What is your website's conversion rate?

[Jim K]

After years of tracking the overall conversion and not seeing where it truly tied onto Sales - I stopped tracking it. Found there to be too many variables to do anything with the metric.

@Jeff, I know attribution is a bad word for many, but is anyone, can anyone, accurately provide a conversion metric tied to sales, that you indicate is so illusive?

 

[Ryan Everson]

View attachment 5767

We break out conversion rate for dealers in Google Data Studio, here is an example. Breaking out conversion rate by each conversion method allows you to see if a particular conversion method may be broken, or implemented poorly.

For instance, we know trade-in tools perform within a conversion percentage range at most dealer websites. We are fans of TradePending and others, and when we find a new dealer that has a lower percentage than the rest of the country, we dig in and find out why. Perhaps the link is not on the SRPs, or is too far down on the homepage. Contact your TP rep, or digital retail support rep if your conversion rates are lower than they should be.

Overall, our goal is 2% or above, but that can be hard for dealers who don't want chat/text or DR tools. For a dealer with multiple methods, maybe 3% or above. Of course this past Spring and Summer saw much higher conversion rates, and also a higher conversion rate for new vs. returning users, which can show a shortening sales cycle. Lately returning user conversion rates are climbing back, showing potential market softening, longer sales cycles.

Nice George!

Do you also break it down by traffic source?

A dealer's website conversion rate can be influenced incredibly by their website traffic mix. Usually, the less click-heavy advertising you do (facebook, display, etc), the better your website conversion rate, since you end up with mainly organic and GMB/GBP traffic.