The problem with conversion ratios for Dealership Websites

[Mitch]

Joe - I agree totally, in fact I wrote almost the same comments verbatim last time I addressed this topic.

Seems like a lot of you are addressing the concept of "optimizing" your site for conversions... first of all, that's precisely my argument: website providers and third party plug-ins want you to think in these terms so they can validate their existence, but I can think of plenty of elements I'd like to have on my dealer site that don't convert well on their own... what they will do is build a value that brings people in the door, and that's where you have to be on top of your floor traffic sourcing, as Mike pointed out.

The other part of the argument is the marketing you do to bring people to your site... I don't care how great you think your site is at measuring conversions, it goes without saying that the farther your marketing reaches, the less effective it will be. That was the conundrum I was posing here: if you live and die by the conversion ratio, then marketing past 5 or 10 miles from your dealership (relative to geography of course) is bad, and you shouldn't do it. Would anyone be interested in marketing that way?

 

[Robert Sherman]

Tracking conversion rates is critical! No lead provider, nor even dealer web site can do this accurately as they do not know what leads buy cars outside of your dealership. That is where the company I work for comes in.
Polk has registration data for all 50 states, including DC and Puerto Rico. We can determine what lead, bought what car, at what dealership! Give us a call, we can provide you the "real data"!

 

[Frank Davis]

I have to agree with Robert Sherman "Tracking conversion rates is critical" If you are not tracking this then what are you doing? I believe you can be over analytical and in some cases this is happening. I have used the conversion ratio formulas for many years and have improved the amount of vehicles we sell. OK you drive traffic to your site, now what? You see how many pages they look at how long they spent on your site etc etc etc, Gezzzz all that is good but what REALLY matters? "HOW MANY LEADS DID I GET TODAY" well that would be called a conversion. Let’s take it a step further “how many of those leads did I sell"? What is important is you convert the traffic into leads from your website, the more you convert the better you are doing your job. If you could possibly convert 30% of your visitors into some kind of lead would you agree you would sell more vehicles? So if you convert let’s say 5% of your visitors you will sell how many of those converted leads? So if you converted 30% wouldn’t you be a hero? Sure use the argument of blogs and social media but give me a break how much of that will bring BUYERS to your website and how much actual traffic? VERY LITTLE. I would say you better measure conversions and find ways to improve that # because if you do you will SELL MORE CARS. I will tell you one reason why, when you convert someone from your website into a lead and you get a “salesman “ on that customer within minutes then you have a great chance of selling that converted lead today. First one to contact is the first one to sell. So in essence if you have 3,000 visitors this month (unique) and you converted 5% or 30%, how many would you sell? From each metric? I rest my case.

 

[John Kimel]

I'm note sure these comments are EXACTLY on point, but it is my contention that any dealership which claims to have a closing ratio of 20% on floor/phone traffic has a staff full of sales people who are NOT logging all their UPS. Also, any dealership with an internet sales closing ratio of 10% of higher needs to change web site providers because I guarantee they are not getting enough leads, or from a wide enough geographical area.

I absolutely track closing ratios at our dealership, and review them on a regular basis with the sales staff. However, I'd rather have my people log ALL their leads and have a lower closing ratio than to sandbag and only log "good" leads so that they attain a higher closing ratio. The same goes for internet leads. I'm going to log them all, even if they're really weak, and I'm going to work them until they "buy or die." The dealer principal fully understand this, and totally prefers knowing that all leads are getting logged even at the cost of lower closing ratios.