The problem so many face is the lead is such an amazingly easy thing to follow from Click to Curb. It is the ONLY reliably trackable thing. It is tough to ween yourself from that. And even tougher to ween yourself from that to a new fix like the one I'm about to say.
Faith.
It starts with faith. Like the old days when our tracking system was a desklog we had to have faith in what our sales managers and sales agents told us. If our most desirable path is to land a customer on our website and then put them behind the wheel of their trade to drive-in, we're going to have to let go of our analytical selves a little bit.....no.....quite a bit.
The new metric to watch is the repeat visitor and the exit. More returning visits = higher interest. Exiting (not bouncing) on VDP and VLPs = assumptive action. Exiting on map pages = assumptive action. Exiting on the homepage = assumptive action too (usually a phone call).
Your job is not to convert the first time visitor; it is to give them a reason to come back. And then you need to provide them with enough quality content to make them want to drive to you. This alone is a MASSIVE departure from how most sites are currently built.
- Don't have real pictures of your new cars.... no bueno.
- Don't have every single used car photographed... no bueno.
- Don't have the vehicles options clearly defined/described... no bueno.
- Not showing incentives... no bueno.
- Not reiterating OEM programs (Season of Audi for example)... no bueno.
- Pricing all new cars at MSRP... excusable only if your entire marketplace is doing it.
- Comments... jury is still out, but they're excellent when well written to convey who you are and what the product is... no automated cheese.
These are just a few things to get started on. But if you are capable of taking your head out of the car business and thinking like a retailer (what do you expect to see when you buy things online?) this starts to become common sense. Unfortunately, I had to hop out of the dealership to figure things out because my head was only wired for "how to shove the customer through our process."
Then you strive to find your return and exit benchmarks while watching the floor like a hawk! You'll need to watch the floor-up count....not the sales. If you focus too deeply (from an Internet department perspective) on the sales count you might short change your effort by the floor staff performing poorly.
