Is The VDP a Good Landing Page?

[Chris Leslie]

Only reason I bring it up is that at first glance it may not seem like very much out of market. But, over time and at $3.50 a click or whatever 1,000 out of market clicks is gonna be pretty expensive. You might be able to spot some wasteful spend.

 

[Gayle Rogers]

@Chris Leslie I excluded the home state and immediate neighbors, and compared all four source, but the metrics don't really change. What is interesting is that Lotlinx did have the highest number of visits from outside the excluded area. 17% of the traffic sent to the dealer's site was from at least two states away.

 

[Amy Eddins Hughes]

Here's an idea. Dynamically build out Landing pages for all new and used vehicles in inventory. You would only need one or two pages. <Example> Your a Nissan dealer and you have a couple used Honda civic's in stock. We can build the SEM ad dynamically based on an inventory feed( mileage, color, starting price, etc...). Customer clicks the ad and instead of the click leading to a SRP or VDP, take them to a dynamic landing page. As the page renders, it pings edmunds api and pulls pic's, reviews, options, market data and other items pertaining to that specific Year, make and model or Make, model in general. Load a video talking about the Used Car inspection process at the dealership, dynamically Load a Payment caculator widget powered by the website provider and load an inventory widget for those specific used Honda civic's. Populate a tradein widget like KBB or Blackbook. Customer can click on a vehicle in the inventory widget and go straight to the VDP for that specific vehicle.</Example>

You can ping the API and return back almost any data for any type of vehicle in your inventory. The customer experience goes through the roof because now they have all the research data and Instock inventory to make a decision on and they didn't have to search an entire website just find the info they were looking for and you as the dealer provided the customer a little more data about the vehicle that they are interested about even though your not a Honda dealer.


Thoughts????

Yes!!! Love it.

 

[Amy Eddins Hughes]

OK, what got me thinking about this was a client requested research on a vendor that specializes in VDP traffic. The results were terrible. I couldn't believe how bad the metrics were.

So, instead of jumping straight to conclusions, I wanted to see if anyone else had a POV that would make me think about it differently.

My thoughts...It's a dead end page. The last place I want to drop an offsite click. @Tallcool1 said something similar to my initial reaction...It's like putting someone in a car for a test drive before you ask them a single question.

@Rick Buffkin & @Chris Leslie both made some really good points about reorganizing the page. I do think VDP's are organized poorly and lack the ability to lead the customer. We have tried dynamically driven pages in the past, with mixed results. That said, there were some things you mentioned that we didn't include.

All said, It seems like there is some solidarity. There are instances where it could be a good landing page, but more than the basic vehicle information is needed to help turn a casual shopper into an interested shopper. Ultimately there are better landing pages.

I'm going to turn this into a bigger research project and see what pages are better and why...I'll report the results. If anyone is interested in collaborating holler at me.

Gayle, we have millions of combinations of campaign combinations, ranked by conversion rate, VDP engagement, bounce rate, etc. Each campaign and landing page combination is reviewed so that you can see the effectiveness in context. Let me know if we can help. We were actually asked to clarify this exact topic by both a VDP driving vendor and a client last week. Happy to share.

 

[anthonycapital]

We used these guys: http://unbounce.com/
Works great for A/B testingtype of thing.

Years ago we tested this and the answer in our case was that -> Search page is better than -> Detail page, why? who knows but I agree with the logic stated that a customer can more easily "shop" on a search page.

However, what's even better than a search page, is typically a custom built landing page.
ie Ideal flow is Ad -> Landing Page -> Appropriate page (ie Search Page).

Yes, it's an extra click, but you may be surprised how valuable the context is.
For example, let's say I searched "Sierra 1500". Is it New or Used? Impossible to know.
If they get a landing page that offers them that exact choice, my hypothesis is that the results
would typically be better than sending them to a mixed new/used search page.

 

[Alexander Lau]

Better than a VDP...

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2018/07/10/google-marketing-live

#10: Don’t Have a Website? No Problem!
Nearly half of all small business owners in the United States don’t have a website (whoa). Among them, even fewer have the time and expertise to create websites and landing pages that are optimized for search ads. As a potential solution to that common predicament, Google is now testing auto-optimized landing pages. The functionality will live within Smart Campaigns, and will provide business owners an appealing alternative to creating resource-consuming, product-centric websites.

Auto-optimized landing pages use machine learning to pull information about your products and services directly from your ad, and match that to your on-page creative. Google has also built conversion tracking and reporting directly into the experience; so ad creation, landing page creation, and conversion tracking and reporting now all live within the Smart Campaigns UI.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Article from @Dane Saville over on the blog touched on this very topic... https://www.dealerrefresh.com/vdp-as-landing-page/

High Bounce Rates can be False Positives
The VDPs that shoppers land on will likely have a high bounce rate. That’s because you drove them directly to the last webpage of their journey; thus, you’ve satisfied their search. In these cases, the bounce rate is a false positive.

If you have great on-site SEO and deep linking, you’ll more likely see a high bounce rate. You are, however, reducing the number of people who exit at the wrong time. This bounce rate should also accompany more leads because you offered a streamlined user experience. People got to where they wanted to go.

This isn’t the only false positive... keep reading

Can a VDP view is a False Positive?