Uncle Joe's Make Over Diary

[joe.pistell]

Joe, any thoughts on adding a blog to the new UCK?

Yes Jake, 2 styles of blogs.

#1). Theme based (LuxuryCarKing.com, SportsCarKing.com, UsedSUVking.com, MiniVanKing.com, PickupTruckKing.com, UsedCarQueen.com, etc)

#2). Location Based. (city1.usedcarking.com, city2.usedcarking.com, city3.usedcarking.com, etc)

Before I get to the blogs, I have a dedicated Video site that's in beta, The Used Car King TV - Used Auto Videos Near Syracuse, NY (I need a video host that has optimized for commerce: http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f14/hunting-elusive-video-conversion-1325.html ). I also have NewCarKing.com on the drawing boards right now. Hopefully these will go live before July4th.

Then sometime in 2012, I hope to get to my nest of marketing sites: TradeinBonus.com, Over30MPG.com, FallingtoZero.com, GMCertifiedSale.com...

 

[joe.pistell]

Dear Diary.

I am quickly approaching the time when I need to be establishing the site architecture model. You can't do a makeover THEN change the link structure. This is a grueling part of the process as EVERYTHING rests on this. The architecture must be friendly to humans and bots alike. It must be optimized, yet not overly so, It must be flexible to accept change should change be needed. It must be optimized for Catalogue/eCommerce . Catalogue sites (like ours) has lots of dupe content. Also, I need to improve the PR (Page Rank) to the SRPs (Search Return Pages) thru link sculpting. 50% of my organic search traffic lands on the home page. That needs to change where most of my long tail organic search traffic goes into the site (where it belongs).

I will be comparing my research and notes along side my able webgurus at Homenet, Matt Scalicone & Mike Weiss. To help me create a best of class solution, I'll be spending a few hours with the the famous SEO, Michael Gray, aka GrayWolf on a Blog series dedicated just to this topic: How To Silo Your Website: The Masthead

 

[Jake L]

So I assume you have in-house content writers?

 

[joe.pistell]

So I assume you have in-house content writers?

Yes.

Retirees from Fla work for drinkin' money

 

[joe.pistell]

Seeking feedback on Eureka! lead tool.

Take off your dealer hat and put on your customer shopper hat.

Scenario: Your at AutoTrader.com on and off for weeks. You're getting close to pulling the trigger, now you need to go visit the dealer. You click the link to visit the dealers site click here

Give the coupon a few secs to load, then look at the coupon for 5 seconds and then look away.

What did you see?
What was the offer?
Was the offer easy to read and understand?
Thoughts??

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Seeking feedback on Eureka! lead tool.

Take off your dealer hat and put on your customer shopper hat.

Scenario: Your at AutoTrader.com on and off for weeks. You're getting close to pulling the trigger, now you need to go visit the dealer. You click the link to visit the dealers site click here

Give the coupon a few secs to load, then look at the coupon for 5 seconds and then look away.

What did you see?
What was the offer?
Was the offer easy to read and understand?
Thoughts??

"We'll Make your first payment!"

Joe - I run this offer from time to time using our eautosavings feature with our DealerOn websites with some nice success.

"Was the offer easy to read and understand?" - I thought I as going to get my first payment FREE and had no initial idea this was a contest. Why make it a contest?

What if the customer declines at first but then finds something they may be interested in and now would like to fill out the form? How do they get it?

Also - be great if you knew where the customer was coming from...the referring domain.

Customer is on AutoTrader --> Clicks on Website Link --> Lands on UsedCarKing and is greeted with "Welcome AutoTrader Shopper - We'll Make your first payment!" This has shown to increase the consumers attention and awareness.

Be great if you could allow the consumer to minimize the offer into a side tab so if the consumer would like to initiate the offer later on, they would be able to do so.



Take it another step and build in some re-targeting logic and only offer it to customer that have been one the site with in the last 15 days but has NOT converted. That would be a huge win. I would love to have this logic built into an incentive offer like this.

 

[joe.pistell]

"We'll Make your first payment!"

Joe - I run this offer from time to time using our eautosavings feature with our DealerOn websites with some nice success.

"Was the offer easy to read and understand?" - I thought I as going to get my first payment FREE and had no initial idea this was a contest. Why make it a contest?

DOH! Its NOT a contest!! My confusing verbiage is tied to your quote below...

Also - be great if you knew where the customer was coming from...the referring domain.

Customer is on AutoTrader --> Clicks on Website Link --> Lands on UsedCarKing and is greeted with "Welcome AutoTrader Shopper - We'll Make your first payment!" This has shown to increase the consumers attention and awareness.

This work is an extension of the blog post "Eureka Link".
This IS referral based logic, we serve up a different message for each referral source (Cars, AT, Craigslist, Google Organic, PPC, etc). We'll rotate content to find which message converts the best.

RE: "We'll make your 1st payment".
The message is obviously way too busy leading you to think it was a contest. In this example, I was trying to NOT SPOOK the visitor into knowing that we know where he has come from. The concept was to let them know that they were randomly picked (aka the contest confusion).

What if the customer declines at first but then finds something they may be interested in and now would like to fill out the form? How do they get it?

Be great if you could allow the consumer to minimize the offer into a side tab so if the consumer would like to initiate the offer later on, they would be able to do so.

View attachment 279

Ya, it's in the plan, I call it the "park feature"

Take it another step and build in some re-targeting logic and only offer it to customer that have been one the site with in the last 15 days but has NOT converted. That would be a huge win. I would love to have this logic built into an incentive offer like this.

WICKED SMART JK!
Hmmm... Another HOT SPOT that I've always wanted to expoit would be serving a custom message to the visitor that is back a 2nd time in under ___ hours.


TY for your help my brother from another mother!!

 

[davidmoon]

So it's not a contest? My first thought was you'd make my first payment, which sounds enticing. But as I read it, I'd likely close it and make way to your inventory--I don't want a "pesky" sales call if I cannot find something I'm interested in on your site. It reads like a contest or gimmick, and with my luck I'd probably wouldn't win. And if you are really wanting my business, I can throw that in sometime during negotiations, and expect you to honor the offer.

If you're going to offer it to anyone, why not put up a condition ... make an appointment online to see a vehicle, and if you buy, we'll make your first payment. That way you make an appointment, get the lead and extend the offer.

 

[joe.pistell]

Refreshed the Autotrader.com gateway page, seeking opinions again, please CLICK HERE.

BEFORE you click, remember, you are an AutoTrader.com shopper, you're on a VDP (Veh Detail Page) on a unit you like and you've clicked the link to the dealers website...

thoughts?

 

[joe.pistell]

Dear Diary,


After 18months of effort and waiting, we no longer have to wait for Chrome to produce a list of CrossOver vehicles. We finally have Crossovers broke out and listed separately.

Once every 6months, I ask HomeNet if Chrome has finally created a Crossover class (so I don't have to use my judgement to assign the class). Luckily, in the last 3months, AutoTrader, Edmunds and Cars all have crossovers listed now, so I asked my trusty assistant to place them all on a SS and if any units are identified as Xovers in all 3 sites, then, we got us a crossover... dammit! We wrote "import conversions" in the webIOL platform to flag them all and now I sit back and wait to see if consumers like it.

more as it comes...