- Sep 30, 2015
- 24
- 23
- First Name
- Chad
I wanted to chime in to offer a few more details on the research. First and foremost, it is important to note that this research is solely based on top of the funnel, marketplace behavior. We did not look at the behavior of consumers on dealer sites, which typically represents a shopper deeper in the funnel.
If you haven’t had a chance to read the entire whitepaper, I’d encourage you to download it here: http://bit.ly/UsedCarShopper2015. One might assume that the fewer images you have, the more leads you will receive as consumers will want more information. However, at this stage of the buying process, consumers are more apt to simply move onto the next vehicle vs. digging into one without a lot of detail. The flip side of this is also true. As image count increases, consumers tend to lose interest. Here are some of the specific results:
Lead conversion rate of vehicles with 9 images vs 0, 20 and 30.
- 50% higher lead submission rate than those without any images.
- 56% higher lead submission rate than those with 20 images.
- 71% higher lead submission rate than those with 30 images.
Since this research was published, we did additional work to understand which images were more important to a consumer. The hypothesis is that consumers are simply getting frustrated looking at a bunch of images that aren’t as relevant given their point in the purchase funnel. One interesting finding is that the cockpit/center console image is the second most important, as ranked by consumers. Unfortunately, the way pictures are typically taken and processed results in this critical view being placed 15-25 pictures into the photo stack.
Given the research our recommendations are as follows:
- Recognize that top of funnel shoppers are scanned, not deep diving, and ensure your pictures are sorted appropriately. Forcing a consumer to look through 20+ pictures to get to the second most important one is a losing proposition.
- You should absolutely use all of your images on your own sites as consumers are typically deeper in the funnel and do want all of that detail. If you decide to push all of your images to the marketplaces (which often comes at an increased cost and can be avoided), be sure they are optimally sorted.
If you haven’t had a chance to read the entire whitepaper, I’d encourage you to download it here: http://bit.ly/UsedCarShopper2015. One might assume that the fewer images you have, the more leads you will receive as consumers will want more information. However, at this stage of the buying process, consumers are more apt to simply move onto the next vehicle vs. digging into one without a lot of detail. The flip side of this is also true. As image count increases, consumers tend to lose interest. Here are some of the specific results:
Lead conversion rate of vehicles with 9 images vs 0, 20 and 30.
- 50% higher lead submission rate than those without any images.
- 56% higher lead submission rate than those with 20 images.
- 71% higher lead submission rate than those with 30 images.
Since this research was published, we did additional work to understand which images were more important to a consumer. The hypothesis is that consumers are simply getting frustrated looking at a bunch of images that aren’t as relevant given their point in the purchase funnel. One interesting finding is that the cockpit/center console image is the second most important, as ranked by consumers. Unfortunately, the way pictures are typically taken and processed results in this critical view being placed 15-25 pictures into the photo stack.
Given the research our recommendations are as follows:
- Recognize that top of funnel shoppers are scanned, not deep diving, and ensure your pictures are sorted appropriately. Forcing a consumer to look through 20+ pictures to get to the second most important one is a losing proposition.
- You should absolutely use all of your images on your own sites as consumers are typically deeper in the funnel and do want all of that detail. If you decide to push all of your images to the marketplaces (which often comes at an increased cost and can be avoided), be sure they are optimally sorted.
