Are there workarounds for this issue? Absolutely, but why are dealerships forced to work around the manufacturer and their ‘website partner’ to achieve better results online? It seems crazy to me but it is the cold hard truth in our industry today.
I completely understand how the manufacturer wants to maintain brand consistency among all its dealerships, keeping a clean brand imagery in the eyes of shoppers whether they are looking for a new vehicle, certified pre-owned or booking a service appointment on a dealerships website.
But at what cost? Is the manufacturer willing to impede its dealerships’ ability to sell as many cars as possible?
Every consultant, trainer, social marketing expert at every single automotive conference including Digital Dealer, NADA, Driving Sales, etc. is telling dealerships that they need to add value to the shopper’s experience while standing out amongst the crowd. The problem is that being unique on your website is virtually impossible if you adhere to and maintain complete compliance under manufacturer regulations and dictates of your website provider.
The average website lead form conversion rate hovers in the pathetic 2% range yet manufacturers and website providers restrict what the dealer can and cannot put on the website under the term “Compliance”.
What is going on? Why is this happening? How are dealers allowing this to happen?
How can anyone be satisfied with 2%? If you look outside our industry there are many businesses that have cracked the double digits. Within our industry I was able to achieve a double digit result with landing pages so I know it is possible even before dealer chat or any other proactive online marketing tools were even in existence.
The website provider’s answer seems to be, “drive more traffic to your site and you will get more leads.” What website providers should be asking is “how do I deliver more leads from the existing traffic on the website – Increase Conversion?”
Lets take a real world example to really drive home this point. A certain dealership that will remain nameless for this actual example has been using live chat for months with great success. Out of the blue, the manufacturer decided it wanted to design and implement a chat graphic standard throughout all of its dealership’s websites. Chat would not be possible unless the dealership complied with these new standards.
Without asking chat companies experts’ advice or referencing any supporting data on what type of graphics work, the manufacturer went to its agency to design a new standard that would be implemented across all of the dealership ‘templated’ websites. This was then given to the chat company to implement.
In theory this is a great idea. Yet, without conversion testing and knowledge of online consumer engagement, this unfortunately didn’t turn out great. In fact the new chat results were dismal at best. The store then wanted to cancel live chat because they were not getting the results they wanted.
Below are the actual three-month results for this store before and after the compliance change. The highlighted number is the month the compliance graphic was used and subsequently turned off and the original one put back in place even though it would not be in compliance. The months in white are when another more proven graphic was used.
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Total Unique Visitors
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Number of Chats
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Number of Leads
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9355
|
188
|
148
|
|
8659
|
72
|
54
|
|
9428
|
181
|
147
|
I am pointing to this as just an example. I think the manufacturer is doing great stuff online and I have been closely following their Social Media marketing. The point of all of this is simple. Manufacturers are dictating uniformity, which is being delivered by the website designers through templated websites that have never been tested but meet brand compliance. Then the website providers are implementing these templates for your dealership, restricting what you can and can’t put on them based on what the manufacturer instructed, again without any empirical data. Who is in charge of this crazy train?
So you have a great idea that can double your conversion on the website? Sorry Mr. Dealer! You will not be able to put that on there because it is not in compliance or will not work within our template. So no matter what awesome tool you want to implement sadly you will not be able to do it.
Sound off with your thoughts?
Todd there are really 3 issues at play here that are killing dealership conversion.
1. OEM’s wanting a consistent brand image, AND THAT’S THE PROBLEM… it’s what THEY want not necessarily what the customer wants. What the customer is looking for when they get to the MFG website and what they are looking for when they get to the dealer website are very different things.
2. Website providers both from a technology standpoint and from a revenue model standpoint. Bottom-line every dealership website platform I know in this industry is a big inventory engine with individual dealership pages wrapped around it. The SERP (Search Engine Response Page) and the VDP (Vehicle Details Page)are shared with every other dealership on the website providers platform with little to control by the dealer. this inhibits testing and keeps any dealer from gaining a competitive advantage over another as anything that works is shared with the group.
3. Lack of understanding message match. The plain truth not all clicks are created equal and not all traffic that ends up on your Random Access Website (your main site) should be there.
What do you do about it? Dealers need to get complete control of all of their web properties. I mean real control YOUR website on YOUR server or hosted server. That way no one tells you what goes on there and what doesn’t and you don’t have be at the mercy of what some website company decides what best for them…um I mean you in conjunction with someone else or OEM and you have to live with the consequences.
Get control of and start using landing pages, microsites and conversion paths to match your message to what the customer wants instead of throwing up on them when they hit your random access website.
Track everything, segment your customers and spit test.
This approach has gotten us 15% plus conversion rates on paid click across the board for our clients so far and it just makes sense we are not deciding what is working customers are telling us what is working and we are continuing to improve every day.
EX: Hyundai Dealer in PA
July so far
Impressions: 4140
Clicks: 441
CTR: 10.65%
Leads: 79
Conversion Rate: 17.91%
All of this is accomplished away from the dealership random access website, completely controlled by the dealer and they are not at the mercy of anyone if they want to make changes or place code on these landing pages that helps them.
This has worked so well we are building a website platform under the same concept.
In the end Todd the problem is when you don’t control your online destiny and you put it in the hand of providers that have agendas that do not match yours.
Just my thoughts, what say you?
LB