Conversions can help you understand a number of important data points. From where consumers click to most effective value propositions or buttons, you can acquire insights about the path to purchase that can guide your digital marketing decisions.

You can know whether to continue optimizing for better conversions or switch to driving more traffic to your site — it’s what we call Opportunity Marketing.

Right now, we’re focused on conversions. They can come through social channels, direct channels, video, display, and much more. That’s why we look at this dataset to make sure our paid and organic channels drive the same high-quality in-market traffic. It also ensures that we use the best information to benchmark across the industry and to anticipate that the conversion rate between the two will be the same — and also know something is wrong with the lower converting channel (paid overspending or lack of organic visibility).

There are a few points to keep in mind about this data set.

First, dealers typically fall across a big spectrum of conversion percentages. If you’re curious about what your metrics are, we have a vast network of dealers. We’d be happy to dive into the details to show how you stack up.

If your paid conversions are coming in at a significantly lower rate than your organic conversions, you are …

• Likely buying keywords that aren’t converting or demonstrating shopping behavior.
  • That means they might …
    • Be too broad
    • Not show intent
    • Be outside your optimal geography
    • Not land on the right (or optimized) purpose page
    • Have misleading ad copy
  • And/or your negative keywords might be wrong or not enough in number
• Inherently wasting your paid search spend.

If your organic conversion seems markedly low, you are …

• Not ranking for the keywords likely working in the paid search strategy.

Should this be the case (low organic conversion), you’ll want to examine your paid keywords that drive conversions and see where you organically rank for them. You may need to double-check your SEO practices for the keywords to gain that first-page and first-position visibility.  

Dealership Challenge — Google Yourself

Take a moment to do some local searches. See how you rank. If you’re not, do you currently have a plan to rank for them ?

For more perspective, we’re more than happy to help you understand how you’re ranking — and how we can help.

A Rare Case You Should Still Keep in Mind.

While rare, your organic conversions may be lower due to a blog gaining national exposure. This means it will bring in a lot of traffic and authority — and help the site’s authority for in-market searches — but not acquire the conversions needed to accurately measure your current efforts.

Compare Organic and Paid Conversions in Google Analytics

If you’re interested to see how you compare, you can get the rest of the instructions here.

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.