It is difficult to grow and get more leads from your dealership website when you are not calculating key user experience metrics. Website metrics are essential to help you manage your dealerships digital presence and help you sell more cars online. You gain knowledge on the behavior of your audience and more importantly, you can measure your successes and failures. 

Here are 8 metrics you should be tracking:

1.      Traffic Sources

You should be aware from where your visitors are coming from (behaviors, demographics, locations etc)

-          Direct Visitors: These are ones who directly type in your dealership website.

-          Search Visitors: They found your website through a search engine query (Google, Yahoo or Bing).

-          Referral Visitors: They arrived because your link was on another website, blog or social site (Links, Social Media, Paid etc)

2.      New/Unique Visitor Conversion

By tracking your new visitors, you’re able to find out if your site converted them to a customer. New visitors interact with your site differently by checking your About Page and going through your vehicle options. You have to ensure New Visitors don’t have high bounce rates.

3.      Return Visitor Conversion

Visitors returning to your website are a good sign. Metrics tell you why they have returned and did you manage to convert the person when he first came. 

4.      Call to Action Click Rates

The call to action buttons on your website is very important. If your call to action click 

rates are low, you need change the way it’s designed and create content which encourages your visitors to take actions.

5.      Interactions Per Visit

Even if a visitor is not converted, you should be able to track his interactions on your website. A visitor that is ideal on your website is not good. A good website will nudge a visitor to explore. As a car dealership, you’re in a unique position. Even if your visitor isn’t looking to buy, present him with vehicles and he will check them out. 

6.      Cost Per Visit

You need to calculate if your costs are worth it. There is no point of having high conversion rates if your cost per visit is not sustainable. While attempting to increase your conversion rates, keep the costs in mind. 

7.      Bounce Rates

Having a high bounce rates is bad. It reveals which pages push away your customer. Bounce rates simply tell you the number of people who appear on your site and go away. You will find that specific pages have high bounce rate. These are the ones that need improvement. 

8.      Landing Page New Contact Rates

A landing page is not just your home page. Whenever you put up an advertisement, visitors will land up on your landing page. New contact rates lets you know the percentage of new visitors you are attracting. It provides good insight into how successful your landing page is and whether you need to make any changes. Dealerships should be split testing their website pages in order to get better conversion rates.

On the regular basis also check the average load time and navigation funnels. Identify your buyer personas and communicate in customers language. 

Bonus: Make your dealership website SEO friendly

Dealership website providers don’t outrightly steal or overcharge you, but they don’t deliver what was promised. Instead, your website suffers from major bugs, copyright issues and design problems and also still you pay third party websites like AutoTrader, Kijiji etc. to get more leads because your website is unable to bring sizeable amount of leads.

Here are a few problems dealerships have been experiencing on their websites.

Duplicate Content

There can be nothing worse than duplicate content. You would assume that the content is exclusively for your website, however some dealership websites are resorting to duplicating content from other websites and sometimes, even your competitors! This is extremely terrible for your website since it will seriously affect your SEO optimization. When Google finds websites with exactly the same content, the newer website will get marked as spam. This could be one reason why your website doesn’t have a high SEO rank and probably appears on the 10th or 12th search result page.

Getting the Problem Fixed

Now that you’ve found the problem, the next step is to inform your website provider and have it fixed. However, it’s not that easy. They are going to give you another set of problems to deal with. Either they don’t get the job done and are deaf to your pleas or they completely miss the mark and change the correct elements and worsen the site.

Another terrible thing is hearing – “we’re getting that problem fixed” or “we’re in the process of fixing the problem” and, oh, you’ve been hearing it for the past TWO MONTHS! Stonewalling is a very irritating issue which a website provider can throw at you.

So how do you get your website provider to stop dragging you through the mud?

Don’t just phone in, Send in Emails Too!

When you find uncover a problem on your dealership website, you want to immediately call up your website provider and give them an earful. Do it! However, additionally, you should drop in a mail too, providing details of the problem and the corrective measures you want to add. This makes your problem official and can’t be ignored. You can also refer to the mail later on and point out how long ago it’s been since you first complained of the problem. It’s called proof!

Contact Their Technical Team Directly

Stop talking to the client servicing person and directly skip over to the technical team. Even if you hear a technical explanation with a lot of mumbo-jumbo, you should get them to break it down. If you have to spend half an hour to an hour on the phone, do it. In the end, you should dig hard and get to the bottom of the issue.

Making the Payment

This is the time when you have the greatest leverage. It is important you play your cards right when a dealership website provider calls you to make the monthly payment. Demand that your problems are fixed and only then make the full payment.

Sometimes it is cheaper to stay with your dealership website provider rather than switching to a new one and having your dealership website made from scratch. Try these techniques before you decide to switch providers.

Few Tips:

Ask For Weekly reports with these metrics:

- Bounce Ratio, Pages/Per Visit, Average Time etc. 

- SEO scores (Which keywords are you ranking for example: Used cars Miami, 2014 acura, used acura, new acura Miami) This way you can build your content strategy.

- Link building, content analysis, social bookmarking, meta tags, bold/italics, etc. are also key performance indicators.

- Conversion and closing ratio

Click through rates are required for successful campaigns for many reasons. One of the reasons being, that the higher the click- through rates, the more allowance there is for an overall lower cost per click in the campaign.

Further down this article, various tactics and strategies that can be used will be discussed. There are a few things that you absolutely must keep in mind about a good PPC strategy.

·         It is important to remember, as mentioned before, that the cost per click will be lowered in the long run.

·         Another thing to remember is that by narrowing down your ads to a specific target audience, you will reap much more out of your paid search plan. This is because you know that your budget is not being wasted on non targeted groups of people (wrong demographics).

·         Thirdly, you are creating a higher chance of drawing attention away from competitor’s ads that will appear alongside your ads thus increasing chances of better performance (Not targeting the same set of keywords).

Strategies can be split into a few categories that can create an impact the click through rates. The categories include pre-campaign plans, campaign plan, and steps that need to be taken post campaign.

Pre Campaign

 It is vital to ask yourself a few questions before beginning your campaign.

·         What is your product/ service essentially(
What cars or service products you want to push more)?

·         Is the campaign about a promotion?

·         Have you identified your competitors (keywords)?

·         What is your most valuable offering that separates you from your competitors ("Why" your potential customers should buy from you) ?

·         What has given you an edge over your competitors over the past few months?

It is important to imagine the goal you wish to achieve at the end of the campaign.  By focusing on the needs of the browsing audience, you can create a targeted campaign that will increase the click –through-rate. Gauge whether the goal is to get a purchase or just a sign up. This will help with the content of the ad.

Campaign Plan

By the time you have your pre campaign plan in order; you will have a strong idea of the tools to be used during the campaign as well. Build a large base of keywords to increase website traffic. Make sure that your content focuses only on benefits and not on features of the product/service.

Post Campaign

Test your campaigns once they are implemented. Optimizing your campaign is the crux of creating amazing PPC campaigns. Keep reviewing the campaign data, keyword performance and overall structure of the campaign to figure out which areas worked. This is a sure-shot way of increasing click through rates.

For some campaigns, a very simple strategy may be enough and for some others, you may have to use an intrinsic plan with many tools and strategies. In most cases, it is best to hire a professional to maximize the chance of a better campaign that is tailor-made to suit your business needs.

In a world that is enriched with a large variety of social media platforms, you may ask yourself why get onto Foursquare? Foursquare is a geo-location based social media. With everyone carrying a smartphone in their pocket, they are able to share information on where they are, put up pictures and write stuff anywhere, any time.

Getting onto Foursqure may look like added work, but it will get more people to visit your showroom. As a car dealership, customers will have to actually come over to your showroom to check and test drive cars. You can influence them to share information through Foursquare which will affect their (your customer’s) social circle.

So what the benefits of Foursquare for your dealership?

Promote a Customer Loyalty Program

This is the most basic and effective social program that most business use Foursquare for. You offer incentives for your customers to check in at your dealership location. In return, you can offer vehicle products or services at discounts.

Also, a unique idea you can offer is test drives. Often, you will get potential customers who are not necessarily looking to purchase a vehicle. They may be interested in going for a test drive in your latest vehicle. Hence, you can make it mandatory for them to check in your dealership before they can go for the test drive. This way, even if the potential customer does not purchase the vehicle, your dealership name is spread through his social circle.

Offer Discounts Differently

Some businesses host something called “Foursquare Days” where customers who check in at the business get access to a wide variety of discounts on products or services. This is a totally different way to offer discounts. You ensure that customers come and visit your dealership.

As a car dealership, even offering 5% discount on vehicles on a particular day will see a significant increase of customers checking into your store. If the 5% discount on vehicles doesn’t appeal to you, you can try out a discount on services, financing or leasing offers, accessories or products.

Notify Customers Easily

Customers who have visited your dealership before and are in the neighbourhood can easily find out about any new offers. This is possible because Foursquare allows GPS tracking.  This means you can get people to come to your showroom.

Understand your Customers

Any good business values a strong relationship with their customers. There is so much valuable insight you can gain from a simple check in by a customer on Foursquare.

You have a list of all the customers that have checked in, find out if they were satisfied, read up on their status, comments or reviews they have put up. You also gain information on their behaviour like how frequently they visit your dealership and which competitor dealerships have they visited.

Such information can really help your sale person on the ground level to understand who he is dealing with. You can also identify the timings and days your customers prefer to visit the dealership.

All of this information will help evolve your business into a customer friendly one.

Foursquare is a social platform which you shouldn’t hesitate to get on. At the end of the day, whatever you call loyalty marketing—CRM, retention marketing or more, it’s a business strategy to improve customer retention. And why wouldn’t you want to test out new technologies to do so? The application has a fantastic integration with other social media platforms like Facebook which means information is shared across.

People who visit your dealership website or store may show interest in your products or services.  But, more than 80% of potential customers for a variety of reasons, they may not make the final purchase decision on their first visit. This is why retargeting is very important, as it allows you to re-engage that potential customer. Also, before they goto your competitor's website you should be engaging them at the right time.

These potential customers are easier to convert and cost you less per lead. However, internet retargeting or digital display ads have evolved. Browsing behaviors, search patters, usage, software’s and search engines have evolved and your dealership retargeting strategy should keep up with the times.

Retargeting also costs you lower comparing to other paid media.

Differentiate Between Site and Search Retargeting

Most dealerships don’t realize the difference between site and search retargeting. With site retargeting, you aren’t really increasing your audience pool.

Search retargeting gives you access to an audience who hasn’t visited your site, but expressed interest through a query on the search engine. Search retargeting is very effective for creating brand awareness, while site retargeting works well for marketing campaigns that convert your audience. By understanding these two, you can better build a strategy that suits your needs.

A Stronger Search Engine Encryption

In 2013, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all announced that it would be encrypting all its search data. This is a change from their usual format where data is only encrypted at certain points. For a marketing person such a move presents a roadblock. Your retargeting strategy won’t be able to access as much keywords as before. You will find it difficult to conduct organic search optimization.

You have two options; either you can reduce your dependency on keywords, or find an alternative source. An alternative source would be a third party who is able to collect search engine data like Magnetic.

Start with Cross-Channel Retargeting

Cross-channel retargeting is a concept that is still being experimented with. It has proven to be quite effective if done right. Cross-channel refers to the various operation systems across a variety of devices. More and more people are using smartphones and tablet devices. Create a retargeting strategy that capitalises on various mobile devices out there. This way your cookies can work across Operating Systems like Android and iOS.

Focus your Retargeting

Your retargeting strategy should be focused on the behaviour of your audience. Take a look at the pages they have visited on your site and ensure you create ads according to them. This way you craft internet ads which have a better chance of interesting them.

Ensure your Ads are being seen

It would be a complete waste of time and effort if your ads aren’t even seen. With anti-advertisement software’s and ad-ons being developed, it can suppress your cookies from working.  These are technical details that your strategy should include so your advertisement will have view ability.

Staying up with the times is not easy. Search engines, mobile phones and pretty much everything else is always evolving. Stick in with these steps and you’ll revamp your retargeting strategy for 2014.