What's the most annoying thing on your website?

[Jeff Glackin]

Following on previous entries,

vAuto, etc can do polling on the hour. With the right website company they can post the data in semi-real time (API).

The best I could ever get out of V Auto was 4 times a day.

 

[Jason Petkov]

I'd give this a twist and add:

What would you rather have?

1. Lots of leads that close poorly
2. Less leads that are easier to close

(don't assume that #1 will produce more sales than #2).

Depends on who you ask! While there is an advantage to quality, quantity gives you the opportunity to market to more of them down the road. You may not land the sale, but that doesn't mean you can't snag them for service down the road.

 

[amirxl]

The best I could ever get out of V Auto was 4 times a day.

Funny, the best thing we got out of vAuto was a slap in the face for buying cars too damn high.

 

[Mitch Gallant]

I would agree that you're "pretty fucking right"

Let's make it as hard as possible for the visitor to get the information they're looking for, while increasing conversion / lead form fills.

@Jeff Kershner and @Alex Snyder

I'd love to hear more.

I agree.

With that change in mindset what would be the KPI's you'd look to instead of conversion? How do you tie the behaviour and experience to the bottom line? I don't ask to challenge, I ask sincerely. I'm as guilty as everyone and would be happy to call myself a lead whore in rehab.

At the end of the day the (customer experience>lead generation) equation makes sense to me all day, I really don't care how they do business with us, so long as they do. With that... what do do I test, measure and optimize for?

GET ME LEADS is an easy metric AND feels like we've done a good job... so why not smash CTA's EVERYWHERE, not only that, let's make em' pop up 10x during their 5m visit with us! ... I know how stupid that sounds and yet we do exactly (close to) that...

Wisemen, lead me....

 

[craigh]

The best I could ever get out of V Auto was 4 times a day.

They have offered me as rapid as every 15 minutes now. We are working on an actual realtime push API.

 

[craigh]

At the end of the day the (customer experience>lead generation) equation makes sense to me all day, I really don't care how they do business with us, so long as they do. With that... what do do I test, measure and optimize for?

I'm certainly not Jeff or Alex, nor would I pretend to have their experience.
All I can tell you is that my team and I have been focusing on this debate for 3 years now and it's a tough sell.

Our Focus:

1. Attractive sites that look modern and don't necessarily look like every other dealership website

2. Lead forms that are readily available and easy to fill out, not cumbersome and not "in your face"

3. A clear focus on what we think the customer wants - great (big) photos, cleaner spec sheets, transparent price (how did this price get built - show incentives, show dealer discounts, show fees) - in some cases we did this well enough that it reduced leads because we got less of the "Does it have ________" style of leads.

What We Track:

1. Pages per visitor - not in the simple sense though; we compare this against their old website to determine how many pages before they view their first vehicle, how many vehicles they view, how many people go back to the VLP before viewing a second VDP (are my related vehicles effective?), what page do they exit on (does it have contact info? How long did they spend on this last page?)

2. Organic Search Acquisition - one of our biggest focuses was making the website code itself cleaner and more readable to Google, along with proper indexing, markup, etc. We started from the ground up trying to make the sites "Google friendly" because we knew that this would result in more free traffic from Google as well as a reduced cost in AdWords (higher authority, lower cost).

3. Interactions / Activity - we use google goals and a few other tools (ie: heatmaps) extensively. How many photos did they view? Did they scroll down on the VDP? Did they even open a lead modal and not fill it out? If they made it to a vehicle, where did they come from? (ie: New vehicle showcase page, homepage slider of featured vehicles, VLP, etc)

At that point it gets more complicated and client specific (ie: at my toyota stores, how effective is truck marketing in Toronto, etc).
The beauty of it is that I haven't run a leads report in over 6 months. We have a dashboard the clients use to see their own leads, but my analytics and summative reports are almost entirely generated by Google Analytics data.

 

[Alex Snyder]

@Jeff Kershner and @Alex SnyderWith that change in mindset what would be the KPI's you'd look to instead of conversion? How do you tie the behaviour and experience to the bottom line? I don't ask to challenge, I ask sincerely.

The problem so many face is the lead is such an amazingly easy thing to follow from Click to Curb. It is the ONLY reliably trackable thing. It is tough to ween yourself from that. And even tougher to ween yourself from that to a new fix like the one I'm about to say.

Faith.

It starts with faith. Like the old days when our tracking system was a desklog we had to have faith in what our sales managers and sales agents told us. If our most desirable path is to land a customer on our website and then put them behind the wheel of their trade to drive-in, we're going to have to let go of our analytical selves a little bit.....no.....quite a bit.

The new metric to watch is the repeat visitor and the exit. More returning visits = higher interest. Exiting (not bouncing) on VDP and VLPs = assumptive action. Exiting on map pages = assumptive action. Exiting on the homepage = assumptive action too (usually a phone call).

Your job is not to convert the first time visitor; it is to give them a reason to come back. And then you need to provide them with enough quality content to make them want to drive to you. This alone is a MASSIVE departure from how most sites are currently built.

• Don't have real pictures of your new cars.... no bueno.
• Don't have every single used car photographed... no bueno.
• Don't have the vehicles options clearly defined/described... no bueno.
• Not showing incentives... no bueno.
• Not reiterating OEM programs (Season of Audi for example)... no bueno.
• Pricing all new cars at MSRP... excusable only if your entire marketplace is doing it.
• Comments... jury is still out, but they're excellent when well written to convey who you are and what the product is... no automated cheese.

These are just a few things to get started on. But if you are capable of taking your head out of the car business and thinking like a retailer (what do you expect to see when you buy things online?) this starts to become common sense. Unfortunately, I had to hop out of the dealership to figure things out because my head was only wired for "how to shove the customer through our process."

Then you strive to find your return and exit benchmarks while watching the floor like a hawk! You'll need to watch the floor-up count....not the sales. If you focus too deeply (from an Internet department perspective) on the sales count you might short change your effort by the floor staff performing poorly.

 

[eddyshaf]

Faith.

It starts with faith. Like the old days when our tracking system was a desklog we had to have faith in what our sales managers and sales agents told us. If our most desirable path is to land a customer on our website and then put them behind the wheel of their trade to drive-in, we're going to have to let go of our analytical selves a little bit.....no.....quite a bit.

The new metric to watch is the repeat visitor and the exit. More returning visits = higher interest. Exiting (not bouncing) on VDP and VLPs = assumptive action. Exiting on map pages = assumptive action. Exiting on the homepage = assumptive action too (usually a phone call).

Your job is not to convert the first time visitor; it is to give them a reason to come back. And then you need to provide them with enough quality content to make them want to drive to you.

Holy Moly! WOW!!! Amazing!! Crazy!!! I feel like I am in an alternate dimension or something...because pretty much everything you are saying here is what the "arch villan" Autotrader has been saying for YEARS and we all vilified them for it!! I knew that Chip Perry was a Genius when I served on their Dealer Advisory Board but now I have concrete proof.

Thank you Alex for saying so eloquently and explaining in such detail what I think many of us have believed for some time.

"You gotta Have...


Please enjoy these dancing bananas...

 

[Alex Snyder]

Holy Moly! WOW!!! Amazing!! Crazy!!! I feel like I am in an alternate dimension or something...because pretty much everything you are saying here is what the "arch villan" Autotrader has been saying for YEARS and we all vilified them for it!! I knew that Chip Perry was a Genius when I served on their Dealer Advisory Board but now I have concrete proof.

Thank you Alex for saying so eloquently and explaining in such detail what I think many of us have believed for some time.

that's funny.

But don't make too many connections between what I'm saying in regards to a dealer's website and Autotrader.com. They're different animals.

 

[joe.pistell]

@Jeff Kershner and @Alex Snyder

... happy to call myself a lead whore in rehab.

hahaha! A classic! Rack it!