I like it Joe :thumbup:
Have you figured out if any of those CL clicks are converting to sold units yet?
No exact counts yet Alex. It's like every other marketing venue, the traceable traffic vanishes into the noise. A few CL'ers pop up, but auto the shopper likes to remain hidden. Here's my $0.02.
CL shopper metrics are less than the site as a whole, but, the feed back I get from reps is positive.
CL visitor stats:
- 72% are NEW visitors...... (VERY good)
- 4.0 pgs p/visit..... (LOW: I avg 12pgs per visit)
- 2:11 avg time on site..... (LOW: I avg 6.3 mins p/visitor)
- 69% bounce rate.... (YUK: site avg 14%)
Because the CL ads link directly to the VDP (vehicle detail page) I'd expect low metrics. The bounce rate is pathetic, but, Google claims a bounce is a single page visit, if this is true, this high number fits the "direct link to the VDP" scenario. That being said, CL'ers have not been filling out my forms, conversion rates are off 50% from regular visitors. I dont capture #of page prints (grr), that would be an interesting data point.
How many units sold from CL visits?
Our current web site converts 2% of it's traffic (web visitors divided by sales gives us around a 2% closing rate). We're not going to sell 2% of the CL traffic. If we strongly reduce the closing rate by 75% (from 2% to 0.5%), I'd be comfortable with a "back of the napkin" projection of 5 sales per 1,000 visitors.
CL ROI?
No doubt. We've dropped the automation and gone old school to attempt to reduce the "playa hater" flagging and increase traffic count to our site. We're far from a finished product (that we can automate), but once I get this dialed in I'll find a way to automate it. I believe we're going down the right path.
