Rockville, MD--DealerOn, the premier auto dealer website provider, announces that two of their auto dealership customers have been awarded Dataium Website Performance Awards for October 2011.  Dataium uses various performance metrics collected from participating dealership websites to recognize auto dealerships and their website providers for their online performance.  Volkswagen of Lithia Springs was awarded the Auto Shopper Intensity (ASI) Award and Joe Cecconi’s Chrysler Complex received the Best Performance: Leads per Auto Shopper Award.

The ASI Award is Dataium’s proprietary index used to measure auto shopper engagement, enthusiasm, and intensity by tracking the lead to visitor, returning visitors, visitor to auto shopper conversion, and search to visitor ratios.  Volkswagen of Lithia Springs was given this award for October, showing that they were ranked within the top five in each of the measured categories.

Joe Cecconi’s Chrysler Complex was awarded the Best Performance: Leads per Auto Shopper.  This is given to the auto dealership website that has the highest percentage of leads submitted on their site per auto shopper.  This shows that their dealer website is able to convert those that visit their site into actual leads.

DealerOn, Inc., a leading online marketing company serving the retail automotive industry, provides online marketing solutions to auto dealer customers including car dealer websites, SEO, social media and online reputation management (including managed blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and press releases), paid search, and lead nurturing tools.

In addition to providing online marketing for auto dealers, DealerOn has pioneered the analytics-based marketing approach in the retail auto industry with their DealerOn Digital Marketing Dashboard. The Digital Dashboard helps to document the precise impact of their services for every new customer. Since creating this process in 2009, DealerOn has documented an average increase of over 200% in lead volume for their auto dealer clients.

By providing common, independent web metrics for all websites, Dataium is the first company to collect, translate, research, analyze, and report on shopper behavior across multiple automotive website platforms.  Dataium provides critical business intelligence and insight for their customers through the aggregation and analysis of consumer activity from across the Internet.

Rockville, MD--DealerOn, the premier auto dealer website provider, announces that two of their auto dealership customers have been awarded Dataium Website Performance Awards for October 2011.  Dataium uses various performance metrics collected from participating dealership websites to recognize auto dealerships and their website providers for their online performance.  Volkswagen of Lithia Springs was awarded the Auto Shopper Intensity (ASI) Award and Joe Cecconi’s Chrysler Complex received the Best Performance: Leads per Auto Shopper Award.

The ASI Award is Dataium’s proprietary index used to measure auto shopper engagement, enthusiasm, and intensity by tracking the lead to visitor, returning visitors, visitor to auto shopper conversion, and search to visitor ratios.  Volkswagen of Lithia Springs was given this award for October, showing that they were ranked within the top five in each of the measured categories.

Joe Cecconi’s Chrysler Complex was awarded the Best Performance: Leads per Auto Shopper.  This is given to the auto dealership website that has the highest percentage of leads submitted on their site per auto shopper.  This shows that their dealer website is able to convert those that visit their site into actual leads.

DealerOn, Inc., a leading online marketing company serving the retail automotive industry, provides online marketing solutions to auto dealer customers including car dealer websites, SEO, social media and online reputation management (including managed blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and press releases), paid search, and lead nurturing tools.

In addition to providing online marketing for auto dealers, DealerOn has pioneered the analytics-based marketing approach in the retail auto industry with their DealerOn Digital Marketing Dashboard. The Digital Dashboard helps to document the precise impact of their services for every new customer. Since creating this process in 2009, DealerOn has documented an average increase of over 200% in lead volume for their auto dealer clients.

By providing common, independent web metrics for all websites, Dataium is the first company to collect, translate, research, analyze, and report on shopper behavior across multiple automotive website platforms.  Dataium provides critical business intelligence and insight for their customers through the aggregation and analysis of consumer activity from across the Internet.

For the most part, search engine optimization (SEO) is a recognized necessity of running a successful auto dealer website.  Not just in the auto industry, but there are still some hold-outs that think building websites and content to be found by search engines is a little spammy.

According to Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web spam fighting team, his company does not consider SEO to be spam.  "We don't consider SEO to be spam," and SEO is a "valid way to help people find what they're looking for via search engines".  While he does denounce black hat SEO tactics, Cutts emphasizes that Google's goal is to return the best possible search results they can, and sites with quality SEO help them achieve that goal.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that SEO is spammy, direct them to this video, and then hopefully to your search engine optimized auto dealership website at the top of Google page 1.

For the most part, search engine optimization (SEO) is a recognized necessity of running a successful auto dealer website.  Not just in the auto industry, but there are still some hold-outs that think building websites and content to be found by search engines is a little spammy.

According to Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web spam fighting team, his company does not consider SEO to be spam.  "We don't consider SEO to be spam," and SEO is a "valid way to help people find what they're looking for via search engines".  While he does denounce black hat SEO tactics, Cutts emphasizes that Google's goal is to return the best possible search results they can, and sites with quality SEO help them achieve that goal.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that SEO is spammy, direct them to this video, and then hopefully to your search engine optimized auto dealership website at the top of Google page 1.

The amount of "best practices" and "tips" involved with social media marketing can be overwhelming to say the least (and yes, I'm guilty of sharing my own).  In the spirit of KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid), here is a short list of Must-Do's for dealerships using social media as a part of their online marketing efforts:

Have a Plan: Before starting any marketing campaign, your dealership should have a plan.  When it comes to social media, make sure you consider (and answer) things like:

• What is your goal?
• Why are we investing time and resources into this particular social media site?
• Who are we trying to reach with this campaign?

Optimize: As with your auto dealer website, your social media efforts should have search engine optimization as a focus.  This not only means the content you post, but also your profiles.  Use keywords that your customers are using to search for your dealership online in your summary, backlink to your website with keywords, and make sure your contact information is accurate across all platforms.

Measure Everything You Can: At the very least, use Google Analytics to measure your efforts.  Your dealership should investigate the free and paid tools that are out there as well.  Some things you should be keeping track of:

• Engagement-How many people are interacting or sharing your content
• Conversions-You'll have to determine what this mean for your dealership; for example, is it clicks, shares, or comments?  Once you've established that, you can measure it.

The amount of "best practices" and "tips" involved with social media marketing can be overwhelming to say the least (and yes, I'm guilty of sharing my own).  In the spirit of KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid), here is a short list of Must-Do's for dealerships using social media as a part of their online marketing efforts:

Have a Plan: Before starting any marketing campaign, your dealership should have a plan.  When it comes to social media, make sure you consider (and answer) things like:

• What is your goal?
• Why are we investing time and resources into this particular social media site?
• Who are we trying to reach with this campaign?

Optimize: As with your auto dealer website, your social media efforts should have search engine optimization as a focus.  This not only means the content you post, but also your profiles.  Use keywords that your customers are using to search for your dealership online in your summary, backlink to your website with keywords, and make sure your contact information is accurate across all platforms.

Measure Everything You Can: At the very least, use Google Analytics to measure your efforts.  Your dealership should investigate the free and paid tools that are out there as well.  Some things you should be keeping track of:

• Engagement-How many people are interacting or sharing your content
• Conversions-You'll have to determine what this mean for your dealership; for example, is it clicks, shares, or comments?  Once you've established that, you can measure it.

Having videos on your auto dealer website has been shown to increase website leads, and when done with video search engine optimization (VSEO), helping your site climb the search engine result pages.  If your dealership has videos on your website, you should have those videos uploaded to your own dealership YouTube channel.

Here's why:

Popularity: YouTube is the world's largest video search engine (and the second largest search engine) and growing every single day.  People all over the world use it to find videos, so if someone searches for a vehicle that your dealership sells, don't you want a video from your dealership to show up?

Timing: Like most search engines, YouTube tends to give older entries a little extra edge when returning search results.  The sooner you create your channel and upload videos, the better.

Cost: YouTube is free.  Aside from the time cost of uploading (though it's possible your auto dealer website or video provider will do this for you), YouTube has no financial cost.  This means you get all of this exposure without an additional marketing cost.

Blended Search: Google, Bing and Yahoo are integrating mixed media (images, news, videos, etc) into their search engine result pages, so having your VSEO dealership videos on a separate domain can provide an additional link on Google’s results page for any search relevant to your dealership brand or your inventory.

Having videos on your auto dealer website has been shown to increase website leads, and when done with video search engine optimization (VSEO), helping your site climb the search engine result pages.  If your dealership has videos on your website, you should have those videos uploaded to your own dealership YouTube channel.

Here's why:

Popularity: YouTube is the world's largest video search engine (and the second largest search engine) and growing every single day.  People all over the world use it to find videos, so if someone searches for a vehicle that your dealership sells, don't you want a video from your dealership to show up?

Timing: Like most search engines, YouTube tends to give older entries a little extra edge when returning search results.  The sooner you create your channel and upload videos, the better.

Cost: YouTube is free.  Aside from the time cost of uploading (though it's possible your auto dealer website or video provider will do this for you), YouTube has no financial cost.  This means you get all of this exposure without an additional marketing cost.

Blended Search: Google, Bing and Yahoo are integrating mixed media (images, news, videos, etc) into their search engine result pages, so having your VSEO dealership videos on a separate domain can provide an additional link on Google’s results page for any search relevant to your dealership brand or your inventory.

I recently wrote about how important it is to keep the NAP (name, address, phone number) the same across all local listing sites.  Typically this isn't a problem, but if your dealership wants to use tracking numbers for auto dealer website, you usually won't be able to keep your NAP the same across the board.

Luckily, a call measurement firm, Telmetrics, has a solution that can help with that, especially for mobile users.  Their product, m.Call, uses an icon or button to track the call, instead of a separate phone number.  Essentially, users will click or touch the icon or button which initiates the tracking process and calls your dealership.

Since m.Call doesn't involve adding/buying/renting additional phone numbers, the cost for this type of call tracking is less expensive than most.  Also, the company uses a pay for performance pricing model, so instead of a fixed fee, your dealership only pays each time someone clicks the icon.

While this product is probably more effective for mobile devices (I haven’t seen the actual numbers), I see this growing.  With the increase in tablet computers, laptops with microphones, and even desktop computers having touch screen technology, I think people will embrace the “touch to call” more and more.

Is anyone using something like this?  What about traditional call tracking for your local listings?

I recently wrote about how important it is to keep the NAP (name, address, phone number) the same across all local listing sites.  Typically this isn't a problem, but if your dealership wants to use tracking numbers for auto dealer website, you usually won't be able to keep your NAP the same across the board.

Luckily, a call measurement firm, Telmetrics, has a solution that can help with that, especially for mobile users.  Their product, m.Call, uses an icon or button to track the call, instead of a separate phone number.  Essentially, users will click or touch the icon or button which initiates the tracking process and calls your dealership.

Since m.Call doesn't involve adding/buying/renting additional phone numbers, the cost for this type of call tracking is less expensive than most.  Also, the company uses a pay for performance pricing model, so instead of a fixed fee, your dealership only pays each time someone clicks the icon.

While this product is probably more effective for mobile devices (I haven’t seen the actual numbers), I see this growing.  With the increase in tablet computers, laptops with microphones, and even desktop computers having touch screen technology, I think people will embrace the “touch to call” more and more.

Is anyone using something like this?  What about traditional call tracking for your local listings?