AutoJini.com Dealer Website Blog - Lead Management

Conversion Basics - Part 1 of 2

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:17:00 -0500

Beginning of new year and everyone is taking about conversion rate... so I'll jump into this and give my thoughts and explain bit more on:

What is conversion rate?
How do I increase my dealership site conversion rate? (Part 2)

In this two part series first we are going to look at, what is conversion rate?

Since most dealership sites are actually lead generation sites, the conversion rate is the number of visitors as a percentage of total visitors who complete a form and you are able to contact them again. So in our case a successful convert is someone who has completed one of the online lead generating forms or got in touch with your dealership through your website. A dealership website commonly convert around 1%-3% rate.

So what are some of these lead generating forms? Well it could be any of these... the more you have on your dealership website the better.

Contact Form.
Test Drive Form
Quick Quote Form
Online Vehicle Configurator
KBB or Black Book Trade In
Schedule a Test Drive
Online Winnings (Free Gas, Signed Baseball, etc)
Click to View Price (simple email, name, phone form)
Online Coupons
Parts Request
Service Appointment Form
Finance Form
Vehicle Locator
Live Chat
Click To Call
Pre-Approval Form
Contact this staff member
Mailing list signups

So thats the basics of what conversion rate is and where it can happen on your site... next we will look at how to increase your dealership website conversion rate.

Ultimate dealership online marketing website

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:56:00 -0500

Here is a list of vendors and tools I would have for a the best of the bread dealership online marketing website for an OEM dealership.

AutoJini.com Powered website with platinum package plus these additional features and services
- Chrome VIN decoding
- eVox to provide the images for new inventory lineup
- Dealer Specialties to provide the data feed and images for used cars
- Google Analytics to provide me the web statistics
- Live Chat
- Click-To-Call
- Organic Search Engine Optimization Service
- Pay-Per-Click Program
  - Adwords, Yahoo, MSN with minimum of $100/mo spend on each.
- Campaigner8.com for my email marketing
- Cost: $695/mo(Excluding Dealer Specialties and PPC spend)
Adam, ReyRey or DealerSocket CRM
Cars.com & AutoTrader Account to get my listing in front of over 60 million users.
X-Time for online service appointment hookup.
RouteOne to manage my finance applications
Minimum 1 listing a month on E-bay
Ongoing training from Sean Bradley or Cyclone Automotive

Total cost: $2500 to $4500 a month. Largest cost being Cars.com, AutoTrader and the CRM

leads or inquiries?

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 01:11:00 -0500

Came across a good read today on Ion Blog. Online marketing leads or inquiries?

Basically online lead generation is a process and you need a plan in place to turn an inquiry into a lead.

Converting Traffic Into Leads

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 23:44:00 -0500

You have spent the time, money and effort to optimize your website to get more traffic, now its time to make your online marketing efforts pay off. Hopefully you have made a good decision, like AutoJini, when choosing a website provider that offers website design that gets your visitors to take action.

Call your visitors to take action by request more info, schedule a test drive, finance application, obviously not the only ones you should have on your site. Make sure visitor to your website always know what action to take next. Lead them through the process don't let them standing on that page. Add call to actions on every page of your site: Learn More, Make an Offer, Value You Trade In. Compare.

Make it easy for the prospect to reach their objective by providing key pieces of information (i.e. price, mileage, warranty, basic features, pictures) and only ask for minimum information. If phone number is provided do you really need the email address or vise a versa.

Driving traffic to your dealership website

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:21:00 -0500

In this post I will be focusing on one of the things as a dealer you can do to generate more leads from your dealership website. If you recall from my previous post "How do I make my dealership website an effective lead-generating resource?" the first thing we need to do is drive traffic to your website.

So here are the methods you can use to drive traffic to your website:

Online marketing
- Search Engines
  - Natural/Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  - Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
  - Paid Inclusion
- Classified Sites
Offline marketing

Search Engines

What do you do when you are looking for something online. If you are like me and most other online users you'll likely visit your favorite search engine and type in what you are looking for. According to some studies and our web stats there is a likely a 70% chance that you found this post and our dealer website product by using a search engine. So getting your site listed in search engine matters greatly for driving targeted traffic to your website. There are three search engine marketing methods you can use to increase your visibility, Natural/Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Paid inclusion or Search Engine Marketing.

Natrual/Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Is a method of increasing your visibility in the natural search engine result pages (SERPs). So when someone searches for your targeted keyword(s) your site appears in the first few pages of SERPs and not the sponsored search results on the top, bottom or right. This is a very very very high level look at things and no way I could cover SEO in this post... However here are the few things you can do now to increase your rankings in the SERPs

Pick your keywords carefully
Have the main keyword in the title of your page do not use Welcome to XYZ dealership as your title
Do not keyword spam (frequency of keyword is higher then normal, using unrelated keywords)
Have good content on your homepage and use your keywords. Use the main keyword in heading tags or bold them
Avoid full flash based sites as search engines can't index them
Get incoming links to your site.

Pay-Per-Click
Its a method that allows you to choose the keywords you like your site to appear for on search engines. And you decide how much you are willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad. The places these ads appear are top, bottom and/or right of natural search engine results. This is an excellent way to get traffic to your website. However, this should not be the only method used for online advertising due to the cost involved. Here are few tips that could save you some green when doing PPC or you can always hire a third party like us to manage your PPC campaign.

Setup your campaign using GEO targeting.
Choose your keywords carefully and be specific do not use general keywords like "auto dealer"
Use ad Variations and test your ad copy
Integrate your PPC programs conversion tracking tools into your website
Keep an eye on content match and ban sites from your network or not use content match all together.

Paid Inclusion
You pay a price to have your site included in natural search engine result pages. Inclusion is guaranteed however placement is not. Personally I think it is just waste of cash. Google search engine does not offer this option, very good thing.

Classified Sites

For classified sites I cut them into four different categories, national auto classified sites, regional auto classified sites, generic classified sites and local classified sites.

National auto classified sites contain the likes of AutoTrader, Cars.com, Vehix.com, CarsDirect.com, Edmunds (I think AutoTrader powers their site but you can sign up for dealer listing) and etc. I won't be covering them much as most off us already know the value of these from personal experience.

Regional classified sites are the unknown in your local region examples being IowaMotor.com or WheelsForYou.com. Google for some others as the cost to get your inventory on these sites is going to be lot less then national sites some may even post your inventory for free and you may see better ROI from these then national.

Generic classified sites are the onces ignored by most dealers... these include craigs list, kijiji.com, Google base, Oodle.com and others. All these mentioned sites offer free postings. For craigs list and kijiji.com the posting process is manual but it is well worth the 5 mins it takes to post one listing. As that one listing could generate up to 250 unique visitors to your site and get you 5-7 leads. When posting your listing on these make sure to include a link back to your site from the ad content. Please please follow the rules when posting on these sites, as it will keep everyone happy.

Google base and Oodle.com will take your full inventory file and can be automated unlike the other two. BTW AutoJini.com sends your feed to Google Base and Oodle.com for Free.

Local classified sites are the local websites started by a web developer in your city. Almost every city has few off these use your fav search engine to find them. Contact the site owner and let them know that you can send them your inventory in electronic format. Most will add your inventory for free as they need content.

Offline Marketing

I won't cover this in here as ton of books and blogs are available on this already. Two things I will mention:

Your web address should appear anywhere your name appears
And checkout article "10 Strategies to Increase Traffic to Your Auto Dealership Website" by my colleague Syed Azam

I hope this sheds some light on methods available for getting traffic to your site. In the next post we will look at how to turn this traffic into leads.

How do I make my dealership website an effective lead-generating resource?

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 09:16:00 -0500

The biggest questions we have after launching any dealer website is "How do I make my dealership website an effective lead-generating resource?" so in the next couple of postings we be covering the basics steps you should take. So lets get started...

To start generating leads from your dealership website there are two things you need to do.

Drive traffic to your dealership website
Convert visitors into leads

Sound simple right... actually its not as these require planning, time, money. In next posting we will look in-depth into "Drive traffic to your dealership website" and the tools and resource offered by AutoJini.com to help you with this.