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Best dealership website you've seen?

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#63
craigh said:
I will post links to our new sites because I am really starting to like the way they're coming together.
They're not perfect, but we're trying to rid ourselves of terrible websites and provide an in-house solution.

Oakridge Ford Sales | New Ford dealership in London, ON N6H 1T8
Click to expand...

Craig nice work! One thing I noticed was that the call to actions should command some more attention in the design as a whole (on homepage), and on the details page the different sections for toggling vehicle features doesn't stand out enough. Not sure if that's intentional or not, but that was my first reaction. I think if you surround more lead actions around a transaction (apply for finance, value trade-in, estimate payments) near the pricing area, you should see some more lead action. I think attaching something like HookLogic to those leads could also push people over into your store too. I really like the larger fonts and I think it brings some more energy to the site, but I feel the cosmetics are great and optimization should continue making the site feel very sales oriented. Different weekly print ads or the free circulars they have in 7/11, etc. are excellent sources of inspiration to take from print to web. I feel that is probably one of the biggest missing components of dealer sites these days in terms of advertising.
 
Dominion DMS
#65
Chris Cachor said:
I forgot to mention, large actual vehicle photos on new/used go a LONG way.
Click to expand...

I agree entirely. One of our major focuses was getting great photos up and showing them off.
One of our biggest debates was laying the photos out horizontally vs vertically - this way they take up the entire width, but I find it much better visually.

We're also looking to completely re-invent the way we do the call to actions - I want to find a hybrid between the cheese factor I see on almost every dealer site and the additional functionality that we're working on to make it easier for consumers. I'm disgruntled about the fact that "ugly" buttons and "in your face" methods have proven to work so effectively.
 
#66
Very interesting conversation everybody. We're having these same conversations with our dealer clients every day.

Joe made a great point here: it isn't just about adding "stuff" to your website. You've got to be able to monitor and track the performance behind the changes you make. No matter what you add, take out, or tweak on your site, if you can't track how it contributes to your bottom line -- better VDP views,more leads, more sales conversions from web traffic, all the good stuff that actually means visitor engagement and real money at the end of the day -- then it's all just "stuff."
Here at Dataium we run Clickmap consultations with our clients, where we look at their site performance, visualize where visitors are clicking, and compare their performance scores against top performers across our network of over 12,000 automotive websites. We rank our top performers based on how they attract and convert in-market auto shoppers, down to area market and make. For anyone that's curious, check out Website Award Winners | Dataium | The Data Utility Company ...you might be surprised.

When we compare our top performers to under-performing websites, you can tell who's tracking their website design for success and who isn't just by their click map results. Visitor clicks on top-performing websites are concentrated in a few key touchpoints: they go straight to a VDP link, a lead submission form, or some other conversion opportunity as soon as they hit the home page. Visitor clicks on under-performing websites are all over the place, and it shows in that website's poor performance. There's no major focus, nothing really pulls visitors straight to a conversion.

We've actually recommended a few basic changes to a dealer group that ended up contributing to a five-figure profit increase in a matter of months. We didn't tell them to just add "stuff" to their website. We actually didn't tell them to add much at all, most of it involved moving existing homepage elements around. The suggestions we made could be tracked in Clickmaps directly, but the dealer group saw the results in their performance stats long before they ever needed to see an updated Clickmap.

Website design can generate leads and crank outs ales, but at the end of the day it's important to remember that it isn't just the website driving results. Is your advertising actually touching in-market shoppers? Is your inventory aligned with local consumer demand? Maybe that's another conversation entirely, but it's worth considering. The best dealer website design on the planet can still under-perform relative to its local market if it doesn't have smart marketing backing it up.
 
#67
Jason Ezell said:
Visitor clicks on top-performing websites are concentrated in a few key touchpoints: they go straight to a VDP link, a lead submission form, or some other conversion opportunity as soon as they hit the home page. Visitor clicks on under-performing websites are all over the place, and it shows in that website's poor performance.
Click to expand...

Oddly enough, this is one of the biggest battles we have with clients.
They want to engage the user, show them content and have them spend time on the website more than they want them to get to the conversion points. We designed websites around getting customers where we believe the customer wants to go. Clients immediately ask us to turn that around and steer customers where the dealership wants the customer to go.

Interesting discussions for sure.
 
#68
From my experience - Dataium's data = very unreliable. I've inquired about it 3 separate times and never received an answer.

Here's a sampling - Google Analytics has our internal IPs blocked:
April 2013
Site 1:
Unique Visitors:
Google Analytics: 18,582
Dataium: 10,751

VDPs:
GA: 11,634
Dataium: 89,985

Page Views:
GA: 125,264
Dataium: 112,409

Auto Leads:
Web Forms: 112
Dataium: 8



Site 2:
Unique Visitors:
Google Analytics: 1,852
Dataium: 1,355

VDPs:
GA: 1,142
Dataium: 8,254

Page Views:
GA: 7,876
Dataium: 10,816

Auto Leads:
Web Forms: 24
Dataium: 0
 
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#69
csabatka1 said:
From my experience - Dataium's data = very unreliable. I've inquired about it 3 separate times and never received an answer.

Here's a sampling - Google Analytics has our internal IPs blocked:
April 2013
Site 1:
Unique Visitors:
Google Analytics: 18,582
Dataium: 10,751

VDPs:
GA: 11,634
Dataium: 89,985

Page Views:
GA: 125,264
Dataium: 112,409

Auto Leads:
Web Forms: 112
Dataium: 8



Site 2:
Unique Visitors:
Google Analytics: 1,852
Dataium: 1,355

VDPs:
GA: 1,142
Dataium: 8,254

Page Views:
GA: 17,876
Dataium: 10,816

Auto Leads:
Web Forms: 24
Dataium: 0
Click to expand...


17k page views and only 1k VDP? Either your site sucks, which it doesn't or the stats are off.
I can't comment on Datium itself but their VDP over Page View numbers make more sense then Google do for the data provided.
 
Dominion DMS
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