Author Archives: John Paul Strong

About John Paul Strong

John Paul Strong is co-owner of Strong, LLC, an Automotive Intelligence Agency. He works with 80 individual dealers across the United States, who are on track to sell over 125,000 vehicles this year. His blog features what dealers are doing to increase market share and profits, as well as what they are finding are the positives and negatives in this changing market.

Four Ways to Increase Traffic Conversions

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arrowYou want more traffic? Generating traffic is easy; you can buy all kinds of Internet traffic. Now you want conversions? Well, that becomes a little more difficult. Industry wide, customers are increasingly less willing to send an email lead. They simply do not want to give dealers their email address. But in the cases that they do give you their email address, they expect an immediate response and direct information. It’s also likely that the email address has been created for the sole purpose of car shopping.

Statistics indicate that between 50 and 70 percent of your floor traffic has been on your website and did not call, email or chat before their arrival. This trend is due to several factors, but one main culprit is a lack of attention to conversion optimization. A majority of dealerships’ websites have no conversion funnel or any actionable plan to increase conversions with the current traffic count. If one does exist, it usually consists of adding more contact buttons.

Here are four actionable ways you can help increase conversions and improve the effectiveness of your campaigns:

  1. Develop a Clear Call to Action: Ask them to do one thing (call, chat, email, or smoke signal), preferably the one your team excels at and clarify what will happen if they complete the action.
  2. Reduce Distractions: Distractions create anxiety and reduce action. Keep it simple.
  3. Increase Urgency: Give them a reason to act now. The fear of loss usually outperforms the opportunity of gain.
  4. Test, Analyze, Adjust: This is a cyclical process. Make small adjustments you can measure and always, always strive to improve.

In theory it is a simple list to satisfy, but if it were easy everyone would be doing it. Start small and move slowly. You don’t want to make a big change too fast because you could miss an opportunity. As people’s shopping and car buying habits shift with technology, we will have to learn from the data and shift with them.

This is part of an ongoing series of insights by Gayle Rogers, Digital Director at Strong, LLC, about refining the Internet strategy at your dealership.

Your Website is Unmanned and the Customers are Running Amuck!

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Most automotive websites are built like a dealership with no employees. Some signage, some deals/offers, but it’s basically a car lot full of vehicles with customers wandering around unchecked. Other than the obvious, there are three inherent flaws with this design. First, it assumes all people have the same wants, needs or questions. Second, it only addresses people in the purchase phase of the shopping funnel. Finally, the customer is completely anonymous and there isn’t anyone to lead them or sell them on the benefits and value the dealership provides.

When customers walk into your dealership, are you going to let them walk the lot without anyone to qualify their wants or needs? Would you neglect to explain all the benefits of your customer programs and amenities?

CheckUpIn order to maximize the traffic to your website, you must strive to create a conversion funnel that will quickly help consumers get from awareness to consideration and preference. Dropping traffic directly into inventory or moving them there without providing any support or a value proposition is a win-lose play.

You either have the car they want or you don’t. If you are lucky, it sets the stage for conversation completely ­centered on price. This is not a suggestion to abandon prices or payments – it’s far from it. It’s a recommendation that you support the deal with value. You are kidding yourself if you think that a site visitor isn’t evaluating the dealership before, during and after they have shopped the inventory.

When a customer lands on your site they know a lot about the vehicles, but they don’t know anything about you. All they have are stereotypes, generalizations and assumptions. Make sure you invest as much time selling your value as you do selling the car!

This is part of an ongoing series of insights by Gayle Rogers, Digital Director at Strong, LLC, about refining the Internet strategy at your dealership.

The One Metric That May Surprise You

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It’s not total visits. It’s not bounce rate. It’s also not time on site. If you only pay attention to one metric on your website, outside of conversions, you will know how many pages are viewed per visit. This single metric can speak volumes about your website and marketing.

PageViewsIf your visitors view more than one page, your bounce rate will decline and the time on the site will increase. These are all directly tied to each other because Google Analytics uses timestamps (or clicks) to track visits. Every timestamp adds the time since the last timestamp. Hence creating action and moving people through the site will add more “quality” to the visit. Here are a few things this metric can teach you:

  • The effectiveness of your landing page
  • The effectiveness of your pricing
  • The quality of the traffic
  • The quality of the source/creative
  • Most importantly, if you have an established conversion funnel

While increasing this metric is simple in theory, in practice it can take a lot of time, research, planning, testing and patience. The rewards will not only be a site with improved stats, but you will also have more information to analyze so you can further adjust and tweak your site for future success!

This is part of an ongoing series of insights by Gayle Rogers, Digital Director at Strong, LLC, about refining the Internet strategy at your dealership.

Why Web Traffic Is Important

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chartThere is a lot of focus in our industry about website traffic. Sometimes a campaign is judged on just this one thing. Considering the campaign typically has little to do with inventory, pricing or the handling of the lead, it can be at its most basic level, the best way to determine its success.

If you prefer to take your analysis one step further, here are a few metrics to review and why they matter.

Bounce Rate: A site visitor is like the bouncing of a ball. Did they find what they were looking for or did they just “bounce?” Sometimes bounce percentages can be a false negative. For instance if someone is only looking for a dealer’s phone number from the landing page then bounces, it can appear that they did not find what they were looking for when in fact they did. It was a positive visit but registered as a bounce. Typically Google sees a high bounce as the result of a poor landing page, poor or misleading optimization or a misleading ad. If Google’s goal is an improved user experience and your website does not promote that, Google will ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­devalue your site in SERP and/or charge you more to buy traffic.

Time on Site: Tied closely to the bounce rate, the amount of time a visitor spends on the site gives you an indication about the quality of the content or inventory. Things that negatively affect this are a lack of original pictures, no prices, and a lack of custom quality descriptions. A good rule of thumb is about 10 pictures and 200 words.

Pages Per Visit: This is simply the number of pages people visit during a session. In nerd speak this is the one “ring” to rule them all. If you can increase this your bounce will decrease and your time on site will increase. So how do we do it? You have to, along with pictures and content, create a funnel. You want to land visitors on a page that’s designed to move them through the site. To do that you have to start with the end and work your way backwards.

While traffic as a standalone is an important metric, make sure it’s quality by watching your bounce rate, time on site and most importantly pages per visit.

This is part of an ongoing series of insights by Gayle Rogers, Digital Director at Strong, LLC, about refining the Internet strategy at your dealership.

What Google Wants and Why it Matters to You

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If you understand what Google wants it makes it easier for you to optimize your website marketing (SEO & PPC) for maximum success and longevity. So what does Google want? Market share. Google market share equals money. How they go about gaining and maintaining market share is a little more complicated, so we’ll stick to the basics.

algorithmThe key is the algorithm. Google’s very complex, proprietary algorithm is what generates search results and is the lynchpin to market share gains. A crude explanation for the algorithm’s function is to generate a list of web pages (or answers) to your searches (questions). The more relevant the answers are, the more likely you will use Google the next time you use a search engine. That’s the key to the whole thing. Here’s how you can use this information to improve your interactive marketing campaign.

Treat every page like the answer to one question:

Don’t be a Jack of all trades and master of none. If you try to have every page on your site rank for too many things, how can you be the best answer? Pick the question you most want to answer and be the expert.

Customize elements of each page to be unique.

There are over 40 factors on a webpage that can be customized so visitors and Google know what the page is trying to convey. Take advantage of as many as you can.

Provide a good UX (User Experience) for the visitor.

Don’t over “optimize” the page for a particular search. Make sure your content is readable, informative and insightful. Don’t create any “dead ends” assuming you have provided everything the visitor could possibly want and their only logical option left is to call or email you.

There are many, many factors that will come into play when you are developing or executing your dealership’s interactive marketing plan. Whether you are optimizing your website, developing a PPC campaign, writing content or engaging in social media, it’s best to use these three guides to craft your execution. You will ultimately create something positive that both your site visitors and Google will appreciate.

This is part of an ongoing series of insights by Gayle Rogers, Digital Director at Strong, LLC, about refining the Internet strategy at your dealership.

 

Winners Never Quit and Quitters Never Win

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“Winners never quit and quitters never win.”
–Vince Lombardi, Pro Football Hall of Fame

This is such a timeless quote by the legendary football coach. It can be applied to today’s retail automotive environment especially inside dealerships.

Dealers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year per store to generate traffic. They invest a great deal in advertising, but they also invest in their sales staff to complete the purchase process. That’s why there is nothing more frustrating as a marketer to walk into a dealership that makes such a sizable investment in advertising dollars and see a lazy and unmotivated sales force.

SleazySalesmanIt’s disappointing but true. The first impression that many customers often see once they step foot into a dealership is a poorly equipped and unprofessional sales associate.

There are many steps that must be followed in order to sustain a great dealership marketing plan. If a dealership’s sales team fails to capitalize on traffic generated by a successful marketing campaign, then the dealership ultimately fails. This is a direct correlation to a sales team that is not up to handling the challenge set out before them. A team can’t win if the players quit, and the same goes for a sales staff within a dealership.

There wasn’t any traffic this weekend!

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If I had to place a bet on it, I am sure there are probably a lot of dealerships who are starting out this morning saying, “There wasn’t any traffic this weekend!”

While traveling this morning Gayle Rogers, our digital director, and I were reviewing lead counts for a number of our dealerships from April.

shoppersRegardless of how good or bad your April finished one thing’s for certain; not all of your leads from April bought a car in April. There are plenty of buyers still in the market that are serious shoppers but just haven’t pulled the trigger yet.

So here is the remedy: Take all of your unsold prospects from April, both showroom and Internet, and assign a sales person or a manager to follow-up with them. If you don’t do this then you’re leaving a lot on the table.

There is never the amount of traffic the first week in a month as there is the last week in a month. People in our industry also do not habitually take the first week of the month (and first weekend) as a time to aggressively follow-up and track down all unsold prospects.

There are always people who are in the market to buy. Depending on how hard the leads are worked can determine the number of cars that sell.

Digital Frequency

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This is a follow up to my post titled Digital Frequency & Saturation Are Making Waves.

Just as we talked about “reach,” the number of people who may be in the market to buy, now we have to talk about the most effective way to place a dealership first on the mental shopping list of customers. This is called digital frequency.

Just like you cannot expect much from one TV ad during the 10 o’clock news or one Sunday print ad once a month, your digital presence has to actively be in front of the buyers when they are shopping.

woman computerThis is why digital frequency should be treated just as importantly as digital saturation of a market. A number that I heard this week was that as many as nine different websites are being looked at by people who are shopping for cars before they find the car that they are interested in buying. If this number is true then your ads and optimization efforts need to reach these people each time they shop so you have a chance to capture them on your site.

Retargeting is another great tool to expand your presence if you are one of the nine sites that a person has visited because you will continue to appear on their screen as they look for more options. The Internet is no different than buying a frequency building medium like cable or radio. You need to be there, and be there often in order to take more viewers away from your competitors.

Digital Saturation

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This is a follow up to my post titled Digital Frequency & Saturation Are Making Waves.

Conditioning yourself to think of the Internet the same way you would a broadcast media outlet is easier than you would think. With Internet marketing you are looking at how many people you have to “reach” in the total market to achieve market saturation just as you would for traditional marketing. Your reach is the people you need to be in front of that consider your brand, your dealership and have the opportunity to find you.

Money ChartIn the past year STRONG has taken the restrictor plates off and increased dealers’ digital spending on pay-per-click and total market saturation through mass email marketing. The results have exceeded the percentage of dollars that these dealers have spent on broadcast. At one point, the son of one of our very well respected dealers asked me, “When is enough, enough? It seems like we are just spending money just to spend it online and there could be too much waste?”

Our answer was that there is waste in digital spending, but there is going to be waste in every type of advertising that you have. So, the solution is to eliminate as much waste as possible. The ultimate way for us to get rid of the waste is to bring as many people to the website and showroom floor as possible.

Through a lot of trial and error, we have found that the ceiling on digital spending really doesn’t exist. It is only controlled by the size of how many people are in the market at that given time.

When I talk to people about digital saturation today it’s in terms of how many tens of thousands of people we can reach with your digital marketing efforts. Also we are trying to generate a few thousand more that will land on your website and potentially pour through your various pages of inventory and ultimately shop.

Today’s dealer cannot think about their digital spend, whether it be pay-per-click, SEO, or behavioral targeting as a small line item on their budget. They need to think about it in terms of how much their reach costs?