Core Web Vitals

[Ryan Everson]

Ugh.... maybe it's just time to find a new vendor. Truthfully, the only reason I haven't is that I have a phenomenal rep.

The Truelink Capital acquisition, which closed Nov. 30, comes after a period of instability for Ansira. Written by independent director Steven Panagos to Ansira's "Limited Partners," the letter explained the reasons for the sale came down to money problems.

"For some time now, Ansira has been under financial stress," Panagos wrote, noting that Ansira "started to fail to meet certain covenant obligations to its lenders" going back to August 2022. Panagos said he was appointed as an independent director Oct. 13, 2022, to help identify strategic alternatives for Ansira "in light of these defaults and the difficult circumstances facing Ansira."

The firm was sold at a "significant discount" vs. what it owes lenders, Panagos wrote, adding that dozens of potential investors were considered before Truelink's offer was determined to be "the best deal available to maximize value for Ansira's stakeholders and represent the best strategic alternative."

The sale agreement takes steps to reduce Ansira's debt, avoid liquidation, unload unused office space, "preserve hundreds of jobs and continue to serve its clients," the letter said.

https://www.autonews.com/marketing/ansira-acquired-private-equity-firm-truelink-capital

 

[BillKVMotorCo]

The Truelink Capital acquisition, which closed Nov. 30, comes after a period of instability for Ansira. Written by independent director Steven Panagos to Ansira's "Limited Partners," the letter explained the reasons for the sale came down to money problems.

"For some time now, Ansira has been under financial stress," Panagos wrote, noting that Ansira "started to fail to meet certain covenant obligations to its lenders" going back to August 2022. Panagos said he was appointed as an independent director Oct. 13, 2022, to help identify strategic alternatives for Ansira "in light of these defaults and the difficult circumstances facing Ansira."

The firm was sold at a "significant discount" vs. what it owes lenders, Panagos wrote, adding that dozens of potential investors were considered before Truelink's offer was determined to be "the best deal available to maximize value for Ansira's stakeholders and represent the best strategic alternative."

The sale agreement takes steps to reduce Ansira's debt, avoid liquidation, unload unused office space, "preserve hundreds of jobs and continue to serve its clients," the letter said.
https://www.autonews.com/marketing/ansira-acquired-private-equity-firm-truelink-capital

Good ol' PR: Copy. Paste.

 

[Greg_Gifford]

ok look - Core Web Vitals are really only important if you get crappy scores, or if you're talking about a massive website with millions of pages. For dealerships, the only time any of it will matter is if you're in the bottom 10% of all of the auto industry - that's when you'd be penalized. Otherwise, shaving off a half second or even a second of load time won't do jack squat as far as Google is concerned.

Like @Ryan Everson pointed out, page load speed WILL have an influence on conversions though - don't buy into the BS stats online about how much, but it's pretty obvious... If you have a page that takes 3 seconds to load well enough to interact with, chances are high that the customer will leave and go to another site.

But you also have to realize that dealers (and marketing partners) really don't have the ability to "fix" bad CVW/load times. It's always one of 2 things - either a poorly coded page (fault of the website provider), or a poorly coded third party plugin (fault of the 3rd party tool). If it's a plugin, you can pretty easily bail on it and find another, but on the website side, they're all pretty crappy... and they're not EVER going to make a code change to fix something for a single dealer.

So Bill - if this question was more about the Google/SEO side of things, your best (only) option is to work with an SEO partner who really knows how to maximize value

 

[jon.berna]

I am less concerned about it's impact into rank and more into how bloated and unusable these sites have become. In Bill's case and thousands of dealership website across the country years of bad habits have left sites in a pretty bleak state. It's also a game of hot potato between the dealer, the website provider and the 3rd party code. Who's actually owning this and solving it? Sure some dealerships have a person on their team that wants to bring this to resolution but this is not exactly on anyone's radar. It also impacts the majority of dollars spent as most customers will funnel through the site.

So maybe it impacts rank 5% but it impacts how the user feels about the site experience 100%. Dealership website are looking like local news sites and loading about as efficiently.

I wonder who's worse local news or dealerships and how are local news org doing these days financially?

 

[BillKVMotorCo]

ok look - Core Web Vitals are really only important if you get crappy scores, or if you're talking about a massive website with millions of pages. For dealerships, the only time any of it will matter is if you're in the bottom 10% of all of the auto industry - that's when you'd be penalized. Otherwise, shaving off a half second or even a second of load time won't do jack squat as far as Google is concerned.

Like @Ryan Everson pointed out, page load speed WILL have an influence on conversions though - don't buy into the BS stats online about how much, but it's pretty obvious... If you have a page that takes 3 seconds to load well enough to interact with, chances are high that the customer will leave and go to another site.

But you also have to realize that dealers (and marketing partners) really don't have the ability to "fix" bad CVW/load times. It's always one of 2 things - either a poorly coded page (fault of the website provider), or a poorly coded third party plugin (fault of the 3rd party tool). If it's a plugin, you can pretty easily bail on it and find another, but on the website side, they're all pretty crappy... and they're not EVER going to make a code change to fix something for a single dealer.

So Bill - if this question was more about the Google/SEO side of things, your best (only) option is to work with an SEO partner who really knows how to maximize value

You're not passionate about this at all, are you?

 

[GeorgeAutoSEO]

Yeah, I have no idea what I'm looking at. You both have provided great feedback, but I'm still not quite sure where to start. I don't even quite know what to ask. I'll get it figured out, though.

Message me if you want some help understanding. I'd be glad to chat about websites!

 

[BillKVMotorCo]

ok look - Core Web Vitals are really only important if you get crappy scores, or if you're talking about a massive website with millions of pages. For dealerships, the only time any of it will matter is if you're in the bottom 10% of all of the auto industry - that's when you'd be penalized. Otherwise, shaving off a half second or even a second of load time won't do jack squat as far as Google is concerned.

Like @Ryan Everson pointed out, page load speed WILL have an influence on conversions though - don't buy into the BS stats online about how much, but it's pretty obvious... If you have a page that takes 3 seconds to load well enough to interact with, chances are high that the customer will leave and go to another site.

But you also have to realize that dealers (and marketing partners) really don't have the ability to "fix" bad CVW/load times. It's always one of 2 things - either a poorly coded page (fault of the website provider), or a poorly coded third party plugin (fault of the 3rd party tool). If it's a plugin, you can pretty easily bail on it and find another, but on the website side, they're all pretty crappy... and they're not EVER going to make a code change to fix something for a single dealer.

So Bill - if this question was more about the Google/SEO side of things, your best (only) option is to work with an SEO partner who really knows how to maximize value

Hope you know that I was just being playful in my last comment to you. Was busy and didn't have time to deeply engage, so I sent that as a way to keep engagement going until I had more time. Ha. I really appreciate this insight. So why does Google's metrics affect dealers less, though? Just the size of the site? Surely Google doesn't recognize it as a dealer site and say, "Who cares." I'm not really strong in this area so please bear with my poor questioning.

You are right though, from a user perspective, my site seems to function just fine. No noticeably slow load times or major technical issues seem to show up to me. So, as you correctly deduced, the main reason for inquiring was how much it would impact me from an SEO perspective. My score was a 78 for SEO (though the 27 for Performance bothered me as well - this kills the overachiever in me). I honestly don't know how much my SEO hurts me though being a rural dealer with over 60 miles to the next closest dealer of any size. I may be either naïve or stupid. Not sure which.

 

[Alex Snyder]

I wonder who's worse local news or dealerships and how are local news org doing these days financially?

Both are driving toward easier-to-measure incentives instead of an overall outcome. Dealers are going for leads, while news is going for subscriptions. I don't understand the news business well enough to know if there is a digital manager on a different pay plan influencing a lot of this, but obviously, dealership Internet departments are fully built around leads. We all love paywalls and lead gates!

The missing component in all of it is engagement. You can't sell a car without an engaged shopper. And I assume you can't sell a subscription on one article view.

Engagement = more time spent on content. More clicks. More return visits. An engaged shopper can turn into a lead once nurtured to that point.

I believe you can get more from your customers by making their entry smoother. There is no need to bombard people with pop-ups, chats, location verifications, and whatever else is driven for conversion. Simpler navigation paths, better merchandising, answering whether the car is in stock right away, and giving them the price/payments immediately will net more engagement. And a more engaged shopper will close far easier.

There is a balance between closing rates and website metrics, but at the moment the scale is leaning too far toward lead quantity.

 

[BillKVMotorCo]

Both are driving toward easier-to-measure incentives instead of an overall outcome. Dealers are going for leads, while news is going for subscriptions. I don't understand the news business well enough to know if there is a digital manager on a different pay plan influencing a lot of this, but obviously, dealership Internet departments are fully built around leads. We all love paywalls and lead gates!

The missing component in all of it is engagement. You can't sell a car without an engaged shopper. And I assume you can't sell a subscription on one article view.

Engagement = more time spent on content. More clicks. More return visits. An engaged shopper can turn into a lead once nurtured to that point.

I believe you can get more from your customers by making their entry smoother. There is no need to bombard people with pop-ups, chats, location verifications, and whatever else is driven for conversion. Simpler navigation paths, better merchandising, answering whether the car is in stock right away, and giving them the price/payments immediately will net more engagement. And a more engaged shopper will close far easier.

There is a balance between closing rates and website metrics, but at the moment the scale is leaning too far toward lead quantity.

This is what I want to get to. I agree that sites are built way too much around leads. I am honestly not as consumed with leads as most dealers are. I just want the site to be user-friendly first. I think that if it is the leads will come. I believe it so much that I almost think you could get rid of them completely and people would still contact you if you have the right car, at the right price, and give them the information that they want quickly.

 

[jon.berna]

Another point is all this stuff makes sites look cheap, like an poorly lit strip mall with insane signage and garbage piled up everywhere.

Customers spend the majority of their time on the top 10 digital experiences then check their local news or car dealership and get a reminder on what the rest of the internet is like.

Watching the history of dealership websites, and I'm sure others know more than me, it seems like there's a pendulum between aesthetic and feature stuffing. The advent of digital retailing has pushed the feature stuffing to the max. We need it to swing back towards a cycle of clean designs and better implementation of supplement applications.