Needing to vent a little

[Dave Erickson]

Trying to implement Contact at Once chat on our site. It's recommended by Cobalt, they have a widget for it, I sent in the code 2 days ago and their email promised someone would contact me in 24 hours. No one did. I called them and they said another day. That day passed. I called again and the support guy said no one has touched it. I asked when it can be done and he doesn't know. Hopefully tomorrow he says. I ask if it's a hope or a commitment and he says he can't say. I ask if it can be escalated because I'm a little scared since it took about 14 days to get just the google analytics code installed on our site. They said I can try to escalate with my Advocate. I emailed her asking if I can be saved from the depths of untouched support queue.

Fingers crossed

On another note when trying to look at expenses last week I asked Cobalt for access to our live Adwords campaign and was shot down. Only they can view the Adwords for dealers. It has me worried that if we ever have them not manage our adwords they'll just take our campaign equity and move it over to some competitor. Does anyone else think this is a valid concern?

urggh

Okay back to work. I feel a little better having vented.

 

[cmjerry4531]

14 days just to get Google Analytics on your site?? That's crazy! I've used Cobalt in the past, and never had experiences like that. Every time I asked for a change on the site it happened right away. I must have just had a really good account rep.

 

[yagoparamo]

Dave,

Get a second website! For less than $1,000 you can get a second site that you can customize and do whatever you want with it.

First if all no 2 systems can do the same things, so you can play different strategies display and SEO wise. Secondly you will have both website companies work just a little bit harder to get your business up. Third it will allow you to experiment and see what works best conversion rate wise.

Last, don't tell me you don't have budget... I'll bet that in LA leads easily go for $25-35 each. All you need is to get this second site to produce 25 leads organically so you can cancel a per-lead provider.

On a last note, and JUST my opinion; don't do PPC with your website company. It is the worst conflict of interest ever. The website's job should be to grow organically and show in as many more searches as time goes as possible. If you reward them for PPC clicks why would they perform organically?

This is one of my sites hyundai elantra smokey point - Google Search showing on an organic search for a make they don't have (is a Dodge dealer). The local Hyundai dealer uses Cobalt.

I'm not blaming Cobalt for this nor I'm showing of my site. I'm sure Cobalt shows great in other searches and mine doesn't. That is the point.

So this dealer, my client, has this site done by me Rairdon Dodge Chrysler Jeep Dealer - Everett Arlington New Used Car Washington and it also has this site done by Dealer.com Rairdon's Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram of Smokey Point | New Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram dealership in Arlington, WA 98223 I think that is a long term good strategy.

 

[cmjerry4531]

Yago, good point with a second website. It's nice being able to completely customize a site to your hearts content, and to be able to test your own ideas. Considering you can get a second site for even less than $500, it is well worth the investment.

As for not doing your PPC with the same company as your website, I would say it depends. As long as your website company is being completely transparent, and doing a good job why not? Just make sure you set up goal tracking in your Google Analytics, and see how many e-leads they are generating with the PPC traffic, and I'd suggest setting up a small piece of script to show a different phone number if the person came through PPC. That way you can see hard stats of 2/3rds of the leads generated by PPC - assuming that your team doesn't ask walk-ins if they clicked on a PPC ad.

Edit:
Considering that I don't post often, I want to point out that the last part about sourcing your walk-in traffic about PPC was supposed to be a joke.

 

[yagoparamo]

CM,

This may go against dealer culture but... A less than $500 website for a franchised dealer will come at the expense of missing something (videos, rebate tool, etc).

Don't focus on the $500... dealers ask me all the time "can you do it for $500", they never ask me "can you get my site to index better than my current one" or "can you build a site that will increase my traffic" etc.

Dealer culture, in part driven by customers asking for a $100 discount on a $35,000 car, is focusing on the least important factor of the service. If the website doesn't perform, it doesn't matter I did it for $500.

 

[Dave Erickson]

14 days just to get Google Analytics on your site?? That's crazy! I've used Cobalt in the past, and never had experiences like that. Every time I asked for a change on the site it happened right away. I must have just had a really good account rep.

Yes I was a little surprised too! We have a dealer.com site and I asked them the same day I asked Cobalt. DDC had it up in about 20 minutes.

 

[cmjerry4531]

CM,

This may go against dealer culture but... A less than $500 website for a franchised dealer will come at the expense of missing something (videos, rebate tool, etc).

You are completely correct on that point, you wouldn't be able to get additional features for that $500.

As for the indexing better part, it would really depend on the dealer. Obviously $500 isn't going to get you any SEO work, so you are going to have to depend on someone in house to do all the on-site and off-site SEO. While something around the $1000 mark may get you some on-site optimization.

 

[ewalraven]

My experience with Cobalt is that they CAN do Adwords no problem. Not sure why they won't as they market themselves as SEO/SEM "masterrrzz". I say this because before we signed up I got on a conference call with their support department and we had a conversation about it. Unfortunately it was to much money (like everything at that place .. ugh) and we never did it. So I'm not sure if they allow you access to the account. Can't say I blame them either -- I could debate this either way actually.

As for getting them to do anything, this is just "standard vendor". If it's not something the frontline can do over the phone it's probably not going to happen right away. My only advice here (from being on the vendor and dealer side) to get anything done in a reasonable time is just beg and beg .. aaannnd... beg nicely and just say you don't mind being put on hold for an hour or two as long as it gets done. I swear it works. Advice soon to be published in an PDF on eBay for 4.99.

Got a little off track there, but the best experience I had with Cobalt was one month before we signed the 11 months into the contract (one month before the contract was up).

 

[danmichaeli]

The second (or third, fourth and fifth) website idea is an interesting topic. Keep in mind that over 25% of what Google looks at when their algorithms are ranking you in search results (ie SEO) is your "domain authority". This metric is ranked from 0-10 and the average is 3. www.hyundaiusa.com for example, has a domain authority of 6, which is quite good. Each incremental number is exponentially harder to achieve (AutoTrader has an 8, New York Times has a 9 and Twitter has a 10)


The main reason I mention this is that when you build a new website that just connects to the old site (does not have the same domain name), the content from the new site will not contribute to your domain authority. Therefore, it will not help your SEO ranking for your original site. So my opinion is that a second website could be used just for SEM purposes, meaning you could pay for traffic that goes to another website. Once the traffic gets there, you capture that lead (with a call to action) and direct them to your main site. That way you can gain more control over your PPC (pay per click) while not needing to build up your SEO all over again. The main thing is to keep all of your content on your main website so that you always focus your "domain authority" efforts in one place.

 

[Dave Erickson]

Thanks everyone for the great information.