Ok my first thought is that this post is more about the types of conversions than why the visitor converted or how to get more of them to convert. According to a study by TMP Directional and ComScore 46% of all lead conversions happen on the phone, and a recent MIT study in 2009 showed that a call is 22 times more likely to get a sale than any other type of conversion. So it shouldn’t be by accident that calls are respectively 3 to 1 and 20 to 1 that should be by design. As a matter of fact when we build out landing experiences for PPC campaigns we intentionally push a call over a form submission for all the reasons above and in this post.
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Ok my first thought is that this post is more about the types of conversions than why the visitor converted or how to get more of them to convert. According to a study by TMP Directional and ComScore 46% of all lead conversions happen on the phone (http://www.dmconfidential.com/blogs/column/Search_Engines/2446/), and a recent MIT study in 2009 showed that a call is 22 times more likely to get a sale than any other type of conversion (http://www.leadresponsemanagement.org/lrm_study). So it shouldn’t be by accident that calls are respectively 3 to 1 and 20 to 1 that should be by design. As a matter of fact when we build out landing experiences for PPC campaigns we intentionally push a call over a form submission for all the reasons above and in this post.
Additionally, I'm not sure I would have used new, used and service as my segmentation buckets for this test. It shouldn’t be shocking that a new and used visitors both behave similarly on your site, the funnels for finding a new or used car and converting for each are exactly the same so in the end the visitor has no choice but to behave the same way, that’s how you designed it.
This brings in my biggest contention with website providers today, ALL OF THEM! There is very little a dealership can do to differentiate themselves in any website provider’s platform, particularly in the most important areas, the listings page and the details page because these are shared across every dealer in the platform, as Alex S would put it “Equal Incompetence”.
“The page view difference in this study is a result of less used cars of the same type or model to choose from. that’s not behavior that’s logistics.” Very, very few visitors are coming to a dealerships site to build a car. By the time they get to the dealers site they have already decided what they want to buy and it is now a matter of do you have it, how much is it and how do I get it.
You did however hit on the top 2 things that a visitor is looking to do on a dealerships main website:
1. Find a car
2. Schedule a service appointment
“DO” is the operative word here. The problems you should be solving on a dealerships website are ones that help visitors do the things they want to do, faster.
As for conversion, well I think I would want to see this broken out by branded vs. non branded terms (dealer name vs. high value non-name related terms), sales and service. A blended 12% rate isn’t good in my opinion, we want to see branded terms on a website convert at 30% plus. NOW, let me caveat that with we don't have a dealership doing that yet, my company is new and the oldest client I have right now is 60 days old. 30% plus is our goal and this is why I believe it is possible. The user typed in your name into a search engine their clear intent was to find your dealerships website. The only reason they don't convert is because you don't give them what they need to do so.
We believe we can achieve this through a series of off main site pages or microsites and our behavioral targeting technology to intercede at certain pages in the main website and/or redirect to offsite pages that focus on what we can determine as user intent. By doing this we can also split test the offsite pages and offers in real time, something not possible with any website company I know of today. I say this because I do not believe anyone can get to a 30% plus conversion rate without a clear test driven strategy, if you're just guessing you’ll never get it.
“18% for branding (name related key terms), I wouldn’t call that a pretty big number. I would call that a little less than average number for the same reasons I stated above.”
As for buying your name, first thing I would say is “keywords don't convert landing do”. With that said I would ask to see that data. Are the search terms the same? Is the landing the same? Were both the organic listing and the paid listing on page one and was the organic listing in the same position respectively to the paid listing (ex: paid listing in position 2 and organic listing in position 2)? If not that would skew your results of the test dramatically. I would wager there are some differences that would cause this to happen that have nothing to do with the ad being a sponsored link. Again you have to go back to user intent which is clearly to find that store and by human nature they are going to complete their intent unless there are some dramatic circumstances that stop them from doing so.
Last but certainly not least “Deep Linking vs Off page landing” this is actually the softball in this whole post. YOU NEVER, EVER WANT TO SEND PAID TRAFFIC BACK YOU YOUR RANDOM ACCESS MAIN WEBSITE…EVER!
1. With deep linking you still have all of the site navigation that will distract your customer out of the conversion funnel lowering you conversions.
2. When you deep link you are assuming that one page is going to do it we have very very very few landing experiences that are one page most are 3 some as many as 10 pages. With a deeplink or a single page you are assuming a one size fits all mentality and this post started out dispelling that notion immediately. Let me add to this before someone brings it up, a dynamic landing page where you are changing the picture or a header isn’t a custom landing that is closely connected to your promise. That’s just perfuming the pig; it doesn’t do a damn thing for conversion.
3. There is absolutely no way to split test a deeplink page with in any providers website right now for a lot of the reasons I stated above in this comment and if you can spit test you can’t get high conversions or continuous improvement.
Those are the top three there are many more but t this comment is already too long.
Well there you have it, be careful what you ask for you just might get it!
Hope that helps, of course I am sure that there are questions or clarifications on what I have said here everyone knows I am certainly willing to answer them and help where I can.
Additionally, I'm not sure I would have used new, used and service as my segmentation buckets for this test. It shouldn’t be shocking that a new and used visitors both behave similarly on your site, the funnels for finding a new or used car and converting for each are exactly the same so in the end the visitor has no choice but to behave the same way, that’s how you designed it.
This brings in my biggest contention with website providers today, ALL OF THEM! There is very little a dealership can do to differentiate themselves in any website provider’s platform, particularly in the most important areas, the listings page and the details page because these are shared across every dealer in the platform, as Alex S would put it “Equal Incompetence”.
“The page view difference in this study is a result of less used cars of the same type or model to choose from. that’s not behavior that’s logistics.” Very, very few visitors are coming to a dealerships site to build a car. By the time they get to the dealers site they have already decided what they want to buy and it is now a matter of do you have it, how much is it and how do I get it.
You did however hit on the top 2 things that a visitor is looking to do on a dealerships main website:
1. Find a car
2. Schedule a service appointment
“DO” is the operative word here. The problems you should be solving on a dealerships website are ones that help visitors do the things they want to do, faster.
As for conversion, well I think I would want to see this broken out by branded vs. non branded terms (dealer name vs. high value non-name related terms), sales and service. A blended 12% rate isn’t good in my opinion, we want to see branded terms on a website convert at 30% plus. NOW, let me caveat that with we don't have a dealership doing that yet, my company is new and the oldest client I have right now is 60 days old. 30% plus is our goal and this is why I believe it is possible. The user typed in your name into a search engine their clear intent was to find your dealerships website. The only reason they don't convert is because you don't give them what they need to do so.
We believe we can achieve this through a series of off main site pages or microsites and our behavioral targeting technology to intercede at certain pages in the main website and/or redirect to offsite pages that focus on what we can determine as user intent. By doing this we can also split test the offsite pages and offers in real time, something not possible with any website company I know of today. I say this because I do not believe anyone can get to a 30% plus conversion rate without a clear test driven strategy, if you're just guessing you’ll never get it.
“18% for branding (name related key terms), I wouldn’t call that a pretty big number. I would call that a little less than average number for the same reasons I stated above.”
As for buying your name, first thing I would say is “keywords don't convert landing do”. With that said I would ask to see that data. Are the search terms the same? Is the landing the same? Were both the organic listing and the paid listing on page one and was the organic listing in the same position respectively to the paid listing (ex: paid listing in position 2 and organic listing in position 2)? If not that would skew your results of the test dramatically. I would wager there are some differences that would cause this to happen that have nothing to do with the ad being a sponsored link. Again you have to go back to user intent which is clearly to find that store and by human nature they are going to complete their intent unless there are some dramatic circumstances that stop them from doing so.
Last but certainly not least “Deep Linking vs Off page landing” this is actually the softball in this whole post. YOU NEVER, EVER WANT TO SEND PAID TRAFFIC BACK YOU YOUR RANDOM ACCESS MAIN WEBSITE…EVER!
1. With deep linking you still have all of the site navigation that will distract your customer out of the conversion funnel lowering you conversions.
2. When you deep link you are assuming that one page is going to do it we have very very very few landing experiences that are one page most are 3 some as many as 10 pages. With a deeplink or a single page you are assuming a one size fits all mentality and this post started out dispelling that notion immediately. Let me add to this before someone brings it up, a dynamic landing page where you are changing the picture or a header isn’t a custom landing that is closely connected to your promise. That’s just perfuming the pig; it doesn’t do a damn thing for conversion.
3. There is absolutely no way to split test a deeplink page with in any providers website right now for a lot of the reasons I stated above in this comment and if you can spit test you can’t get high conversions or continuous improvement.
Those are the top three there are many more but t this comment is already too long.
Well there you have it, be careful what you ask for you just might get it!
Hope that helps, of course I am sure that there are questions or clarifications on what I have said here everyone knows I am certainly willing to answer them and help where I can.
Larry - I was following along fine until I got to "RANDOM ACCESS WEBSITE." What is that?
I've got a lot more to respond to on that comment but I can't get past the Random Access Thingy. Help me out.
I've got a lot more to respond to on that comment but I can't get past the Random Access Thingy. Help me out.
Random Access isn’t a disparaging term, its an adjective.
Basically it means your main website can and often is accessed by random traffic that cannot be controlled and with no understanding of how the traffic got there, and once the traffic arrives on site the respondent can randomly access any part of the site taking them off the conversion path.
Sorry I should have defined that term.
Basically it means your main website can and often is accessed by random traffic that cannot be controlled and with no understanding of how the traffic got there, and once the traffic arrives on site the respondent can randomly access any part of the site taking them off the conversion path.
Sorry I should have defined that term.
I had to Google the term and the only thing I could find was one of your blog articles that mentioned Random Access Website without a definition of what it was as well. I assume this is a Larry Bruce term?
Anyway, I get what you're saying in regards to that term. Isn't that every public and spiderable website though? If it is a bad thing to direct customers to these pages then why do companies like eBay, Edmunds, or Amazon do it?
I do understand what you're saying about having an extremely targeted microsite that isn't public or spiderable to do nothing but be a lead conversion site. You probably could get to a conversion rate in the area you're talking about by using this method, but let's get real. What dealership has invested the man power, time, effort, experience, knowledge, and money to do all this? If you're saying "hire Larry Bruce for this" then let's take things a step further:
I wasn't at Digital Dealer 9, but I have heard from numerous dealers that you're telling people their website should convert at 30-40%. You have even admitted in this comment string that you, yourself, have no clients that are getting to these heights. You also stated that "if you’re just guessing you’ll never get it." Isn't that exactly what you're doing right now?
Larry, I'm not trying to paint you as a fool. I think you're on to some potentially good points that could help our industry, and maybe with time you'll get there. The problem I have is that you're jumping out of the gate trying to make things you pulled out of your butt into fact. Unfortunately, some people are listening to you and it is creating issues. My advice is that you should take a step back, get some time and true data on your side and then start making claims that support reality.
Anyway, I get what you're saying in regards to that term. Isn't that every public and spiderable website though? If it is a bad thing to direct customers to these pages then why do companies like eBay, Edmunds, or Amazon do it?
I do understand what you're saying about having an extremely targeted microsite that isn't public or spiderable to do nothing but be a lead conversion site. You probably could get to a conversion rate in the area you're talking about by using this method, but let's get real. What dealership has invested the man power, time, effort, experience, knowledge, and money to do all this? If you're saying "hire Larry Bruce for this" then let's take things a step further:
I wasn't at Digital Dealer 9, but I have heard from numerous dealers that you're telling people their website should convert at 30-40%. You have even admitted in this comment string that you, yourself, have no clients that are getting to these heights. You also stated that "if you’re just guessing you’ll never get it." Isn't that exactly what you're doing right now?
Larry, I'm not trying to paint you as a fool. I think you're on to some potentially good points that could help our industry, and maybe with time you'll get there. The problem I have is that you're jumping out of the gate trying to make things you pulled out of your butt into fact. Unfortunately, some people are listening to you and it is creating issues. My advice is that you should take a step back, get some time and true data on your side and then start making claims that support reality.
Actually “Random Access Website” is not a Larry Bruce term although I wish it were. Where it comes from isn’t important if you must know email me and I’ll direct you there.
Let me take your examples one at a time. Now here I can only guess what is going through the minds of the CMO’s at these companies and of course I am not privy to all that they are doing from and online marketing stand point. I will tell you what I know and why I think the decision are made to use deeplinks vs a Microsite in each of these cases.
1. EBay – in my opinion embay is resting on its brand. They haven’t been aggressive online or off for some time. Right now if you Google “toys” you will not likely find eBay items listed anywhere on the SERP page one, and it’s November the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Same if you search “used ford trucks”, my estimation they aren’t doing much of anything when it comes to web marketing they are using word of mouth. If you think about it eBay gets paid by the listing weather the item sells or not so what's their real motivation? There are a couple of entities in the car business like that too, but that is another post entirely.
An interesting side note on eBay according to compete.com of their top 5 referring sites 4 is Facebook at 6.98% and 5 craigslist @ 3.27% that may seem like small percentages but when you consider that eBay’s unique visitors last month were 65+ million that all of the sudden becomes a big number. Point being who do you think is doing this? eBay? No, it’s the sellers on eBay putting items on their Facebook pages with links and on craigslist. When you have sellers doing this and other search marketing tactics for you, why do you need to do anything else?
2. Edmunds.com – easily the smallest of the examples you gave at 6 million unique visitors per month. Their top five search terms driving traffic again according to compete.com all brand terms but one “used cars” .24% of 6 million unique visitors. According to alexa.com there SEM activity has been medium at best and they are bidding on some very generic broad terms: “cars”, “huyndai”, “bluebook” ect. when you're selling data in hopes to get a click or a name you can resell and your are bidding on terms this broad then you really can’t build a Microsite that will focus traffic because you are casting a wide net and for lack of a better term, crossing your fingers that net catches something. Edmunds model just doesn’t lend itself to landing pages.
3. Amazon.com – without a doubt the most aggressive of the 3 examples and I can tell you without a doubt they use landing pages, squeeze page, microsites ect. they use every bullet in the gun. Now they also have a network of affiliates that use these same tactics to convert at very high numbers.
Alex of all the examples you have given Amazon is the closest to our business and they use the tactics I have discussed in this post in depth. Depths I would love to discuss with their CMO who would never tell me all I would want to know.
Alex there is no doubt that what I am talking about takes manpower, I have seen the marketing department at Amazon in Seattle and I can tell you, the employee comp for Amazon’s marketing dept. is more than the total gross profit for most dealerships. That is the reason I started MicrositesByU to do this for dealers that needed it, to provide a platform for dealers that wanted to try it themselves and a platform for other online marketing agencies that wanted to get into conversion marketing instead of selling traffic.
Yes Alex I am telling dealers that their website should be converting at 30% to 40% and I will stand behind that number. This is hardly a number I have, as you so eloquently put it, “pulled out of my butt”. It is based on data. So here is my explanation of that number:
First I’ll start with your own numbers that come from this post admittedly Matt has put an 18% conversion rate on branded terms that you are getting right now. This is with no Split testing or multivariate testing that I am aware of or have ever seen data on that Dealer.com has done, so if you start doing some testing to see what you can do to get more conversion do you think you could find 12% more? Sure you could, I can tell you this… I could.
The only reason MicrositesByU hasn’t is the first two website vendors we tried working with (neither were Dealer.com) we got such tremendous push back it was unreal. As a matter of fact one sizeable website provider that I won’t name here the CEO said and I quote “Dealers are not paying us enough to work that hard to figure out how to convert more leads, what you are talking about doing is too much work”. That’s when I decided we needed a behavioral targeting technology to place on a dealerships websites to get the traffic off the main website site so we could do it without involving the provider…just too much trouble.
Second let me point you to a small consulting client Mike Warwick, Internet Director at Lawless Chrysler Jeep who right now gets 20.52% conversion on his website www.lawlesscj.com . Mark writes in a Kain Automotive post (http://kainautomotiveideaexchange.ning.com/forum/topics/website-visitor-conversion?xg_source=activity) “I would read all of Larry Bruce’s posts on website conversion optimization. I’ve applied many of his concepts and the results have been fantastic.” Mark still has no ability to test either.
Now I’m not tootin my own horn, I am trying to make you aware that these principals are proven. Outside this industry there are entities that would fire the CMO if their conversion rate was 20% on branded terms.
Lastly I will leave you with this analogy. You have a salesperson in your dealership who gets 3 ups a day coming in asking specifically for him, that’s 78 ups a month.
Out of the 78 ups per month, that are asking specifically for him he is getting information in the CRM system for only 14 of those ups every month and he is selling 8 cars per month. What are you going to do?
Well you're not going to fire the guy he is selling cars and more importantly he has a lot of people asking for him so he is obviously prospecting hard. You are going to work with this guy to help him get more information and to work with the desk to close more deals that’s what any of us, would do. That’s what I tell dealers in every session. This is probably the part you didn’t hear Alex, Any dealer reading this comment please pay particular attention to this next quote:
“It is not your website provider’s job to give you a working site. It is their job to give you a functional site. It is your job to figure out what works for your market and your customers and work with your website provider to make your site work for you.”
So as you can see Alex I am not exactly “Pulling things out of my butt” I would have hoped by now you knew me well enough to know everything I do is based on data. Just because I haven’t done it YET doesn’t mean it can’t be done and just because Dealer.com can’t do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. The data inside and outside this industry supports these numbers and we will get there. It will not be long Alex and I will have hard data to support this. I don't think it is unfortunate at all some people are listening, in fact I am glad that conversion marketing is rising up and proud if I had anything to do with it. If this is causing Dealer.com a problem I suggest you find a way to get there before I do, but don't take the AutoTrader approach and try to convince dealers it’s not possible just because Dealer.com can’t do it.
Let me take your examples one at a time. Now here I can only guess what is going through the minds of the CMO’s at these companies and of course I am not privy to all that they are doing from and online marketing stand point. I will tell you what I know and why I think the decision are made to use deeplinks vs a Microsite in each of these cases.
1. EBay – in my opinion embay is resting on its brand. They haven’t been aggressive online or off for some time. Right now if you Google “toys” you will not likely find eBay items listed anywhere on the SERP page one, and it’s November the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Same if you search “used ford trucks”, my estimation they aren’t doing much of anything when it comes to web marketing they are using word of mouth. If you think about it eBay gets paid by the listing weather the item sells or not so what's their real motivation? There are a couple of entities in the car business like that too, but that is another post entirely.
An interesting side note on eBay according to compete.com of their top 5 referring sites 4 is Facebook at 6.98% and 5 craigslist @ 3.27% that may seem like small percentages but when you consider that eBay’s unique visitors last month were 65+ million that all of the sudden becomes a big number. Point being who do you think is doing this? eBay? No, it’s the sellers on eBay putting items on their Facebook pages with links and on craigslist. When you have sellers doing this and other search marketing tactics for you, why do you need to do anything else?
2. Edmunds.com – easily the smallest of the examples you gave at 6 million unique visitors per month. Their top five search terms driving traffic again according to compete.com all brand terms but one “used cars” .24% of 6 million unique visitors. According to alexa.com there SEM activity has been medium at best and they are bidding on some very generic broad terms: “cars”, “huyndai”, “bluebook” ect. when you're selling data in hopes to get a click or a name you can resell and your are bidding on terms this broad then you really can’t build a Microsite that will focus traffic because you are casting a wide net and for lack of a better term, crossing your fingers that net catches something. Edmunds model just doesn’t lend itself to landing pages.
3. Amazon.com – without a doubt the most aggressive of the 3 examples and I can tell you without a doubt they use landing pages, squeeze page, microsites ect. they use every bullet in the gun. Now they also have a network of affiliates that use these same tactics to convert at very high numbers.
Alex of all the examples you have given Amazon is the closest to our business and they use the tactics I have discussed in this post in depth. Depths I would love to discuss with their CMO who would never tell me all I would want to know.
Alex there is no doubt that what I am talking about takes manpower, I have seen the marketing department at Amazon in Seattle and I can tell you, the employee comp for Amazon’s marketing dept. is more than the total gross profit for most dealerships. That is the reason I started MicrositesByU to do this for dealers that needed it, to provide a platform for dealers that wanted to try it themselves and a platform for other online marketing agencies that wanted to get into conversion marketing instead of selling traffic.
Yes Alex I am telling dealers that their website should be converting at 30% to 40% and I will stand behind that number. This is hardly a number I have, as you so eloquently put it, “pulled out of my butt”. It is based on data. So here is my explanation of that number:
First I’ll start with your own numbers that come from this post admittedly Matt has put an 18% conversion rate on branded terms that you are getting right now. This is with no Split testing or multivariate testing that I am aware of or have ever seen data on that Dealer.com has done, so if you start doing some testing to see what you can do to get more conversion do you think you could find 12% more? Sure you could, I can tell you this… I could.
The only reason MicrositesByU hasn’t is the first two website vendors we tried working with (neither were Dealer.com) we got such tremendous push back it was unreal. As a matter of fact one sizeable website provider that I won’t name here the CEO said and I quote “Dealers are not paying us enough to work that hard to figure out how to convert more leads, what you are talking about doing is too much work”. That’s when I decided we needed a behavioral targeting technology to place on a dealerships websites to get the traffic off the main website site so we could do it without involving the provider…just too much trouble.
Second let me point you to a small consulting client Mike Warwick, Internet Director at Lawless Chrysler Jeep who right now gets 20.52% conversion on his website www.lawlesscj.com . Mark writes in a Kain Automotive post (http://kainautomotiveideaexchange.ning.com/forum/topics/website-visitor-conversion?xg_source=activity) “I would read all of Larry Bruce’s posts on website conversion optimization. I’ve applied many of his concepts and the results have been fantastic.” Mark still has no ability to test either.
Now I’m not tootin my own horn, I am trying to make you aware that these principals are proven. Outside this industry there are entities that would fire the CMO if their conversion rate was 20% on branded terms.
Lastly I will leave you with this analogy. You have a salesperson in your dealership who gets 3 ups a day coming in asking specifically for him, that’s 78 ups a month.
Out of the 78 ups per month, that are asking specifically for him he is getting information in the CRM system for only 14 of those ups every month and he is selling 8 cars per month. What are you going to do?
Well you're not going to fire the guy he is selling cars and more importantly he has a lot of people asking for him so he is obviously prospecting hard. You are going to work with this guy to help him get more information and to work with the desk to close more deals that’s what any of us, would do. That’s what I tell dealers in every session. This is probably the part you didn’t hear Alex, Any dealer reading this comment please pay particular attention to this next quote:
“It is not your website provider’s job to give you a working site. It is their job to give you a functional site. It is your job to figure out what works for your market and your customers and work with your website provider to make your site work for you.”
So as you can see Alex I am not exactly “Pulling things out of my butt” I would have hoped by now you knew me well enough to know everything I do is based on data. Just because I haven’t done it YET doesn’t mean it can’t be done and just because Dealer.com can’t do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. The data inside and outside this industry supports these numbers and we will get there. It will not be long Alex and I will have hard data to support this. I don't think it is unfortunate at all some people are listening, in fact I am glad that conversion marketing is rising up and proud if I had anything to do with it. If this is causing Dealer.com a problem I suggest you find a way to get there before I do, but don't take the AutoTrader approach and try to convince dealers it’s not possible just because Dealer.com can’t do it.
"If this is causing Dealer.com a problem I suggest you find a way to get there before I do, but don’t take the AutoTrader approach and try to convince dealers it’s not possible just because Dealer.com can’t do it."
This is my post Larry, not Alex's. I work for Dealer.com and well before Alex worked here he was on the DealerRefresh team. You say "Dealer.com can't do it" in the face of an average conversion rate at 18% over many hundreds of accounts. This, therefore, means that we do have dealers above that mark. You have a client at 20%, I can tell you that we do to, and it's not because of off-site landing pages, squeeze pages or anything other than solid ad text, deep linking and robust sites.
Using Amazon is not a good example. Cars are the second largest purchase a person will make in their life, meaning the consideration phase of the buying cycle is significantly longer. Comparisons between a single dealer and Amazon are not effective.
You have passion and conviction for your strategies, I admire that. Don't for a second think that the Dealer.com team doesn't carry passionate, driven individuals with the technical expertise to bring real success to the industry. That's what we're here for.
Any time you would like to discuss data with me feel free. In the interim please remember that Dealer.com got to where we are today because we were born in a used car dealership. We get it.
This is my post Larry, not Alex's. I work for Dealer.com and well before Alex worked here he was on the DealerRefresh team. You say "Dealer.com can't do it" in the face of an average conversion rate at 18% over many hundreds of accounts. This, therefore, means that we do have dealers above that mark. You have a client at 20%, I can tell you that we do to, and it's not because of off-site landing pages, squeeze pages or anything other than solid ad text, deep linking and robust sites.
Using Amazon is not a good example. Cars are the second largest purchase a person will make in their life, meaning the consideration phase of the buying cycle is significantly longer. Comparisons between a single dealer and Amazon are not effective.
You have passion and conviction for your strategies, I admire that. Don't for a second think that the Dealer.com team doesn't carry passionate, driven individuals with the technical expertise to bring real success to the industry. That's what we're here for.
Any time you would like to discuss data with me feel free. In the interim please remember that Dealer.com got to where we are today because we were born in a used car dealership. We get it.
Matt if you have a person that is going make statements that I am "pulling things out of my butt" and that I should "back off" you should expect I am going to come back pretty strong with what I believe backs up my belief.
Never said that Dealer.com doesn't have passion or expertise I don't know enough about Dealer.com to make that claim. I do think your platform is limited in it's capability to produce higher conversions and continous conversion improvement, but no more than anyother website provider.
If that is an 18% avg conversion rate there are 5% converting sites & some 30% converting sites I would think so why would it be a problem if I tell a dealer his site should convert at 30% plus? Not only that the data proves my point all of those dealers have the same platform and same opportunity. However some have figured out how to work what they can in it and others are just sitting back hoping something happens.
"It's not the site providers job to give the dealer a working site, just a funtional one." the dealer has to make it work.
I can't speak for your company as a whole but the people I know and have met at Dealer.com do seem to get it. However none of us know all of it.
Never said that Dealer.com doesn't have passion or expertise I don't know enough about Dealer.com to make that claim. I do think your platform is limited in it's capability to produce higher conversions and continous conversion improvement, but no more than anyother website provider.
If that is an 18% avg conversion rate there are 5% converting sites & some 30% converting sites I would think so why would it be a problem if I tell a dealer his site should convert at 30% plus? Not only that the data proves my point all of those dealers have the same platform and same opportunity. However some have figured out how to work what they can in it and others are just sitting back hoping something happens.
"It's not the site providers job to give the dealer a working site, just a funtional one." the dealer has to make it work.
I can't speak for your company as a whole but the people I know and have met at Dealer.com do seem to get it. However none of us know all of it.
You are right Larry - Some are higher than 18 and some are lower. The ones who are converting at higher percentages are doing so because they understand the importance of the landing page in conversion. Telling people that they should expect 30-40% conversion is unrealistic when offering a product that has a 90 day average buy cycle.
To move past this discussion, let's refocus on the fact that the data I am sharing shows that there is a real need to think about and capitalize on the different "Search Personas" that exist on the dealer site. If anyone makes it this far down on the page, please know that the goal is to reinforce the need for more customer focused website pages. Think about the different needs that any one customer might have and design a website experience that caters to their needs. Many providers allow for their clients to add pages to their site or edit navigation where they see fit. Taking advantage of these opportunities will create a site that delivers a solid user experience that is more likely to convert.
To move past this discussion, let's refocus on the fact that the data I am sharing shows that there is a real need to think about and capitalize on the different "Search Personas" that exist on the dealer site. If anyone makes it this far down on the page, please know that the goal is to reinforce the need for more customer focused website pages. Think about the different needs that any one customer might have and design a website experience that caters to their needs. Many providers allow for their clients to add pages to their site or edit navigation where they see fit. Taking advantage of these opportunities will create a site that delivers a solid user experience that is more likely to convert.
Matt we can agree to disagree on the conversion percentage.
If you want to dive into search personas the formost authority on that subject is Bryan Eisenberg http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/04/08/bryan-eisenberg-persona-interview/
I love Bryan's stuff but I have a difficult time applying it in a niche like retail auto. Personas are very subtle differences in visitor behavior based on small interactions on the site. Also element placement on site as it relates to the type of persona thst might visit. This is highly complicated and takes a great deal of traffic to do do the multivariate testing nessesary to achieve any confidence levels.
I prefer to simplify the landing and split test big changes, this allows for lower traffic levels to reach confidence levels, easier implementation and much bigger wins.
Given a niche market and low traffic volumes I think any focus on personas is stepping over dollars to pick up dimes.
Just my opinion
If you want to dive into search personas the formost authority on that subject is Bryan Eisenberg http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/04/08/bryan-eisenberg-persona-interview/
I love Bryan's stuff but I have a difficult time applying it in a niche like retail auto. Personas are very subtle differences in visitor behavior based on small interactions on the site. Also element placement on site as it relates to the type of persona thst might visit. This is highly complicated and takes a great deal of traffic to do do the multivariate testing nessesary to achieve any confidence levels.
I prefer to simplify the landing and split test big changes, this allows for lower traffic levels to reach confidence levels, easier implementation and much bigger wins.
Given a niche market and low traffic volumes I think any focus on personas is stepping over dollars to pick up dimes.
Just my opinion
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