This week’s Wednesday Workshop is a life tip, not a digital marketing tip. Take the time to make a difference in someone’s life. It’s that simple.
Let’s be upfront about this: I advocate filtered site search as opposed to free form search, and here’s why.
When it comes to finding things on your website, your customers are either clicking buttons or using a search box. This is true whether you sell cars, cookies, or clothes. Nearly every single person on your website looking for a particular vehicle will either click on the “New” or “Used” buttons that you (hopefully) have in your navigation bar, or they’re mousing over to the search box and manually typing it in. Continue Reading
This week’s video shares the terrifying story of a dealership group in California that was recently fined $3.6 million for fake reviews. Don’t get caught posting fake reviews, or even influencing what customers write in their reviews – watch and learn more…
Continue Reading
In a previous post, we talked about website optimization as a general concept and laid out some ground rules for A/B testing to gauge how visitors interact with your site. Driving traffic to your site is a worthwhile effort, but it can quickly become worthless if you never track which buttons are being clicked, which pages are being viewed, and what path your customers are taking to conversion.
Now, it’s time to get specific, so let’s talk about how to optimize your homepage.
Layout
Odds are, your homepage is the most heavily trafficked page on your website, so content matters a lot. Most can be separated into four different sections, which you can see below:
Top right header – Logo, Branding, & Identity
Top left header – Titles & Contact Info
Lower header – Global Navigation
Below header – Main Content
Every site will be organized slightly differently, but for the most part, that’s the universal template. Your mobile homepage will have a variation of the same layout as well.
Headers
Your homepage’s headers act a bit like a driver’s license for the page. They tell the visitor what site they’re on, what page they’re viewing, and how to get in touch with your dealership – all the basics. Consistent headers actually help people interpret webpages as part of your website. For example, consistent headers would tell someone that your service page and a vehicle detail page both belong to the same website, even though the content on the two pages is quite different.
Logos & Branding
Within your headers, logo and branding consistency is also a key part of homepage optimization. And just like with headers in general, it’s the absence that speaks volumes. A website with a different headers & logo placement on each page would be extremely hard to navigate, frustrating users.
Moreover, having logos that aren’t hyperlinked to the homepage can contribute to that confusion as well. Again, being able to navigate from page to page (or get back “home”) is a function that most people come to expect now.
Additionally, your logo should always be in the top left part of your header, paired with your dealership’s title.
Contact Information
In the olden days of website design, you would include a “Contact” link in the site’s footer, and your address & location were only visible after someone clicked through. While the “Contact Us” page is absolutely necessary, your address and phone number should also be spelled out in the top right header area.
Instead of hiding your contact info on an internal page, display it at the very top of each page.
Global Navigation
Lots of websites (not just car dealer websites) rely on form submissions as a main source of internet leads. When site visitors want to interact with your dealership, they’re most likely going to fill out a form, exchanging some information for an appointment, a phone call, or maybe a coupon.
So then, site navigation is incredibly important to optimizing for conversion, as are CTAs. As the heatmap below illustrates, most users read in an “F-pattern” and take in data from left to right, top to bottom – reading less and less as they scan down the page.
What does that tell us? Put all your pertinent links and CTAs in the red areas, where people’s eyes are naturally going.
As far as global navigation goes, we see the best results when dealers put their “Home,” “New Cars,” and “Used Card” pages on the left hand side of their navbar, and the “About” and “Contact Us” pages on the far right.
And here’s an extra tip: using a “home” icon on the navbar can help lower the number of people who click there as a “reset” strategy. Why? An icon is more subtle than plain text, and therefore a little less noticeable. Users are more likely to leave your website after resetting to your homepage, so you don’t want to disrupt the conversion process if at all possible.
While it’s not usually a good idea to use icons in place of text (it can get very confusing, very quickly), the “home” icon can help guide user flow to a CTA that your dealership has found to have a high conversion rate. To put it simply, don’t make it any easier than it already is for potential leads to get distracted and bounce off your site.
Extra Tips & Tricks
- Popups can be a high-volume lead producer when the offers are compelling and promise a savings or coupon.
- Any vehicle search function on your homepage should be above-the-fold.
- Eliminate any unnecessary widgets, as they increase site load time.
- Use drop-down inventory search bars when possible, as they’re still the #1 search method for car shoppers.
- Make any “floating” chat boxes static.
- Use colored vehicle photos on your model bar, white/silver are the least-clicked colors.
Managing a PPC campaign can sometimes seem like a free-for-all effort. There are lots of options and lots of ways to spend your money – but not all of them are worth your time. I’ve spent years in the SEM/PPC world, and I’ve noticed a trend in the way ad budgets are structured. Here are 6 ways to avoid wasting your PPC budget, based on the most common mistakes I see dealerships make.
1. Running Ads 24/7
This might be the most common mistake I see when auditing PPC processes – and it’s not unique to dealerships. For businesses that are closed at night and don’t have a 24-hour customer support system or call center, running ads 24/7 is a sure-fire way to waste money. If your dealership is closed and can’t follow up on a website lead, then why pay to drive traffic there? Imagine you have a compelling click-to-call ad that requires an internet sales rep to follow up with immediately. If the ad is being run 24/7, and someone happens to see it at 11:30 p.m., what happens? A whole lot of nothing. Make sure to double-check ads that are running nonstop, because if you can’t actually follow up with the lead in a timely fashion, it’s a wasted effort.
Conversion rates on overnight leads don’t have strong conversion rates, so allocate those dollars for ads during your dealership’s business hours.
2. Text Ads in Google Display Network
Can you guess what’s wrong here? Two words in the subheading above are a dead giveaway: text and display. You technically have the option to run text-based ads on Google’s Display Network, but text ads are traditionally served in search engines. By serving text ads on image-heavy websites, your clicks may go down and your bounce rate may go up, as you’re more likely to get accidental clicks from users who will quickly leave your site. Further, text-based ads don’t look compelling next to display ads, and it’s not an optimal use of your money.
3. Ads in Google Search Partner Network
I hate to say it, but not everything Google offers is a golden goose. In other words, just because it’s an option for your PPC campaign, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea – even if it comes from Google. The Search Partner Network might seem like a great way to boost your impressions, but that metric is undermined by the quality of traffic you’ll get, not to mention it will hurt your overall campaign metrics. If you extend your audience to the Search Partner Network, where conversion & click rates are obscenely low, you’re simply lowering your overall metrics because it ties into your Google campaign as well.
4. Poorly Managed Negative Keywords
Your negative keywords help target qualified traffic, plain and simple. If you’re not excluding negative keywords like “headlights” or “headrests” from your campaigns, for example, then you risk wasting your budget by serving ads to car customers who are looking to accessorize or repair – not buy.
Determine your campaign goals and make sure that you exclude all unqualified traffic by adding in the appropriate keywords. Here’s a pro tip: exclude other products by the OEM, if applicable. For example, Honda makes lawnmowers and cars, and serving an ad to someone who’s trying to cut their grass is a prime example of doing it wrong.
5. Sloppy Copy
I’m not talking about grammar & verbiage issues (that should be at a premium!), I’m talking about how well the ad matches your landing page. Sad to say, misleading and/or poorly written ad copy is a very real problem that not only wastes money, but frustrates your potential customers.
If your advertisement says or implies one thing, but your customer finds something very different on your site when they click through, you’ve lost that lead. And, of course, that can negatively impact your metrics. Just think about how frustrating it is to spend time & effort investigating what you think is a good deal, but turns out to be wrong.
6. No Ad Extensions
A robust, optimized ad is one that includes extensions. And that’s not just a matter of opinion, failure to make ad extensions can rank you lower in Google’s Search Network or even cause you to lose a bid to a competitor who did take the time to build out amazing extensions.
If it’s properly implemented, adding things like link, phone, and pricing extensions can help boost conversion rates significantly. But neglecting extensions is essentially keeping helpful information from your customers, who are eager to learn more (and fast) about their search query. Telling someone that you have new Toyota Camrys is nice, but what if the customer could look at inventory links, could see price ranges, could call you, and even see your address in the ad itself? It’s easy to see how that ad would win over a plain-text ad.
Get Going
It’s important to note that quite a few of these PPC mistakes are the result of an automated advertising strategy. And, let’s be honest. If there’s anything more frustrating than wasting money, it’s paying a machine to do it for you. But that’s not to say that all automated strategies are bad, there’s a difference between “set it & forget it” and smart automation.
For some dealers, automated processes are the only way to manage a campaign, due to sheer volume. If any part of your PPC gameplan is automated, then test it against these 6 common mistakes to make sure you’re not “automatically” wasting money.
