Joe,
I agree that there are other factors involved but that does not mean you cannot compare these numbers. First of, I do not agree that your conversion will go down/up if you have more stores per capita or the distance between stores. This would influence the number of unique visitors not your conversion ratio. Think about this for a moment, more stores per capita means more competition online, so less visitors to your site. How they convert has nothing to do with this. The type of visitors might, but who says a Chevy customer is less likely to convert and why? What research do you base this on?
If your inventory shrunk, then I can see how it affects your conversion, but again it affects your traffic more than your conversion. Also, you have tools to get around limited inventory like virtual inventory.
When the market shows conversion of 2-5% I think having a ratio of 7-9% does show better conversion no matter what intangibles there are. When we were with another vendor we would get 4% conversion too and then I installed the pop-up tool from our current vendor and our conversion increased by 1.5% (from 4 to 5.5%) So lets say that I have 10,000 unique visitors per month, the increase of 1.5% would give me an additional 150 leads an increase of 37.5%.
The moral of this story is that everyone should focus on improving their conversion. Your customers are on your site for a reason. They want information. It works just like phone ups, if your sales reps that take phone calls do not ask for a name and number to call back (or better yet - set an appointment), then they do not convert the calls. I expect my website to convert as high as possible, because more leads almost always turn in to more sales.
FYI. I checked out your website. Was this custom build? To improve your SEO you could include a location in the SEO friendly URLs which will help rank better. Sames goes for your sitemap. Also since you have a website that does not look like your typical dealer site, I would install a heatmap, so you can see how customers flow through your websites. This will allow you to adjust the design and text on your website to improve your conversion. P.S. I do like your custom Meta Descriptions since they show up in the SERPs.
I agree that there are other factors involved but that does not mean you cannot compare these numbers. First of, I do not agree that your conversion will go down/up if you have more stores per capita or the distance between stores. This would influence the number of unique visitors not your conversion ratio. Think about this for a moment, more stores per capita means more competition online, so less visitors to your site. How they convert has nothing to do with this. The type of visitors might, but who says a Chevy customer is less likely to convert and why? What research do you base this on?
If your inventory shrunk, then I can see how it affects your conversion, but again it affects your traffic more than your conversion. Also, you have tools to get around limited inventory like virtual inventory.
When the market shows conversion of 2-5% I think having a ratio of 7-9% does show better conversion no matter what intangibles there are. When we were with another vendor we would get 4% conversion too and then I installed the pop-up tool from our current vendor and our conversion increased by 1.5% (from 4 to 5.5%) So lets say that I have 10,000 unique visitors per month, the increase of 1.5% would give me an additional 150 leads an increase of 37.5%.
The moral of this story is that everyone should focus on improving their conversion. Your customers are on your site for a reason. They want information. It works just like phone ups, if your sales reps that take phone calls do not ask for a name and number to call back (or better yet - set an appointment), then they do not convert the calls. I expect my website to convert as high as possible, because more leads almost always turn in to more sales.
FYI. I checked out your website. Was this custom build? To improve your SEO you could include a location in the SEO friendly URLs which will help rank better. Sames goes for your sitemap. Also since you have a website that does not look like your typical dealer site, I would install a heatmap, so you can see how customers flow through your websites. This will allow you to adjust the design and text on your website to improve your conversion. P.S. I do like your custom Meta Descriptions since they show up in the SERPs.
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Regardless, I would take you up on it, although one thing they have to do is turn the pop-up certificate on (we receive around 33% of our leads from that). It looks like their website has not been up for over a year, which also explains why they are not showing up for common keywords. I might be wrong on this, because it does not show a domain creation date. When I use the wayback machine, no results show up, which most often means there was no website 12 months ago.
