he's actually reading the emails. When I see TK in an email, it goes straight to the trash - no need to read anymore.

SO - REMOVE ALL EMAIL ADDRESSES WITH @checkeredflag.com as the domain FROM YOUR SYSTEM.

I'm with Joe on this one - please stop the useless spamming!

Can someone at TK oversee the SPAM machine?
How many REMOVE requests do I have to make to be REMOVED? Case in point:

Remove request for customer# 2838xx (all sent to same email address)
---4/09/08, REMOVE to [email protected]
---4/10/08, REMOVE to [email protected]
---4/22/08, REMOVE to [email protected]
---4/22/08, REMOVE to [email protected]
---4/30/08, REMOVE to [email protected]
Next TK dumps me to a diff email system, REMOVE requests:
---5/11/08, REMOVE to [email protected]
---5/22/08, REMOVE to [email protected]

Now TK wants to push its new TK5 platform (SPAM sent to me on 6/05/08)

Dear TK marketing manager,
I visited your new TK5 intro site and I have to call you to see it? Do you think I am going to give your team 02 seconds of my time? Not a chance.

May I suggest that you revisit lessons learned from reputation management. Defend your brand at all costs, Improve your strategy. If someone sends you a REMOVE, honor it and place that accnt into a special folder for future use.

Sorry to air out the dirty laundry, but after 7 REMOVE requests... C'mon!

Joe Pistell
Marketing Director
UsedCarKing.com

p.s. I recall even more REMOVE requests like the SPAM from worldclassautosite.com (assigned with same client#)

Hello Alex

I had 168 people print a 500.00 coupon for the month of March 2008. Just like most ISD I have many reports to choose from, I use Bold chats visitor report for a benchmark, I have 11,291 unique visitors for the month of March. That high number is because of a promo we are running for fathers day (giving away a truck) we collected over 3,000 e-mail addresses in March also.

Frank Davis
[email protected]