28% of customers will not return to a slow site.

That means if your site is slow, you are throwing away over ¼ of your advertising budget. And we’re not talking about just your digital budget. We’re talking your entire budget. TV. Radio. Newspaper. Direct Mail.

Why does your slow website affect your offline advertising?

Because after seeing your offline ad, over 90% of customers are still going to check out your website.

So, if you’re spending $40,000 a month, $10,000 is going down a rat hole. If you spend $60,000 a month? $15,000 down the drain. $100,000 a month? $25,000 up in smoke.

Just because your website is slow.

And as if that’s not bad enough, your slow website is costing you ¼ of your sales too.

Every month.

That’s right, you could increase your sales by 25% just by getting a website that’s not slow!

Now I sell Artificial Intelligence driven advertising, so why am I telling you this?

Because your slow site is going to make my performance look bad too. What’s worse, your slowpoke website is going to slow down my AI’s learning and skew our results.

Is it any wonder dealerships are beginning to double profitability in a year just by replacing older GM’s who make decisions by going with their gut with younger managers that are smart enough to realize slow websites suck?

Here’s some more facts just to further illustrate how critical website speed is:

• 28% of customers will not return to a slow site
• Optimal load times for peak conversions ranges from 1.8 to 2.7 seconds across all device types with the sweet spot being 2.4 seconds
• Just a 100-millisecond delay, that’s 1/10 of a second for the mathematically/metrically challenged, hurts conversion rates by 7%
• Optimal load times for lowest bounce rate ranges from 700-milliseconds to 1.2 seconds across all device types
• A two-second delay in load time hurts bounce rates by up to 103% and cuts the time customers spend on your website in half

We all know speed kills.

But you have to decide if you’re going to be driving the up bus or if you’re going to be road kill.

The choice is yours.

Emanuel Jones II became General Manager in 2016 and immediately increased profitability 90% for Legacy Ford and 120% for Legacy Hyundai.

He didn’t double sales, he doubled profitability! In one year!! 

No wonder he was named to Automotive News 40 Under 40 and has been recognized as a rising star by other organizations.

How was he able to do it?

He was in medical school before committing to the auto industry, so he’s obviously pretty smart.

Emanuel says all the right things in the Automotive News article without giving away his secret sauce.

But there’s only one way to double profitability that fast, and that’s by being more efficient with your money.

So, here’s my question, “how could a newcomer to the industry do this if the stores were well managed to begin with and what can other dealers take away from his accomplishment?”

I’d love to sit down and have a couple of beers with Emanuel and talk about how he did it, but until such a time I’m going to point out the obvious.

1.      He replaced the old General Manager.

2.      You don’t get into medical school without being smart and having a scientific mind.

3.      He found new efficiencies using tools and a mindset the old GM did have.

What can other dealers and GM’s take away from Emanuel’s accomplishments? Let’s start by asking if they can double their profitability in one year too by using the same techniques.

A very successful colleague recently wrote a blog post about a “new, smart client” of theirs that demanded an answer to this question, “What’s the return on my digital advertising investment? I know how much money I spend with Google, Bing and Facebook…prove to me the transactions and money we deposit in return for our investment.”  

I about spit up my coffee when I read that. Is this what passes for “smart” in the auto industry today?

There isn’t a CRM system in the auto industry that doesn’t give dealers a report showing them their sold leads with lead source. Oh sure, we can talk about how they’re not perfect, but that’s on the dealer too. If you have data quality problems, and you know it, and you do nothing to correct them, that’s your fault.

How is this “smart client” making their marketing and advertising decisions?

We all know the answer to that question, they’re “going with their gut.”

Going with your gut sounds romantic and manly, but it’s not a very smart way to make business decisions. Smart business people make decisions with data and facts. They know what they’re doing and if they don’t have adequate information, they get it and/or hedge their risks.

And that’s why a young newcomer was able to double profits in one year.

He replaced an old manager stuck in his ways that went with his gut.

Which brings me to the final takeaway, if dealers and GM’s don’t adopt a more scientific approach to making business decisions, they’re going to be replaced by a younger, smarter GM who does.

Snapchat's self-serve ad creation tool converts horizontal videos, websites into vertical video ads.

I have not heard of any dealers or salespeople using Snapchat ads. This could be due to the previous $3,000 minimum ad spend and/or friction with having to work with some of their agencies. But now that dealers can make their own ads and control their own budgets, what do you think?

Is it time to get our Snapchat on?

Report: 43% of millennials have made a voice-device purchase in the past year!

OMG! We need to stop everything and optimize for Voice Search Now!

Eh, maybe not. Turns out they bought some pizzas and the latest Selena Gomez hit on iTunes. Car dealers do need to keep there eyes on voice search, but it's a ways off before it hits critical mass.

So, if some snake oil salesman tells you they have "the only proprietary algorithm driven voice search optimized solution developed by two guys who used to work for Google in the car industry today," tell them Pasadena.

Let’s face it, you’re good, but sometimes a computer is just better.

Unlike humans, they know every possible move. They think faster, learn everything, forget nothing and win every time.

Which is why you need to take a look at what Artificial Intelligence can do for you.

Artificial intelligence marketing platforms will launch, manage and optimize all of your digital marketing campaigns.

Not only is AI better than a human, it’s better than every other digital marketing technology solution out there.

Why?

Because AI does the work for you. It makes decisions in real time, based on what’s happening in real time, that are better than anyone else can make in any amount of time.

You just have to put in the creative materials and select your KPI’s and AI will create a campaign based on predictive algorithms and learnings from the past.

With Artificial Intelligence you will destroy the competition and you don’t have to do anything.

So, game over?

No way. AI will still be working away processing your data, updating your campaigns and continuing to improve over time. It will find opportunities, take opportunities and invent new opportunities no one could have ever imagined.

Which means you and the rest of your team can work on the things humans are better at, like being creative and selling more cars.

With AI, you do less and your campaigns do more.

How many times have you heard or read, “My father built this dealership by having a personal relationship with each of his customers. He grew his business through repeat purchases and referrals?”

This is true for almost every dealership in the world.

But things changed. Dealerships got bigger. New brands entered the market. Customer loyalties changed. The world became more complex and technology gave consumers access to information they never had before. Somewhere along the way, dealerships lost those personal relationships.

Technology was supposed to help, but it didn’t. Sending an email with somebody’s first name in it is not the same as really knowing them and understanding their needs. Marketers and advertisers have talked for years about personalized, one-to-one communications, but it’s just been just that, talk.

Until now.

Consumers today want those personal relationships again. They want to do business with dealerships and people who really know them and their needs. But the challenge for dealers is how to deliver a truly personalized experience to earn and keep that relationship.

Customers live in an omni-channel, multi-device reality. They want to do business with companies that understand this who can deliver information and services personalized just for them across every device when they need it.

It sounds impossible.

But it’s not for dealers who understand something called the Value Exchange and Artificial Intelligence. Buyers are sophisticated. They understand technology. But they don’t want to have their privacy or trust violated. That’s where the Value Exchange comes in. Buyers are willing to give up some of their personal information to dealerships, but in exchange they expect the dealership to deliver relevant content, information, and service that really is personalized for them.

If a dealership violates this trust with one-size-fits-all content or sales processes, they’re toast. Especially with women and millennials.

That’s where Artificial Intelligence comes in. The real power of AI is its ability to deliver on a promise 20 years in the making: personalization, at scale, that actually feels human. Without Artificial Intelligence, dealers have no chance to really get to know their customers and deliver personalized unified messages across every channel and device to earn a customer’s respect, confidence, business and loyalty.

What’s more, dealers don’t need to invest in expensive new technology or hire additional technical personnel. Fully autonomous AI marketing platforms do all of the work, freeing humans to do what they do best, which is create and focus on strategy and content.

And sell more cars…

But dealers need to move fast. There’s only one fully autonomous Artificial Intelligence marketing platform for dealers available now. If a competing dealer locks in for a given market, they’re going to be locked out and lose a lot of precious customers.

Google launches new mobile site testing tool that shows dealers how long it takes for their site to load, how much traffic they are losing, and compares their site to their competitors.

I’ve been talking about how slow sites and landing pages are costing dealers a lot of money for a while now, but computing an actual dollar cost has been difficult.  

Until now.

And a lot of dealers and website providers are going to be pissed.

Google’s new mobile site speed testing tool tells dealers how many visitors their current website is losing because of its speed and compares its performance to competitors.

So, how much does a slow site really cost dealers? A lot! I tested a number of different sites from some very large and respected dealers. Their sites took 6 seconds to load and Google estimates that 24% of their visitors clicked away because of it.

Think about that for a moment, 1 out of every 4 visitors to your site is bailing just because your site is slow! Can you afford to waste 25% of your digital advertising? Can you afford to have 1 out of every 4 potential buyers go to your competitor’s site because your website vendor’s code and technology are stuck in the Dark Ages?

If a dealer is spending $20,000 a month on digital PPC advertising with Google, and 24 percent of the clicks that they paid for never see their site because it takes too long to load, they wasted $5,000 in ad spend.

And that doesn’t take into account lost revenue from the customers they could have had if their site just loaded faster!

According to Google, if your competitor has a site that loads just one second faster, they gain a 5% advantage in performance over your site. If both of your sites get 20,000 visitors a month, your competitor is going to get 1,000 more visits just because their site is faster!

So far, 2 seconds is the fastest I’ve been able to find. I’ve tested so many now that Google’s captcha is giving me the evil eye. If anybody has a site that loads faster than that I’d love to see the results.

For smaller dealers without the budgets of the big boys, here’s a perfect opportunity to steal business just by being smarter and nimbler. Update your site now if it’s slow. You’re already paying for a website, it might as well be fast. If your current website provider can’t meet these standards, change and find one who can!

I know, a lot website vendors in the automotive industry are going to say this test is flawed, that they’re sites are really fast, check our Time To First Byte (TTFB), blah, blah, blah. Bull Pucky. Don’t be fooled by the mumbo jumbo. Time To First Byte is a measure of how long a webserver takes to send the first byte, not how long it takes for your site to load. Big difference.

In fact, if any dealers would like some help deciphering the techno speak or think their website vendor is trying to BS them, I invite them to call me directly at 949.910.0421 and I’ll be happy to debunk their BS and explain what’s really going on.