Really debating running my own managed dealer website. Who's running their own dealer website or con

[Derek Bess]

Derek,

I've done my homework on split testing, I follow the feeds of the best in class like Conversion Rate Optimization | Conversion Rate Experts and Tim Ash's SiteTuners | Website Conversion Rate Optimization ? Landing Page Testing » SiteTuners and others. Optimizing any site requires many steps.

Off the top of my pointy head..
.

1. An indepth plunge into the shoppers world and then the same deep look into the seller's operations to discover needs and wants of both sides. Shopper surveys are needed. YOU CAN'T SKIP THIS STEP.
2. Build Creative to "bring to light" the discoveries found from the needs and wants of both sides
3. Examine the current website to find strengths and weaknesses (with heat maps and focus group users, etc...)
4. Formulate split test game plan
5. Execute split testing
6. Formulate multivariate game plan
7. Execute multivariate testing

Next, if you don't have enough traffic, your results could easily be flawed.


Split testing done right is lots of grunt work and is very expensive. Next, the larger the sample, the stronger the rules become.

Bottom Line: Split testing on a dealer level has a high potential of producing bad data. IMO, Optimization to be done at the Vendor level.


See Uncle Joe's Rule #121: "Just Because It's a Good Idea, Doesn't Mean It'll Work".

Joe, you still didn't answer my question regarding if you guys tried it out on your website, and if so were you successful with bringing in data to better your landing pages?

 

[joe.pistell]

Done the surveys and heat maps. Made mods and watched the results. No dynamic split testing so far.

 

[Derek Bess]

Done the surveys and heat maps. Made mods and watched the results. No dynamic split testing so far.

Care to share with the community? I'm really interested in seeing the heat maps. I suspect you used the heat maps on the vehicle specific inventory pages right?

 

[joe.pistell]

HEat maps, scroll depth maps, confetti maps on all important pages. Home, SRP and VDPs.

I'll post them in my makeover diary if I find some time.

 

[Tom Seven]

So Joe, when testing, you are mainly using 'time spent on site' as your conversion metric, am I correct?

 

[joe.pistell]

So Joe, when testing, you are mainly using 'time spent on site' as your conversion metric, am I correct?

It's my PPC conversion trigger.

 

[kcar]

So if I can figure out how to get around the whole iframe problem, I think I'll be set.. Also running the inventory portion on a sub-domain won't work, search engines treat it as a separate site. Apache mod_proxy looks promising though, (server points to another server, picks up info/content as it's own under it's original domain name).

 

[yagoparamo]

So if I can figure out how to get around the whole iframe problem, I think I'll be set.. Also running the inventory portion on a sub-domain won't work, search engines treat it as a separate site. Apache mod_proxy looks promising though, (server points to another server, picks up info/content as it's own under it's original domain name).

This is a WP site and we built an inventory plug in that just takes the inventory from a XML file. Notice that we even made a search for options in the page (we just did that today), we added just a few 'money' options to be searchable:


Independence Auto Center » Inventory

 

[kcar]

This is a WP site and we built an inventory plug in that just takes the inventory from a XML file. Notice that we even made a search for options in the page (we just did that today), we added just a few 'money' options to be searchable:


Independence Auto Center » Inventory

Thanks, looks functional. I'm trying to keep with eBizAutos inventory software though. So main site + their inventory software would be ideal for what I'm trying to do. Really not ready to go full custom including inventory, interested in starting out as a hybrid site. I'll keep this in mind though, at some point I want to go entirely custom.

 

[yagoparamo]

Thanks, looks functional. I'm trying to keep with eBizAutos inventory software though. So main site + their inventory software would be ideal for what I'm trying to do. Really not ready to go full custom including inventory, interested in starting out as a hybrid site. I'll keep this in mind though, at some point I want to go entirely custom.

This options allows you to use whatever inventory you want for as long as they send you an XML file. You should give yourself plenty of time and get an XML file and play with the import process as well as coding the search fields, database, descriptions, etc. Almost the entire page is custom code even though is in the WP platform.