9 pics per vehicle??

[joe.pistell]

Great work Jeff. I'll add to the killer thread.

My ebay work found that car shoppers click on interior photos more often than exterior photos.

 

[joe.pistell]

... car shoppers click on interior photos more often than exterior photos.

In my real estate shopping, I find many cool ideas. Real estate shoppers are drawn to the kitchen (as car shoppers are drawn to the dash shots). As a shopper, I want a site to help me be be a better shopper. I want to get to the kitchen photos fast. I prefer the thumbnail block over the carousel photo display.




I'd love to do a study on this. Anyone experimented with this?

I see Zillow just released a new photo browser:

 

[craigh]

We have played with it a fair bit in some different photo layouts and tracked the results (as accurately as we can).
We've found that with the first of these two layouts the first photos that are shown (pre-carousel) are seen far more often than the others.
This leads me to believe that users aren't using the next/prev buttons on the enlarged images, but are closing and cherry picking thumbnails based on what they see. The second layout tends to get far more views because it shows all the photos at once (we've played with hiding some and doing "Show More" which didn't have a negative impact either, since they had to click "Show More" before viewing thumbnails). The other problem with the first option is that it pushes far more content "below the fold", however we really couldn't find any data to support the fact that this was an issue - having the photos up top and prominent did help increase from the engagement they had on photos before.

I think that lends some support to the theory that carousels are less than ideal - I don't have the actual firm numbers anymore but the team built a tracker that used javascript and large image load tracking to determine which photos were and were not being loaded.

My summary: there's so many factors to explore when it comes to photos that I don't think we'll ever be done trying new things.

 

[carmudgeon]

The “thumbnail block” style most fits the definition of what interactive media should be. In providing the shopper full control of looking at what they want to see, when they want to see it and for as long as they want to see it. The carousel slide show style does the opposite.

Further yet, I would like to see dealers use a VDP that more resembles a photographer’s style website. These usually present the photos bigger and better than most automotive sites do. The black or dark background tends to be easier on the eye. Just like lowering the lights in a movie theater reduces eye strain and makes the image look better.


Something good happens when the picture you are viewing is wider than your eyes are apart.

If you are looking at a 640x480 image on a website with a white background on a 19 inch monitor, 90% of that screen is emitting bright white light to your eye. Your eye reacts to that light and has to squint in order to try to see the relatively much smaller picture. That's kind of a mild version of what they do during interrogations. At least on TV.

Why don't dealers use sites with dark or black backgrounds? At least for the photos.

Why don't dealers display larger images for their customers?

 

[joe.pistell]

Something good happens when the picture you are viewing is wider than your eyes are apart.

hahaha, somehow... this makes sense to me Love it.

Our industry went thru a black background phase (photo friendly), now we're in a white background phase (text friendly). Maybe the modal window is the best of both.

re: Larger images.
During image uploading, most inventory management systems that I know of reduce image size (& weight). I haven't revisited this topic in 5 years, but, page load speed would have to be a top KPI. Zillow moved to AWS, maybe that's in our future: http://engineering.zillow.com/image-processing-at-zillow-out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-aws/

thnx!
Joe

 

[craigh]

re: Larger images.
During image uploading, most inventory management systems that I know of reduce image size (& weight). I haven't revisited this topic in 5 years, but, page load speed would have to be a top KPI. Zillow moved to AWS, maybe that's in our future: http://engineering.zillow.com/image-processing-at-zillow-out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-aws/

A couple thoughts I have on the matter, because I've gone down this road many times and it's a critical part of a website.

1. You don't have to load all images on page load - if you want to show large images you can ajax load them after the page so it doesn't affect page speed times
2. Large images can be optimized as well. I have some photos that are quite large and we can hit 150-200kB file sizes still, which is quite reasonable. Maintain a mid-range size for mobile devices.
3. I take issue with sites that store a properly sized and quality photo, but make it impossible to view it. For example:
   http://www.toyota-town.com/used/Buick/2007-Buick-Allure-48d98f0a0a0a001f072645c7fca85f38.htm see how big you can make the photo. Now look how big the photo really is: http://pictures.dealer.com/t/toyotatownltdtc/0895/52d860a00a0e0acc2af6861861a898ee.jpg
   They're loading that large photos, wasting all that bandwidth, and not letting anyone view it properly.
   I've said it before (and taken crap for it) and I'll say it again - there's no sense in having great photos if they can't be bigger than a polaroid.
4. AWS can help and there's certainly some logic behind it, but typically speaking an AWS option or other CDN benefits most when used on assets that the same person will see multiple times. There's a few good studies out there I'll try and dig up, but as a nation wide provider you may be better off tracing nodes and putting clients on the node nearest to their dealership (and therefore their customers), as distance is often the biggest bottleneck for non-reusable assets. There are also great caching options and other optimization features, but AWS works well when it's setup properly. It really depends on how your setup - personally I host all my images on the same server as the website and put each client on the server closest to their home market - the images will never meet any sort of high demand and the server never has to scale because I don't have every dealership on the same server. This design negates much of the value of AWS, but with a load balancer and single cluster setup it has it's benefits.

At one point in time we added a magnifying glass as an overlay on some images - if you clicked it you would go from the large photo to the original. It would only load this photo if you clicked that link, so it had no impact on page load times. Certainly not everyone used it, but according to the Google Analytics goals it was used fairly often by those with larger resolutions. Currently, our average ranges from 30-35% of users using screens that are 1080p or greater - small photos look miserable on large resolutions.

 

[Kent Lund]

Greetings all- My GM came back from a Ford Conference and apparently one of the presenters said that NINE is the optimal number of photographs we should have of our Vehicles.

To quote from the article, "Postings with nine images saw a 71 percent higher lead submission rate than those with 30 images"

Here's the full article: http://insidelane.dealer.santanderconsumerusa.com/2015/06/22/and-no...

Anyone heard of this? Anyone trying it? Thoughts?

Thanks- Kyle Hayden

 

[Kent Lund]

In response to Kyle Haden's comment and discussion on photographs per vehicle with 9 being the "magic number" ?
We are the premier inventor, designer and builder of Auto Photo Booths. Located in Troy, Michigan our background of 20+ years is in automobile photography.

We build Photo Booths-both Drive Thru and Turn Table. Think carwash with "surrond sound" cameras.
This has been our experience. The first most important thing is great lighting and HI- Res images. While the number of views
is important, we find that 9 works great for our Drive-Thru units. A customer who has two Drive-Thru units, tells us that they get more clicks and time on the page with 9 views, resulting in an increase of out-of-state sales by 30%. This is an auction house customer doing 300 vehicles per day, 9 exterior views, direct to the website in 15 seconds with a tracking code, all this is totally automated. The operator spends zero time uploaded images.

In addition to the Drive-Thru Booths designed for a higher volume (125 cars per day), we design and built Turn-Table units for 25 to 50 cars per day-9 to 36 Views.

The style of Auto Photo Booth that fits into a operation is directly based on your specific requirements; daily volume and automation specs.

Nine views work great, the most important aspect is not how many, but how good.

 

[carmudgeon]

9 photos would be enough for a car dealer to buy a car from an auction. Lets call those "Wholesale" photos. Car dealers buy cars all day long and all year long. They may not need more than 9 photos to track down 5 more copies of that vehicle they did so well with last week. Why? Because they are professional car buyers.

Retail car buyers tend to buy one car every decade or so. They are less experienced, less familiar and, most of all, behind on technology. I'll get back to that later.

Retail Internet photos are, more often than not, the first time Retail Car Buyers see the model in general. When shopping through a virtual sea of inventory of that particular model, all they have to go by is the photos. The only leverage a car dealer has is in convincing a shopper to choose their vehicle over the other dealers' vehicle is clear photos and more of them.

Let’s say you put a mini-van on your lot, it may be purchased by a florist buying a delivery van for their business. He may have intended to go out and buy a stripped out base model but when he saw the nice wide screen navigation in the photos he changed his mind and thought the large screen nav would be a great help to his delivery business.

That same van may be purchased by a recently retired grandmother who plans on buying a van she can drive all of her grandchildren around in. She could be steered towards purchasing your vehicle by showing a picture the backup assist camera screen on the radio and the Photos Folder screen on the radio (for pictures of her grand babies). And the Satellite Radio screen on the radio because she likes 60's hits. Rock on Grandma!

The photos have to show every option possible because anyone might be interested in your vehicle for any one reason.

Which brings me back to technology. There have been quantum leaps in innovation in cars in the last ten years and a good portion of it is in the radio. Navigation, Back-up assist camera, Satellite Radio, HD Radio, Traffic Reporting, Cell Phone Integration, Weather Reporting, Pandora, Stitcher, Text Messaging, Photo Uploading and Bluetooth to name a few.

Do you see how boring it is to read through long lists these options in text? Try burying these valuable features in miles of less important features like cup holder and adjustable height headrests.

On a Retail VDP you could have 9 pictures of the radio.