Seeing The Forest Rather Than Just The Trees

[joehigh]

This is a topic I feel very passionate about. Too much of the focus of a dealers website is based upon justifying an internet managers position by counting leads and visitors. The truth is that the majority of consumers don't submit a lead so if your entire site is all about distracting the consumer with lots of lead-gen pop-ups and leave behinds, you are just slowing down the majority of the consumers that just want to see what you sell, if you have it, and how much it costs.

My entire presentation at Digital Dealer will be focused on this topic. Please come by if you want to hear more about my opinion on the topic.

 

[Kris Thomas]

I have never agreed with anything that Joe Pistell has ever written on this site. Hell froze over and I agree completely with what he said! SM gurus be damned. Facebook and all that junk doesn't sell cars. The Dealerrater article is self serving. Of course they are going to say their poll says more people want car promotions on FB, because it is in their best interest to say that. Way to go Joe!

 

[Joe Pistell]

Thnx for the kudos, This is Brian's thread, speaking for us DR pioneers, Brian has been waaay out ahead of the market for years waiting for our marketplace to be ready for an ecommerce solution.

My anti-SM rant and Brian's vision have a common denominator... "on page optimization". IMO, until we dig and find out what is on our shopper’s minds and address these issues with on-page solutions, Brian's ecommerce game plan won't ever get to 1st base.

Our shoppers use our sites as a catalog site, not a commerce site. IMO, we can't get to an e-commerce dealer site until we get our shoppers so comfortable with the onpage experience that they _readily_ use the forms on the pages we offer them now.

For example, Sutherlin Nissan rocks with a 7% conversion ratio, this is the highest visitor-to-lead stat I've ever seen. Most of us normal dealers are coming in at 3% or lower. Regardless, these numbers suck. 95 of 100 shoppers are un-motivated to communicate with us (let alone give us money) IMO, numbers this poor come from a LOT of unanswered questions on our shoppers minds. On-page optimization needs to addresses these mystery issues.

Because we have a home-brew indie web site New and Used Chevrolet Dealer McMurray | Sun Chevrolet (thnx to Matt & crew at HomeNet!) we are free to explore new ideas without the legacy problems of the big boy vendors. For example, we added a simple and bold tradein button on the VDP and the response was amazing, we doubled our lead count overnight. This simple act confirmed to me that the upside from on-page optimization is huge.

I am not saying that our customers will ever embrace ecommerce, but to get to ecommerce, we need to Crawl, Walk, Run.

Sutherlin Nissan conversion stats thread: http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/free-24-7-live...

 

[Oscar Vanderkooij]

Joe,

I noticed you mentioned Sutherlin Nissan for having a 7% conversion ratio. I do not want to brag (but I guess I will), but over the last 3 months I am getting a 9.18% conversion ratio from my dealeron.com site (filled out lead forms divided by unique visitors). I do not include phone calls in conversion numbers, because customers will call back those tracking numbers when they are not on your website anymore, which will inflate your conversion.

Regarding where dealer websites will go? read these articles on what trends move the market:

http://trendwatching.com/trends/transparencytrium...

I think our customers will want to see more transparency. I think customer testimonials are a good example of this and they will become more and more important.

trendwatching.com's November 2009 Trend Briefing covering "NOWISM"

This article writes about Nowism. Great example of this is that more and more customers want to visit your site on their mobile phone and not wait until they get home behind a computer.

 

[Joe Pistell]

Oscar,

9+% is SMOKIN!

I can quickly see how Sutherlin got hot strong lead counts, a strong brand, little competition (for such a large market), deep inventory, a great dealer rep and (most important) a 45 min drive from Atlanta.

You're not so easy to figure out.

You have 5 other Acura players in your market. Your Dealeron site is rockin the Acura search. A quick look has you with >200 new acuras in stock (quick look, your biggest player in Dallas area?) I can see of all of the brands out there, Acura demos must be top3 for "likely to use the net" PLUS a brand that dosent discount (haggle) much. Hmmm... The 9% is sick! I'd love to see how it stacks up against other Acura players in gigantic markets.

I'll read your links this weekend!

How is that annoying pop-up coupon thingy working for you?

 

[Oscar Vanderkooij]

Joe,

We own another dealership and get around 7%+ from that dealeron site. I do the SEO myself for our sites. Our other dealership is www.universityparkaudi.com although they have certain features turned off that affect the conversion (e.g. they do not have the "request sales price" button on new inventory.) They think their customers do not like that.

The coupon popup is what sold me initially on dealeron, because they allowed me to use it for free on my previous vendor's website and immediately saw a 1.5% increase in conversion. We now receive 60% of all our leads from our own website and around one third come from the pop-up. They turn in to sales in a high percentage also.

If you are interested in trying the coupon feature on your site, so you can see how well it converts, let me know. I am sure I can get dealeron to give it to you for a few months for free.