Your website is unique and personalized to every customer. What does it do exactly?

[SeanWoodruff]

Let's say you're starting an automotive website from scratch and you have some very savvy web designers, and you can literally mold your website so that it is completely unique and personalized to every customer.

What do you do and how do you do it? What "triggers" do you use to decide how and when your site changes? Where the customer lives? How many times they've viewed that car? What search terms they used on Google to get to your website?

What type of metrics like these can we actually track?

How does your website change based on these triggers? If they're near a competitor, do you highlight certain advantages your dealer has over that competitor (without mentioning their name obviously)? If someone's looked at one specific vehicle's VDP page for the 10th time, does it trigger a 1-hour countdown timer letting them fill out a form to save an additional $500 off of the eprice?

What would you do specifically to make your website the ultimate conversion machine?

This is new ground and I think this thread could potentially spawn some amazing ideas that could change our industry for the better. There are some very intelligent people on this website and some of us have some wild ideas.

So let's hear 'em!

 

[Daniel J. Mondello]

You're describing a behavioral website. Learn Javascript and how to use cookies. That's about all I can say... you're a competitor

 

[SeanWoodruff]

You're describing a behavioral website. Learn Javascript and how to use cookies. That's about all I can say... you're a competitor

touché

 

[yagoparamo]

you can literally mold your website so that it is completely unique and personalized to every customer.

That is assuming we know every customer well enough to provide something more useful than the standard site (providing something less useful wouldn't make any sense).

I'll say that is assuming a lot because every time I go shopping for a car with my wife, brother, friend, I'm amazed about the cars I think they will like and the cars they actually buy (and I know these people).

We are getting excited about what Amazon does, but amazon sells books. You can get a lot of info about a person if what it does is sopping for books. For example I use Goodreads (Amazon owns it) and I have bought, read, and logger over 100 books about WWII. In this case I can say amazon can predict that things I would like to see when i visit their site.

Applying that to the car buying process... no so easy. Furthermore try to apply that to the used car buying process... Sometimes not every technology makes sense for every business.

I often think about the website possibilities and lately quite a bit about behavioral targeting and think that so far still a fancy key word to trigger dealers in buying-vendor-product mode. The ones doing the behavioral morphing are the vendors, not via a changing website, but via a changing message that sounds confusing yet attractive enough.

 

[Manny Luna]

My advice is to start off with a niche, and build from there.

 

[Daniel J. Mondello]

touché

I do think your site looks great though Sean! Keep up the solid work man

 

[Chris Cachor]

Let's say you're starting an automotive website from scratch and you have some very savvy web designers, and you can literally mold your website so that it is completely unique and personalized to every customer.

What do you do and how do you do it? What "triggers" do you use to decide how and when your site changes? Where the customer lives? How many times they've viewed that car? What search terms they used on Google to get to your website?

What type of metrics like these can we actually track?

How does your website change based on these triggers? If they're near a competitor, do you highlight certain advantages your dealer has over that competitor (without mentioning their name obviously)? If someone's looked at one specific vehicle's VDP page for the 10th time, does it trigger a 1-hour countdown timer letting them fill out a form to save an additional $500 off of the eprice?

What would you do specifically to make your website the ultimate conversion machine?

This is new ground and I think this thread could potentially spawn some amazing ideas that could change our industry for the better. There are some very intelligent people on this website and some of us have some wild ideas.

So let's hear 'em!

I think the best place to start personalization is on actual inventory with related vehicles. From what it seems, most vendors use a combination of make, model, year, body style, and price range to come up with related vehicles. That's the simplified approach. However, other eCommerce platforms are getting better by using visitor data combined with an algorithm to pair related vehicles (not because they bought them but because they viewed them) in a sort of "other customers that viewed this vehicle viewed these other vehicles". I think it's a better approach to discovering vehicles and I think dealer websites have enough traffic to pull something like this off.

As for the behavioral targeting - I think the best approach is to use something called session tracking. You can setup goals or events, score them against an algorithm to perform some sort of action (say, slide a valueable promotion down the page to those who score high). Get a list of goals on the site (VDP view, active searches, credit app, etc.) and assign each goal points. Then build promotions that run against those points and whala! You're issuing personalized offers to those the website identified as hot leads

 

[anthonycapital]

Like anything don't think of it as a golden arrow. If you can make your site more relevant in theory it will perform better. But it's playing with fire. Do you really know what your customer wants better than they do?

 

[joe.pistell]

Like anything don't think of it as a golden arrow. If you can make your site more relevant in theory it will perform better. But it's playing with fire. Do you really know what your customer wants better than they do?

It's easy to experiment, but watch out for that magnesium

 

[ddavis]

No magnesium, he should have used sulfur, charcoal and saltpeter (potassium nitrate).