The Ego....errrr....Dealership Home Page

[Alex Snyder]

I have an easy job for you.  I'm in the market for a new 55" LED TV and I need your help to find the best one that is local to me.  Sears and Best Buy are right down the street, but I have ordered a TV from B&H Photo Video before - mind checking that one too?  I need:

1. Price
   
2. Soonest Availability
   
3. Best Ratings

Did you find one for me yet?   No!  What do you mean you didn't look?  You just kept reading?  Okay - fine, I'll tell you who this exercise is really for:  your staff or your HIPPO (HIghest Paid Person with the biggest Opinion).  You're on DealerRefresh so you already know this stuff.

When you were searching for my TV did you go to BestBuy.com and ogle at the homepage?  Ooooo that's a pretty button.   Wooooow look at that slideshow of specials.  Maybe they had something up there that caught your attention, but chances are your mission had nothing to do with that homepage.  Your mission started in the navigation at the top - you were looking for my 55" LED TV and nothing else was going to deter you from finding it FIRST.

Logically, when building a website, it makes a lot of sense to start with the homepage and work your way into it from there.  I get that, but....  Why not start with the navigation?  The header?  Extra buttons and conversion points on the internal pages?  What do phone numbers look like and where are they?  Should the homepage be the last thing you put together?

If you want to start living life by the numbers here are some measurements you can use to see which parts of your website are the most valuable:

Rank your pages by form submissions
Simply go into your website's analytics and find the report on form submissions (a.k.a. Internet Leads) and sort your pages based on the number of leads submitted.  Got a page that isn't performing as well as you'd like?  How many views did it get?  Which brings me to the next one....

Per Page Conversion Rate
On that same form conversion report there should also be a "Visits" or "Views" column.    You simply divide the number of forms submitted by the visits or views.

Forms Submissions (Leads) ÷ Views = Conversion Rate

What is a good conversion rate?  As with all Internet metrics it is all subjective to the analytics tool used and too many other factors, so calculate your own average and start by paying attention to the pages that are below average.  Be sure to look at the pages that are above average to see what's going on there.

Time spent on Homepage
Look at the time spent on only your Index page in analytics.  Factor out the bounce rate if your phone numbers are on it or if you have a SEO guru on the payroll.  You want to factor out the bounce rate because your homepage phone numbers might be all that customer is looking for (and you're tracking those differently) and if you have a SEO guru pointing 5 million links at you you're going to get a lot more unwanted traffic that bounces.  Read this about True Time on Page.

Take your bounce rate and subtract it from 100% to get the percentage of visits that didn't bounce.  Multiply that percentage with your Average Time on Page to get your "True" Time on Page without bounces  (hopefully I put that into usable English).

What is a good metric?  This depends on whether your home page is severely action-packed, opens links in new windows, is sitting on dealership computers all day everyday, you hired a SEO consultant, or is just insanely confusing.  You'll have to be the judge of that.

P.S.  If you export your analytics to Excel you'll want to use this at the end of your cell that have times in them:  /60/24/60 and then format the cell to show time as hh:mm:ss to get your times in English.  Or you can borrow my Excel calculation =(((1/(E2-1)*-1))*D2/60/24/60) that should work when you export specifically from Google Analytics.

 

[Joe Pistell]

I am in Alex's camp. The home page is like the front cover of a magazine. People glance at the cover, then go to the index. Granted, the cover has value, but the shopper IS ALREADY AT YOUR SITE (i.e. they have the magazine in their hands). Where do people go once they have the magazine in their hands? THE TABLE OF CONTENTS.

It's easy to get hung up on the impact of a strong visual BRANDING MESSAGE that comes from the home page, but, shopping is all about completing a task. The deeper they go into the site, the more important the page becomes to completing the shoppers needs. IMO, The most important page on a site is the VDP (Vehicle Detail Page). Cut corners here and you're rewarding your competitors for delivering a weak story with no fuel to generate a lead.

It's the ease of navigation that's the most important feature of a well designed home page.

Never judge a book by it's cover... judge it by it's well designed "Table of Contents"

 

[Nathan Carr]

I'm in agreement, simple, quick and direct are all very important. Good walk through on conversion rate and Time Spent too

 

[Brian Pasch]

@alex

I learned that Adult Friend Finder was a social media site recently at a car dealer conference....and I think you were nearby me on that revelation.

You were supposed to keep that insider tip a secret from the automotive community. Now the cat is out of the bag.

 

[Brian Pasch]

@alex

Having links pointing to a dealer's site does not necessarily increase bounce rate unless the links are on anchor text that the site has no value or navigation paths to accomodate the visitor.

If a Chicago Toyota dealer could get 1,000 or 10,000 links from external sites on the phrase "Chicago Toyota Dealers" this would be a blessing and not a curse. They are a Chicago dealer, they sell Toyota cars and if that phrase was popular in consumer search it may increase sales leads.

If those same links were on an anchor text of "Toyota Racing Parts" then those links could potentially be a waste and generate a high bounce rate if the dealer had no performance parts to sell.

That said, dealers need to analyze all their key entry pages and do more A/B testing to see which designs and layouts create the most desired results.

It would be very cool to see some documentary videos on a series of website design changes and data analysis that eventually found an optimal design that created the best results for a car dealer. I have never seen that process of A/B testing documented.

 

[Alex Snyder (blog)]

Brian - if SEO's solely concentrated on keywords that are 100% relevant (like your example), then it would be a perfect world for link-building.

 

[Joe Pistell]

Time on Home Page vs VDP

One Example: http://www.usedcarking.com
Home Page average: 31 seconds

Average VDP: 94 seconds

 

[ed.brooks]

J.D. Power and Associates just published a study today looking at the manufacturer sites. The first paragraph reads:

"Websites that maintain a focus on usability along with branding and design features successfully satisfy shoppers, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2010 Manufacturer Website Evaluation Study (MWES)—Wave 2 released today. However, the semi-annual study, now in its 11th year, finds websites that focus primarily on brand image and interesting design features can actually hinder shoppers in their search for information when usability takes a back seat."

I wonder how much they spent putting that together - All they needed to do was call Alex!

http://www.jdpowercontent.com/OARBlog/finding-hap...

 

[Craig Belowski]

"The home page is like the front cover of a magazine. People glance at the cover, then go to the index. Granted, the cover has value, but the shopper IS ALREADY AT YOUR SITE (i.e. they have the magazine in their hands). Where do people go once they have the magazine in their hands? THE TABLE OF CONTENTS."

This is the only thing you need to pay attention to when building a home page......I wish we were a touch less vain and simplified ours some more, but it started in a whole other direction before I got this advice from Uncle Joe. When you look at your homepage in the "magazine cover" method it will become better. This is one of my favorite tidbits in my list of Joe Pistell classics!

 

[Bruce Novicky]

The magazine theory is fine, but keep in mind when someone looks at the front of the magazine they usually find the first article they are going to read right on the cover.

"The Secret to losing 10lbs in 10 days"

"Peyton Manning, set to retire..."

Magazines use their cover to pull you deep into the magazine, your home page should be the same it should direct people where YOU want them to be not where they want to wind up.