Doug,
You made a couple comments, you wrote: "--more email leads (fishing for price) BUT LESS EMAILS OVERALL?" and you wrote: "-- HIGHER BOUNCE RATE"
Less emails Overall? No*.
Why? The lead submitting audience is tiny. 97% of shoppers never submit a lead. Asked another way, how many less of "the 3%'ers" will not send in a lead vs how many more emails you'll have that are fishing for a price. IMO, net result = remove prices & email volume goes up while business goes down.
Higher Bounce Rate? Nope.
1st, let's talk bounce rate:
Definition
A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.
Bounce rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A bounce happens when a visitor lands on your site, sees only one page and leaves**. Pricing on the inventory isnt seen until you get inside the site. SEO*** produces very little search traffic that lands a shopper on a page with inventory, and no dealer in their right mind would have a PPC campaign that points a paid visitor to a page where "If you want a price... you'll have to call me".
HTH
Joe
*Actually, the answer is... it all depends*. We'll assume that we've got an avg dealer with an avg franchise in the suburbs (not city center, not rural) and assuming the dealer does an avg job of pricing and merchandising,
**The internet is the new phone book. Car Dealers get a bunch of traffic that just wants a phone number (parts & service). IMO, unless your site is junk, Bounce rate is a poor measurement for site performance. I've never done a study, but, I'd bet the LARGER the service business, the higher the bounce rate.
***SEO for car dealers has an industry wide problem where google has given up on trying to figure out car dealers for long tail product searches (best price on a used ford f150 near albany ny) and "hard wire" in classified sites like AutoTrader, CarGurus, local newspaper sites and Cars.com
