In this week’s video, we talk about giving a video tour of our brand new office… which leads to an awesome tip about sharing a video tour of your dealership on your website. Watch and learn how to make your website experience better, so you’ll stand out from all of your competitors.
Your site is, in today’s technological age, the first thing most of your customers see. Site visitors become purchasers in the long run, and the speed of your site is an important variable in their decision-making process. On average, 40 percent of visitors will leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load, which means you don’t have any time to waste.
Third party integrations are one of the reasons your site may not be running as quickly as it could. Third party applications are the outside tools supplied by vendors, such as chat apps, service schedulers, trade application tools—anything that comes from an outside vendor. These tools are integrated into your site via third party tags, and careless integration can slow things down at best, and bring your site crashing down at worst.
Take these tips into consideration to streamline your third party integrations.
Communicate with Your Vendors
You should know what your third party vendor is supplying, how it will work, and what you can expect. A good way to know exactly what you’re getting is to have an SLA (service-level agreement). Include your minimum expectations from the tool and a way to measure potential performance issues, this way there can’t be any surprises.
If your third party is hosted in a different country from the majority of your visitors, you’ll want to find out if they use a CDN (content delivery network). Without one, your visitors will experience increased latency and slower load times. That’s enough to send most of them packing. You can also improve site speed by asking vendors optimize their scripts, such as minifying any JavaScript files.
Keep in contact with your vendors so you know immediately if they alter or update their third party tags. Outdated tags can cause a variety of issues for your site’s performance, especially if your code isn’t asynchronous. The web moves quickly, and if you miss an update your page’s loading time may suffer.
Synchronize Your Code
Speaking of asynchronous code, it’s good to remember that you don’t have complete control of your third party tools, which means you have to set up as many fail-safes as possible. This is where ensuring any third party code is asynchronous with your own comes in handy. This will prevent third party tags from having a dependency on your code, which can result in a SPOF (single point of failure) that could bring down your entire site.
Clean Up Waste
You probably have a lot of third party applications on your site, but are all of them useful? Take some time to measure a third party tool’s impact on your business. Do these tools line up with your performance goals? Are they significantly impacting your ROI?
To decide of a tool is worth having, analyze the percentage of conversion rate lost with each second of page delay caused by third party tools. We’ve talked before about the benefits of A/B testing, and this would be an opportunity to put it into practice. Provide one page with the third party tool and one without, and then compare the bounce and conversion rates. If there is a major difference, and the tool does not provide significant benefit to your business, you may consider eliminating it all together.
Third party tools are a necessary part of running a website, but they can quickly attribute to slow loading times if not watched carefully. Keep an eye on your vendors to make sure no outside forces can affect what’s happening on your site.
We are excited to announce that DealerOn has been selected by the Mazda Motor Corporation as a certified website and digital advertising service provider. This will give Mazda dealerships the opportunity to use DealerOn’s premium website, SEO, and digital advertising services.
“We’re excited to begin this new relationship and to have the chance to share our award-winning websites and data-driven SEO and digital advertising methods with the Mazda family,” said DealerOn CEO Ali Amirrezvani. “We hope we can provide the same individual digital marketing experience to Mazda dealers as we have to many other dealerships since 2004. It’s that small-business mindset that sets us apart.”
Mazda dealerships who use DealerOn will see a responsive site that loads two times faster than those of competitors. With a focus on data-driven optimization and mobile-first strategies, DealerOn sites have remained a cut above the rest.
DealerOn’s digital marketing services work to provide results you can measure. By utilizing trackable metrics, DealerOn provides proof that its search-engine marketing and display advertising really works. Dealers receive monthly reporting and access to a Google AdWords Certified expert.
DealerOn will also bring new integrations such as:
With multiple awards, including Driving Sales Top-Rated Website awards, Digital Dealer’s Overall Website Excellence Award, AWA’s Pinnacle Award, and Dealer Marketing Magazine’s Technology Aware for Website Providers, DealerOn has proved time and again its dedication to keeping all aspects of digital marketing excellence “Under One Hood.”
Interested in learning more about our Mazda program? Click here to see our official enrollment form.
You can also just give us a call at 844-275-2939, or head over here and drop us a line.
In this week’s video, we talk about the importance of updating all of your online listings to reflect your new address whenever your dealership moves to a new location. It’s important for SEO, but it’s important for customer service too. Watch the video to learn why…
Last month, my column over in Search Engine Land focused on tactical strategies for building local links. It’s easy enough to have the theory down, or even know where you want to draw your local links from, but I’ve had a lot of people asking an even simpler question. What is the actual, step-by-step process to building local links?
So I went back to the beginning and looked at how our team handles link building. One of the easier ways to get started is to set up a schedule on a two or three-month cycle. This way, you can’t make any excuses not to get it done. And then there’s research, the most important part of the cycle, if you want to find unique opportunities. Search for local schools, sports teams, tournaments, whatever you can think of that might offer a chance at a connection. Keep your results well organized, including contact info, so you can choose your targets.
After all that, it comes down to hitting the pavement, sometimes literally. Call, email, or visit your potential links. Foster some relationships, and your efforts could go a long way, but don’t be discouraged if you don’t land them all.
You can get all the details of this process in my full article here.
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