TK Carsites - Dealer Website Services Profile and Reviews

[Scott Bouza]

Since going with TK Carsites our two dealerships have seen a HUGE increases in website traffic. Their SEO department has brought our sites up from page 5 or 7 on the organic search engines to the first page. The other website provider we were using just didn't seem to want to work with you. If you needed changes it would take weeks sometimes, that is if you could get in contact with your rep. TK reps will return your calls immediately and get the job done, usually within 48 hours. It has been such a pleasure to have TK on my side in this economy. My sales rep, Jen Schrader, also has been an great asset to have. She is there for me at the drop of a hat, even coming to the dealership to help me out with whatever I need.

Due to our Toyota websites look and feel, we are the ONLY recommended Toyota dealer in Northern Michigan endorsed by AARP.

What I have been able to do since bringing TK on board is increase my sales leads coming directly from our sites and drop my paid leads to zero. The leads that we get directly from our sites have a much higher closing rate than any paid service that we have been using. We currently close an average of between 20% to 30% of our internet leads, which obviously makes the owners VERY HAPPY! That is almost a 80% closing increase from what our internet department did prior to taking on TK. With the integration of Homenet Inc. WebIOL it makes everything a breeze. Instead of having to use several different programs for uploading photos, updating inventory and printing window stickers, now I can do it all in one place. The simplicity of it is so wonderful and it makes my job so much easier. Convenience is a must when you are one person dealing with three separate dealership inventories.

I recommend TK to everyone that I come across as the quintessential website hosting provider and WebIOL as the best online inventory manager out there. I cannot say enough about this company. If you are not happy with your current provider I advise you to give TK a shot. Let them show you how they can increase your web presence and help you to generate not just more leads but turn them into sales. They haven't been votes "Best Website Provider" 4 years straight for nothing. TK Caresites has earned that distinction for a reason!!!

 

[Scott Dube (blog)]

We are in the process of switching over to a TK site form our Dealerskins site. This is without a doubt the worst experience of my career with regard to building a site. They claim everything is custom yet you can't get what you want. The claim they have a very well defined process yet we're now nearly 2 months behind schedule. That's bad enough but they claimed the site was ready to go live but it wasn't even close but too late we let them go live. It's out there now in all of it's splendor broken links database errors etc. Over 4 days that way now with virtually no progress. I have tried to get people higher in the company involved they seem only remotely interested more interested in defending there lousy project manager. I have many more issues with them but I will give them a chance to resolve these issues before completing the rant. I can tell you our online as well as offline reputation would be as bad as Bill Heard if I treated my customers this way! RICHARD PLEASE GET INVOLVED AND FIX MY SITE! It's an embarrassment to both of us!

Scott

 

[Richard Valenta (blog)]

Scott,

I will contact you direct to discuss your issues.

Richard

 

[Richard Valenta (blog)]

Scott,

Tried to contact you. You are not available. I left you my cell phone number so you can contact me at your convenience.

Richard

 

[Scott Dube (blog)]

Alright so as I said to Richard in his follow up calls to me I want to set the record straight on my new site. First off we love the look and feel! We all know it's about the first impressions.... That said once Richard and I connected things began to move! He does indeed get the process moving and the issues got cleared up for the most part. We still have a couple of minor items but everyone is working to resolve them. I am sure that we're going to be very happy with the site's results. I'm already seeing some changes in the search engine positioning. And we're seeing decent lead traffic. I'm sure as the site gets crawled and the search engines index it traffic will go up. I appreciate Richard's getting involved and inspiring his people. I look forward to a long and prosperous relationship with TK.

Scott Dube

 

[Amanda Marsal]

We built a portal page with TK to be the flagship site for our company to include our four area locations. When TK says that their websites are completely customizable they truly mean it. When we first started building our site, I sent them a rough “blue print” of the site that I had pictured. They were able to work off of my rough layout to help us design a truly one-of-a-kind site. The “power of 5” sites are simple to navigate, and make for an easy shopping experience for the consumer. We have only been live for a few days, yet we have seen a rise in leads. I am definitely looking forward to the new business we will acquire with this site.

Amanda Marsal
Internet Sales Manager
John Jones Automotive Group

 

[Timothy Martell]

I for one can speak to Scott's issues. Our initial cutover to tkcarsites was an absolute nightmare. It was particularly frustrating because everyone at tk was extremely nice - they just seemed overwhelmed with new business to the point that they were incapable of delivering on the over promised sizzle of their sales reps outlandish claims. Richard got involved and certainly was a big factor in cutting through the bs and getting results moving more quickly.
It seems to me that they have tried so hard to be able to provide a great product to dealers who have relatively no tech savvy personnel, that when they encounter a store that is on the cutting edge or has key personnel that are VERY tech knowledgeable, that their process gets in the way of their results.

Rather than speaking directly to the people doing the actual work they have what I call glorified message runners. And it seems that they even have message runners for the message runners. What happens is that so much is lost by the time it gets to the tech department that priorities aren't properly set and much gets lost, overlooked, falls through the cracks and ultimately leads to a bad customer experience for the dealer. I've spoken to Richard about this, i hope they are making strides to continue improving in this regard. While we are light-years ahead of where we were, it continues to take far too long to get trouble tickets and requests for work to be completed - one request has been in the works for over a month now.

The single biggest reason we have stayed is their SEO prowess. Now this is a subject which I have a deep understanding of. I won't go into details here, but their chief advisor for SEO is a certifiable genius in this area. They are so effective at using inbound links that they seem to be able to get away with a lot of no-no's in the seo world. Like using iframed inventory (a big pet peeve of mine) Using repeating title tags that are vague.) Some of what they do would also be very much in the grey area of googles webmaster guidelines. My feeling is that - much like myself - they are betting on the reality that dealer websites will continue to fly under google's radar because of the relatively low traffic dealer websites see (when compared with the amazon.com's and ebays of the world) thus, google will never have the time to deal with enforcing these loosely interpreted rules. None of that matters - google "Nissan Dealers" and you'll find Marlboro Nissan in the number 2 or 3 spot on google page one. Now this isn't a particularly important term for us, but that key phrase is extremely competitive and its a NATIONAL term. What this means for those who are less SEO savvy - its real freakin' hard to get on page 1 for a term like that. We were on page 1 for that term by our 2nd week with tk.

To give you an idea of just how effective their TK5 sites are I will give you some info about our sites. Prior to moving to tk our Nissan dealer site already received, on average about 3-4k unique visitors/month. Last month we topped 11k uniques and over 20k total visits. Now the lead conversion is nowhere near tk's 5% claims, but we are certainly busy. In this horrible economy we had a better January than last year and our Feb is going to be right about the same. We sold 69 cars on President's day weekend - 48 were directly sourced from our online marketing efforts.

Now if they could just build in the killer analytics package dealer.com uses - maybe the carflix dealer.com has and ok and the dominator ppc program they have, as well and a more robust back end tool for user customizability they would have the ultimate web solution.

I would warn you of this though. TK is so effective at driving traffic to your website that you better have a good process in place. If you don't you'll end up seeing a ton of bad reviews on dealerrater.com who's web link will be just below your websites location on google page 1.

Hope this helps!

Timothy P Martell
Director of eCommerce & Marketing
Marlboro Nissan
Woburn Jaguar
[email protected]
(888) 251-3813

 

[daniel caliri]

Do vendors (not going to name names yet) ever up the price of the contract for service after you've already gotten all of the big wigs in the company to sign it and fax it in?

This seems like bad business to me.

You would think they would just eat the small difference to save the utter embarrassment on all sides.

 

[Mike McDonohue]

I have seen a good amount of TKCarsite websites before and I have a question involving the SEO that I have just never understood. I would say over 80% of TK sites I have seen have a javascript file (usually links.js) that is full of functions that use javascript to change the current page URL. Instead of just using normal SEO friendly anchor (A) tags, every single link has its own uniquely named javascript function.

Although some aspects of SEO are very open to interpretation based on individual results for a company's strategy, it is well known for fact that javascript is not SEO friendly AT ALL.

I was wondering if there is some secret behind using javascript instead of anchor tags before I just don't understand?

 

[Tom Drommond]

I have to agree with Scott and Timothy. Our site, which rolled out the last week of March, has been one minor frustration after another. From not being able to get the CarFax link changed to my AutoCheck link (3/23, still not done) to coding errors like linking the new car specials button to a dead page due to a typo.

For April, our average time on the site for 2333 visitors was only 248 seconds. That's less than 11 seconds per visitor. They are seeing the index page and leaving, or they click on the peel down coupon, which is very plain-looking, close it and leave. 77% of our vistors bailed out before ever looking at the inventory or even seeing a price, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't crappy pictures, poor descriptions or inflated prices. They never got to see how crappy or high we were or weren't. That's 1485 vistors that ran off into the woods.

Now here's the kicker, of the 1252 that didn't leave in the first page, 72 found their way to the used car inventory. 28 leads were submitted for used cars. That's a staggering 39% conversion rate. Of the 28, 7 bought a used car, or 25% lead to close. How many could we have sold if only 10% of the 1485 who left, could have found what they came to the site to find? Based on these numbers 148 would have submitted 56 leads and we would have closed 14 of those. If those numbers are too high, cut them in half and it's still 7 car deals or $16,000 in missed used car revenue, before pack. That means my salespeople missed the chance to make an additional $4,000 in commission. I don't know much, but I do know my sales team deserved the chance to make that money. They closed 14% of their total leads last month. All they needed was an at-bat to hit a homerun. It was already there. We didn't need more advertising, comments, photos or anything else.

To their credit TK is working to fix these and the other problems. It has not been the smoothest process. I think I'd have rather had an unneccessary prostate exam. Hopefully, once we are through the growing pains it won't be as frustrating.