BLOG

Knowledge, news, and more about Automotive SEO, SEM, and dealership websites
In Best Practices

The High Cost of Poor Process

The lifetime value of a car dealership customer is between $250,000 and several million dollars.  Stay with me…

Far too many dealers are living in a bubble, knowing a lot, but doing a little.  When dealers fail to execute, the lost dollars add up quickly.  I speak with Dealer Principals, General Managers and various internet personnel on a regular basis that believe their processes are solid, only to find out the truth reveals the opposite.  Let me share with you a real world example where a lack of communication process cost a dealership a potential lifetime customer.

 

Toyota Dealership in Arizona

A kind, loving woman (my mom) is ready for a new car and her son (me) happens to be visiting from out of town.  She asks her son to help her through the process and her amazing (and devilishly handsome) son agrees without question.  The woman talks about a personal experience she had recently when she rented a Toyota Camry.  Since that time she has noticed more Camry’s on the road and she has browsed the internet for Toyota Camry information.  Hmm… should the rental car company get credit as the actual lead source?

Still with me?  Good, I’ll fast forward a bit.  My mom’s experience included impressions delivered by television advertising, display ads, PPC and maybe even some good old fashioned SEO, none of which were free for the dealership.  They paid for my mom’s attention and the opportunity to sell her a car.  They earned it because I went with her to pick out and purchase her new Toyota Camry.  The process was pretty smooth.  Not the best I’ve seen, but very good including how the sales person worked appropriately to encourage a woman in her sixties to write a positive review for the dealership post-purchase.  Before you give this dealership five stars, let me tell you how the movie ended.

 

Count the Cost

On the hood of the Camry my mom picked out was a small blemish that required a visit to the body shop.  The sales person made my mom very comfortable about how they this minor repair would be handled.  Unfortunately, reality proved him to be very wrong.  Not only did the minor repair take much longer than was promised, the dealership put 60 miles on my mom’s new Camry over a two day period, even though she was supposed have her car back the same day.  When my sweet, non-confrontational mother asked the service guy about the 60 miles, he delivered a condescending explanation of how they had to send her car out to someone else to have it fixed.  He was clearly irritated my mom would even dare to question him about the additional miles driven in her new car.  So, it wasn’t a service they performed at the dealership.  Fair enough, but that was never disclosed and people like to know what the hell you’re doing with their car.  So, guess what happened?  She will never go back there for service, will never buy another vehicle from them, and will never tell her friends anything but the truth about her experience.  No one wants that experience.

How much does the average dealer spend advertising/marketing each month?  On average, dealers pay over $600 to advertise each new vehicle they’re trying to sell.  It adds up fast!

Dealers, you spend too much money attracting potential customers to allow your sights to be set on anything but turning each one into a lifetime customer.  Process isn’t exclusive to the internet part of your business, so make sure you have established communication processes in your service and parts departments. If not, they may be sending the lifetime customers you’re earning to your competition.

acacia.grant@dealeron.com'
In Mobile, Web Analytics

Using Google Analytics to Understand Your Mobile Traffic

As of March 2014, the average car dealer website gets more traffic from mobile devices (including laptops) than from desktop computers.  Many of the dealers that we work with have no idea how their traffic breaks down between desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone.  They are used to visiting their dealership’s website on a desktop computer at the dealership or from their home at night, so they have a good understanding of how their site looks for customers using their dealership’s site on a desktop computer.  But most dealers don’t spend enough time understanding the mobile customer experience on their website.

According to Google, search is the most common starting point for mobile research. In fact, 42% of automotive shoppers start on search engines, while 27% of automotive shoppers start on branded websites. Those are both huge percentages of people looking for your dealership online – but how do you know if your mobile site is delivering what they need?

The best way to learn whether or not your dealership mobile website solution, regardless of which technology platform you’re using, is meeting the needs and expectations of your visitors is to use Google Analytics. GA data can help you determine if your adaptive website design is set up properly. For example, if mobile traffic is visiting traditional, desktop pages, you have a problem with your adaptive design or switchboard tags. Do you have a disproportional bounce rate on your mobile site? This could indicate that your website isn’t showing properly to mobile visitors.

DealerOn has talked before about the importance of having Google Analytics on your dealership website, and how to use that data to sell more cars, but with the drastic shift to mobile internet usage, dealers need to make sure that their website provider has coded their site so they can easily measure site performance on mobile vs. desktop vs. tablet at a minimum.

It’s also important to understand how to analyze your website data differently for traditional and mobile website visits. Your dealership should probably be tracking different KPIs for mobile traffic than you do for desktop.  For instance, some of the most common and important KPIs for desktop traffic are:

  • Bounce Rate
  • Time on Site
  • Pages per Visit
  • VDP’s per Visit
  • Leads
  • Conversion Rate
  • Calls

For mobile traffic, many of these may not be appropriate.  In fact, you may just want to track things like Calls, Clicks to Maps, and Vehicle Views for your website’s mobile traffic.  Whatever KPIs you want to measure for mobile, you should make sure that you work with your website provider to set up goals that can measure each of these metrics and ideally assign a value to each of them so you can begin to measure the return on your mobile traffic.

These are the types of questions you need to talk to your digital marketing provider (or website company) about to make sure you’re getting the readily available, valuable data out of your Google Analytics.  It is no longer just a good idea to measure, analyze, and optimize your website’s mobile traffic.  In 2014, it is essential to getting the most out of your marketing budget.

In Service Websites

Using Content to Market Your Fixed Operations

Every year since 2009, according to NADA’s Dealership Financial Profile data, the average dealer has generated over 50% of their gross profit from Fixed Operations.  When I speak at NADA or other national conferences on service department marketing, I get the same reaction – lots of heads nodding, lots of note-taking, lot of dealers telling me, “I know we should be doing this”.  Unfortunately, I’ve been getting that same reaction for almost 3 years.

We all know that dealers are busy people and they frequently struggle to make time for new things, like investing time and money into marketing their Fixed Ops department online, even if they know they should be doing it.

In 2011, one of our smartest and most creative customers requested that we build his dealership a brand new website, entirely separate from his dealership’s site, devoted to marketing the Fixed Operations side of his business.  At the time it was fairly unheard of – everyone knew that a dealership’s website existed to sell cars.

We think it’s important to help our dealers test digital marketing strategies, so we worked with our customer to build a separate, stand-alone site that strictly marketed his Fixed Operations.  Now, nearly 3 years later, after having started from scratch with a new URL, his site gets more than 2,000 visits per month – more than some dealers’ regular websites that have been online for 15 years.  Because our customer had the foresight and willingness to invest his time and efforts 3 years ago, he now controls a valuable digital marketing asset—a Fixed Operations website that generates more than 2K visits per month!

In 2014, I encourage you to re-examine how you are allocating your marketing budget, and make sure that you’re devoting enough time and resources to the Service Department, which is probably generating more than half of your profit.   As we all know, Google considers content to be king, so give your team a goal to generate 3-4 pages of unique, Service-related content each month.  In a year, you will have 40-50 pages of unique, high-quality content focused on marketing the most profitable part of your dealership.

Once you have enough content, you can start building campaign-specific landing pages for email marketing campaigns to your DMS contacts.  You can build PPC landing pages and begin running Adwords campaigns to conquest Parts and Service business from the National Service Brands like Firestone and Goodyear.  If you want some more ideas on how to market your Service Department after you start building content for it, check out my Webinar from June, “7 Proven Strategies to Double Your Fixed Ops Profit”.  You will learn what types of keywords consumers use when they research service department offerings and how mobile is impacting Fixed Ops marketing.

So, even if you haven’t built out any online content for your service department asides from the few out-of-the-box pages your website provider incorporates into your regular website, make it your goal to begin creating Service-focused digital content in 2014.  In 2 years you will build up an asset that may generate as much traffic as your regular website already does.

acacia.grant@dealeron.com'
In Responsive Website Design

Clearing Up the Responsive vs. Adaptive Debate

Everyone is telling you that your dealership website NEEDS to be responsive…but what does that really mean?

Responsive web design means that the same URL and HTML are passed to each website visitor, regardless of what device they are using to view that website.  This is different from adaptive web design which first detects which device is accessing the website, then serves a potentially different site to the website visitor.  Most car dealership websites today are built on an adaptive platform.

Okay, so now you know what people mean when they say responsive…but how does having a responsive website benefit your dealership?

Google recommends responsive website design for three reasons:

  • A single URL makes it easier to share/link your content
  • Sites load faster since there is no need to redirect users in order for them to get an optimized view
  • Google site crawlers only have to crawl your pages once, on one device, thus increasing efficiency

Another thing to consider – the average dealer website gets traffic from literally hundreds of unique screen sizes each month.  Without a responsive website design, you’d have to design for every single unique screen size, or risk missing the opportunity to serve each user the best experience.  And next year, when new phones and tablets hit the market? You’ll have to add those design sizes to your portfolio as well.

MobileDevicesResponsive sites lend themselves to better SEO results as well.  Aside from being Google’s recommendation, having a single URL for each page of content, with faster load times, is a huge benefit to your site’s search engine rankings.  Also, there is less of a chance for user error – building just one version of your website means users will have a unified experience and you don’t have to worry about errors trying to communicate to Google which pages on the mobile site correspond to desktop pages.

Granted, your dealership may not be in a position to switch to a fully responsive website platform. It can take a lot of work, time and resources.  Don’t worry, you’re not destined for failure, but there are things that your website provider absolutely needs to do in order for an adaptive website platform to work effectively.

Most likely, your site is currently using a mobile sub-domain.  This would be the /mobi or m. you’ll see in the URL when on a mobile device. If your dealership website is built this way, you MUST implement switchboard tags properly – this helps Google understand the connection between your mobile and desktop pages, and tells Google which pages on your desktop platform correspond to the same page on your mobile platform.  When set up properly, switchboard tags help clear up any potential indexing and link equity issues with Google.  When correctly placed on your website, this can be a great way to see a lot of the benefits having a responsive website would give you without having to switch platforms.

Unfortunately, most of the website providers in the automotive space aren’t placing switchboard tags properly. Make sure you ask your website partner how they’re helping your adaptive website keep up in a responsive world.

In Best Practices

The Importance of a Good Reputation

Level Set

Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Charlie Sheen, Celebrities, Politicians, Musicians and… BUSINESSES.  If this is the first time you’ve heard that your business reputation is important you should consider early retirement.  Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh, but the truth still suggests 99.999% of those reading this understand the critical importance of a good business reputation.


Why Is Reputation So Important Today?  

We live in a world of instant gratification and the internet has only helped increase what we expect from technology, people and… businesses.  This is a selfish group known as… EVERYONE and we have zero patience.  Why should we when we have access to almost anything we want no matter what time of day?

Consider that the smart phone in your pocket makes waiting for news of any kind unnecessary.  Checking the weather includes the option of viewing Doppler radar.  I bet you haven’t bought or used a map in years.  You use your smart phone for EVERYTHING…including shopping and purchasing decisions.

How is this all affecting your business reputation?  When we don’t want to wait for anything and we don’t have to wait for anything, businesses are forced to adjust their processes to support speed and quality of service.  This is no longer an option for businesses hoping to survive long term.  I think you get the point.  Our expectations are higher than ever.  So, how is your dealership handling this today and how is your dealership going to handle the next generation of entitled, selfish brats?

 

There’s A Big Difference

It’s critical to understand the difference between product reviews and business reviews. Your dealership must have a process that includes every department.  Every employee must be focused on providing your customers excellence in all areas of your business.  Think Disney.  There’s a reason why they have one of the best business reputations in the history of EVER.  Your dealership isn’t reviewed the way someone writes a review about an iPhone case they bought on Amazon.  Your business has the dynamic quality of people and this makes or breaks dealerships.  Hold your team accountable to high customer service standards and the word on the street regarding your dealership will be music to your ears.  Don’t forget your reputation is a reflection of how you treat people in person, so why not be great?

 

You’ll Need A Plan

I talk to dealers almost every day about a wide variety of topics.  When the subject of reviews, reputation and social media come up I always talk about planning.  Success with increasing, improving and responding to reviews comes much easier to dealers that have the tools to see what’s going on.  A dealership must have complete visibility to effectively manage their online reputation.  DealerOn offers Reputation Intelligence tools that not only make monitoring all reviews in one place super simple, the tools also show dealers social signals, online mentions and increase their number of reviews.

 

May you find the determination and conviction to work hard on the reputation of your business.  You won’t regret making your customers happy and they’ll be glad to tell everyone they know about their experience.

Call support
(877) 543-4200
Call Sales
(877) 543-6321