Your homepage should do two simple things: (1) get people where they want to go on your site; (2) give people easy access to contact information.

Each visitor should be able to accomplish both of those with as little friction as possible. Far too many dealerships add bells and whistles to inject their homepages with a little flair. In reality, they’re making the homepage less effective.

You may not realize it, but measuring the click-through rate (CTR) of your homepage to your purpose pages (the ones intended to sell) is the best way to gain insights about shopper behavior.

Let’s take a look at why and start by reviewing the homepage banner, a favorite of many dealers.

Nicki Betterbid, one of our longest-tenured marketing consultants, took the initiative to analyze the effectiveness and purpose of homepage banners. This stemmed from various dealer requests for a larger number of banners — which meant more resources used to conceive, write, design, and place them.

Being an advocate for her clients, ensuring our time is spent wisely for them, she dove into the details and developed a recommendation we’ve give all of our clients and partners:

We recommend no more than 3 homepage banners.

Why?

1. Only 5.99% of visitors click a homepage banner
2. Of that 5.99%, half click on the first banner
3. Only 0.86% of that 5.99% get to the third banner

Following our recommendation will give your internal Internet marketer or agency partner the time and resources to make navigating your site easier and let shoppers find what they seek.

To get more insights about your dealership's homepage, you can read more here.