In a recent conversation with Dealer eProcess CMO Eliana Raggio and Chief Revenue Officer Gino Cipperoni, we discussed the modern website experience. How important is if for marketing conversion?

How would you define a website today?

Here's how a dealer should look at it. Your website is your number one most prolific salesperson. It is the person who talks to everybody before they ever walk into your showroom. It has a conversation with each and every person that comes there.

Now, the question you have to ask yourself is, what kind of conversation do you want that salesperson to be having with your potential customers? Is it one like we've seen for the past ten years with a website where that person doesn't really say anything at all and it's really up to the customer to drive the conversation? Or is it one that has an understanding of who that customer is and evolves the conversation proactively with that shopper's journey? And we believe it's the latter.

We believe it's something that should be completely personalized to the user. Digital retailing, that's dependent on the dealer, and how they want to operate. But I think a lot of customers these days want a digital retailing application, not necessarily so that they can put a car in a shopping cart and checkout right then and there, but to take control of a large portion of the buying process, value their trade, find their equity, figure out their payments, pick their terms, pick their loans, things like that.

That's what customers really want because you still hear the biggest complaint coming from customers when it comes to buying a car, is the time it takes at the dealership. 

A quick example, my parents just bought a car two weeks ago. They had already spoken to the dealer a number of times beforehand. All they really wanted to do was come in and test drive the car. And then if they like it, they're going to take it. They were there for 6 hours on a Saturday. 

It still happens. I know. But if your website can speed that process up and do it in a way that's fully tailored to the user, they're going to really appreciate that. They're going to latch on to that. And you got a really good shot at getting them in the door.

Now you mentioned CDP. A CDP can enhance all of that and, in fact, DEP, with our brand new connected retail platform that does all the things I was just talking about, we've actually integrated with a number of CDPs already so companies like Orbee, Client Command and the like, we're able to pull data in from the CDP and use it to personalize the customer journey based on other actions that they've taken outside of the website or marketing platform. So if they have data in the CRM or the DMS or another digital retailing tool, that might not be ours that's on the site, we can combine all that data in their profile in the CDP and then use that data to update their their marketing profile, their website profile so that everything is running in lockstep and the customer's not getting different messaging from all over the place. It's all completely organized and integrated. So that's how we're viewing websites today as it's more of a living, breathing thing, rather than just go here and see our inventory and tell us what you want, which is the old web.

I have to say, this is a really, really exciting time for websites. I've been in the auto industry for 15 years and I've seen websites go from analog to the early, early days of website. And now we have responsive websites, and when we made that switch over to responsive websites, the entire industry, that was the last big renaissance for websites. I think we're upon the precipice of another big renaissance for websites.

Now, we are at the point where we're making Web sites smarter and more intuitive. I just bought a car over the Christmas holiday and spent six months shopping for just the right car. I can tell you personally that I was visiting websites and I was looking for a convertible. I knew exactly the car I wanted. I was just looking for the right mileage and the right color combination, stuff like that. I knew exactly what car I wanted, but every single time I would go to a website, looking for a convertible, I was being shown, for instance, specials on pickup trucks. I don't want a pickup truck. I want a convertible.

Then I would leave that site and somehow be drawn back to that site maybe two weeks later. And guess what? I was shown pickup trucks. I didn't want a pickup truck.

Now we've made a Web site through our new technology, which you can see at NADA. We've made technology where a shopper like me, having known shopper history of shopping for a convertible, now, I come to this website, the smart website that has this first party, third party data integration now being fed into it is going to serve me up exactly what I've been looking for. And they're not going to show me a pickup truck.

And that's the kind of intuitiveness that websites should have. They get that from other people outside of automotive. It's time for automotive to catch up and bring that personalization to the shopper, and meet them where they are, meet them at the place where they are. And because we give them such a much better shopping experience, it's next to impossible for them to say that they would want to shop anyplace else.

We're reading their minds. We're saying, that not only do you want a convertible, you want it to be all-wheel drive. You want this, you want that. These are the things you're looking for. and you're a payment shopper, too, And they give you those things. And that's what the DEP CRP, the DEP Connected Retail Platform can do now, which shoppers really appreciate. It's what they've been waiting for. Now they just have to find a dealer who can serve them exactly the kind of shopping experience they are coming to expect. They're expecting it from other retailers, they should expect it for the second-largest purchase in their lifetime.

What is the CTA sweet spot?

Actually, I was looking at this last week because I've been wondering that myself. It's like I was just stumbling across some of our own sites. We give our dealers a lot of leeway with how they want to set up their site. I mean, we give our best practices, but sometimes cooler heads don't always prevail.

But I ran across a site where they had ten CTAs on their search results. Two were "value my trade", so that was repeated. One was "get your payment" while one was "get your lease payment". I don't know why those are our separate buttons or anything like that. One was a giant flashing red button saying "get today's price", which I think consumers are a little bit tired of at this point.

But to answer your question, the number of CTAs you should have on your vehicle pages is anywhere from 3 to 5. Five is the absolute max. It's five if you are a dealer that wants to run a digital retailing tool because that's going to naturally add one or two more CTAs that you have to have. But that customers appreciate if you're going to offer that type of a service, if not three, maybe four is enough.

Another thing to think about with your CTAs, is when you do go in, when somebody does go in to buy a car, what are the steps they take? They say, "Hey, I'm interested in this car. Let me test drive it", step one. And then during the test drive, "Hey, I like this. What's the you know, what's the price of this car?" That's step two. "Okay, great. Let's get back in the dealership. What is what will my payment be?" That's step three. Okay, cool. You got all that said. "By the way, what are you gonna give me for my trade?"

If you line your CTAs up in that order, you're going to have much better results because it follows the natural customer journey. Don't go out there straight away and say, "Hey, calculate your payment" because they don't know what they want yet, unless we know that and we can dynamically change things like Eliana talking about. But if you've just got somebody who's come to the site, maybe you have one of the old static sites that we've had forever. If you line them up in a logical order, you're going to get a lot more value out of it because customers, they don't live in our world. They don't necessarily know the difference between get my price, get my payment, get things of that nature. But they do know what "schedule test drive" means. They do know what "get your E price means". Oddly enough, that still does get a lot of lead conversions. And so if you just line those up logically and then don't overwhelm people, that's the way you want to go. 

I talk about this a lot. There's a phenomenon in psychology called the Paralysis of Choice. So if you think about it this way, there's the more choices you offer a person, the longer and harder it is for them to make a decision. The analogy that I like to use is if you're out to eat and you order a salad and the waiter says to you, "Good choice. I love that salad. Which of these 12 dressings do you want on your salad?" You're going to be sitting there thinking about it for 5 minutes, maybe like, "I don't know. Which would one do I really like? But if that same waiter says, "Would you like ranch blue cheese or Italian?" You know the answer. So if you slim down the number of choices, you actually start to see leads and engagement improve because the customers aren't deer in headlights looking like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. That's how we look at it.

How healthy is GA4?

It's not as still robust as Universal Analytics was, but that's to be expected because UA was around for a long time.

What I like about GA4 is the way that it can track, in much more granularity, certain details on a site like a button color change or a hover over a button or something like that is a potential engagement or data for an A, B test or things like that. It does have some good robust capabilities, but it has to be set up properly.

We are a a founding member of the Automotive Standards Council, which is a collaboration of a lot of different vendors within the space to say we are standardizing how we're tracking events within GA4 and that allows us to not only track everything properly that we need to, but also measure ourselves against other providers in a real true apples to apples sense. Because if we're all tracking the same things and doing it the same way, we should be able to compare the results on how everything's performing, which is good because it holds everybody accountable.

What we did at DEP is we actually built that ASC spec into our baseline code. So every site that launches with us has that spec initiated and running. We were actually the first ones to launch it on January 1st of last year. So we've had a lot of data so far collecting and it has proven to be really useful, particularly when you look at things like optimizing paid search campaigns because you can create such really robust and specific audiences based on actions that are taken on the site that you pay for. We can then funnel into Google and Google ads and use it for marketing and remarketing and things of that nature. So it's got some good robust capabilities. It's not all the way there yet, but it's making strides, slowly but surely.

I remember when Google came out with Google business profiles, of course, it was Google my business back then, Over time they added to it. They added far more feature-rich snippets and stuff like that. And now Google business profiles are very robust and now it's Google business profiles that get over 60% zero-click searches, you know, or something like that. So I think over time we're going to find out that GA4 is going to be our trusty right hand when it comes to looking at your website and and looking at your campaigns and seeing exactly everything that you could ever possibly want for any.

I agree with you. You know, it does need to be set up properly. And if it's not set up properly, then your foundation is faulty and things go downhill quite quickly. So just make sure everyone out there that you have somebody you trust who is knowledgeable enough to set that up properly for you.

They don't have an easy task. A lot of the reason for this is law. It is driven by a lot of new privacy laws and mandates and things like that that came about that they wanted to be conscious of.

And the removal of the third-party cooking cookie, which has been coming for five years, which sounds like now it's starting to be right around the corner. And so they're accounting for all of that while building a brand new analytics platform. It's not a small task. So, you know, kudos to them for getting it out there in a fairly robust way as it is, and then they'll get it to where it needs to be.

What are some recent shopper trends?

We're seeing a lot of dealers are struggling right now. I spoke with two different dealers today who both said the start of the year was a little soft. And I think there are a lot of macroeconomic factors at play there. You mentioned interest rates. I think a lot of people are underwater on the cars they bought early on in the pandemic that were sky-high prices and things have come down. A lot of uncertainty. And I don't know if you heard, there's an election coming up this year that's kind of important. That might sway people one way or another.

But what's interesting is engagement is still strong. So when people do get to the site, they are actively shopping, and going back to the personalization we talked about, we saw something completely opposite of what we expected. When we launched our new personalization system on our connected retail platform, a little while ago as a beta test, (we're doing a full launch coming up at NADA). We expected to see users on maybe their second or third visit, really that being the point at which they convert, because at that point on your second or third visit of the site, that site is completely tailored to you. It has your saved searches, it has your saved vehicles, and it has the features that you want already pre-loaded for you. It has your filters on the SRP set up in the way that you want them set up. 

All of this is done without a login in which some sites force you to log in to see any personalization. I don't think that's a good idea because it doesn't happen much. But all of that coming together we thought was going to be, once they come back and they see this personalized site, that's when conversions going to be really high. But you know, it was interesting, once the data came in, we saw that sites of ours that had our personalization turned on on the first visit saw almost 54% more leads generated than sites who didn't have personalization on their first visit, meaning this personalization is so robust and so rapidly adjusting to the customer journey that in that first visit, it's getting 50 plus percent more people to convert than if it's sitting there doing nothing.

The reason that's so valuable is because everybody knows getting their first in a sale is critical. Especially at the dealership level. If you're the first one to have a conversation with the customer, you've got the best chance of closing them.

But when you also look at the trends in the industry right now, post-pandemic, people are buying a car. 59% of shoppers buy a car within a one-month window. So if you get that conversion in early, you know that sale is going to happen within the next 30 days, more likely than not. So you got to be the first one in there talking to the consumer. And that's a big shift from previously when most customers were like Eliana here spending six months to look for a car because pre-pandemic they knew that that inventory was going to be there. "I don't have to get the car today. You know, there's not a rush".

So that's really been a shift that's been very noticeable on our sites. But that personalized experience gets that consumer to convert way more, way more quickly. And as I'm thinking about it right now, it kind of makes a lot of sense that that would actually happen on the first visit, because if you consider Amazon, who invented e-commerce personalization, Amazon did all of that so that on your visit to Amazon you would take that action. They have things like pick up where you left off, which we have on our site. They have, you know, suggested items that you want to buy similar to our suggested features and whatnot. So all of that's done to make sure that you make that purchase right then and there. And it happens. Obviously, if it didn't happen, Amazon wouldn't be worth trillions of dollars.

It's interesting to see how much that's mirrored on our side when we turn on this type of personalization. When Gino talked about your website as your number one salesperson, if you think about it that way, what is this website saying to me at this very moment on this very page? If it's throwing ten different questions at the viewer, that is the same as if the person was standing right in front of you and saying, "Hey, so do you want to test drive? Do you want to value your trade? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that?" And listing out ten different questions at you. It's dizzying if you have that.

The real magic of a website is how it draws people in. It gets them excited and it easily brings them down the path towards the sale. And so how do you do that? As Gino said, make it make sense. Don't overwhelm them. Show them only the things that they really, really are looking for. And when you have that knowledge of how they've shopped in the past, you can actually serve those things up right at the top to them. So a person who is looking for the performance of a car is going to shop maybe a bit differently than somebody who's shopping for the best deal because they're a payment shopper. They're looking for something like a really great finance special.

For instance, you know, somebody who's concerned with safety features isn't going to be the same kind of person who is shopping for all of the features like Apple CarPlay and stuff like that. So it's making the website a great showcase for that particular person, for that particular shopper, and giving that person exactly what they're looking for, even maybe before they even know it, before they even had a chance to type it in.

Then, if they leave the website because for whatever reason they have to leave and then they want to come back to that same website, don't make it hard on them. Ask them if they want to pick up where they left off, and refill all of that same stuff. Your website is smart enough to know, this is a return visit. This is a return person who's been here before. Why are you making them start from scratch? There are so many things that a website that technology can do right now to service every single visitor that comes to your website. And it's a shame if dealers don't take advantage of the technology that's out there,

How do you approach AI?

Cautiously. That's my best answer for you right now,

I think AI is going to be very important in the next few years for dealers. I see some CRMs using it to really good effect like answering emails for customer inquiries versus maybe a template or maybe just helping your BDC rep, your salesperson write a good email to respond to a lead on the website. We've had our eye chat for a little while and that does a pretty decent job. It's not like an AI type of chat, but it does do a good job of guiding the customer through the journey.

But where I see AI coming into play is once you start working with these large data models like a CDP or like our CRP, and once we start to develop really large sets of data that we can feed into a system that can then even more proactively start to pull out insights from that shopper journey and decide what to present to a consumer.

It's just it's not there yet. I think it's going to be really important in dealer sites in the next few years once it gets a little bit further along. But it's right now it's a little too nascent for us to say, let's throw it on all our websites.

I agree with you. I mean, I think Skynet is real. The robots are just waiting for the right data to get over. I think AI needs to be approached carefully and I am of the mindset that you shouldn't just let AI do everything. I think it also needs to have not just only artificial intelligence, it needs to have human intelligence with it. So you get the right response the way you have to set it up right. And I think you can't do that without human interaction.

AI and programmatic advertising.

We leverage all of the AI within Google to manage that. It's gotten extremely robust, particularly when you look at things like Performance Max, which now have vehicle ads in them, which used to be separate. But you do have to be a little bit careful, though, because it does boil down to how much data you have and are you collecting the right data.

This is actually going back to the GA4 conversation. It's an important connection between those two platforms because if you're not tracking conversions and actions that you find valuable correctly within GA4, you can't funnel good data into Google ads so that it can optimize for those actions. So for example, what you want to do is if you have GA4 set up correctly, you want to be able to take all of the conversions that go into GA4, funnel those into Google ads, and then tell Google ads to, find people who are going to do this, who are going to take this action. If you don't have a lot of that data set up correctly so it can do that, you're not going to find the right people to advertise to and you're going to be wasting a lot of money. So AI in that respect is really powerful. If it's set up correctly.

We've also seen a lot of really good value from running programmatic ads on the Amazon advertising network, which I think a lot of your dealers might not be familiar with. Amazon advertising is a system that allows us to buy streaming TV ads on apps like Hulu, and Amazon Prime which just now this month is launching ad-supported content, which Amazon's happy about, I'm sure their viewers are probably not crazy about, but they're going to do it anyways. You run on Hulu, you run on Amazon Sling, or any of the major streaming platforms you can advertise to customers on as well as online video and display.

But the programmatic part comes from when Amazon's data is used as the filter for all of that. So we're one of a handful of Amazon partners that are allowed to use this data. And if you think about Amazon, the data they have is extraordinary. It's all first-party data to Amazon and it's all user-generated data. So I can target a customer by their home address, which I know is accurate because nobody's going to lie about where they want their Amazon packages shipped, you can tell them by what's in their garage because if you buy parts for your car on Amazon, you have to tell them your model trim that you own. So now you have an address with one or two vehicles sitting at that address. You can then target people by if they're shopping for a car because Amazon has all these OEM showrooms on Amazon.com, including the robust Hyundai showroom where they're going to start selling cars with Hyundai on Amazon.com. We'll see how that works. And I think the jury's still out a little bit on that.

They also know if somebody is going through what's called a life event, which tends to proceed, a car purchase. For example, if you have a customer who lives seven miles away from a dealership, which we know because of their address, who also owns a 2018 Honda Civic, who has been browsing the OEM showrooms and just created a baby registry and started stocking up on diapers, that person is probably going to get rid of that 2018 Civic. It's not going to cut it anymore. So that's a signal that we use to then programmatically put an ad in front of that consumer. If they go watch, like I was watching all the football games this weekend on Sling so you can target me on Sling even though I was watching football. If you knew all of those things about me and know I'm in the market.

So while Google's AI is really strong, I think the biggest marketing play out there for dealers today that nobody really knows about because it's so new is the Amazon piece. And the great thing is the two of them work together. So we have a lot of data that shows that when you run Amazon, it actually boosts the performance of your Google ads campaign because Amazon is essentially filling the pond with fish that are ready to bite and Google is your fishing pole pulling them out.

It's a very synergistic type of ad format. I call it like all the best one-two punch in automotive marketing today is Amazon and Google.

Why does AI need clean data?

You can try it yourself. If you go to ChatGPT and write a very short prompt and ask it to do something and you don't give it clear details, you're going to get a pretty, pretty bad answer, most likely, or it's going to make something up. Which it does. I've had it make things up on me that I've corrected it on and it says, sorry, I don't know where that came from. Let me try again. I'm like, okay. Yet another reason why I don't fully trust A.I. at the moment.

I think too, that an argument can be made that a dealer's most valuable asset. It's not the cars on the lot. It's their first-party data. It's the data that they don't know how to get a hold of. They don't utilize it. They don't do anything with it. Sometimes it's stored in, I think Gino is so good at explaining this, their first-party data is stored in anywhere from 8 to 15 different places and they they can't reach it and utilize it and be able to say okay I have this data, what can I do with it to make more money, sell more cars, get more customers?

And I think it's a darn shame that there isn't an easier way until now to be able to not only access that data, but maybe work for you. It's very, very valuable. And guess what? It's yours. You earned it. You have it and it's just not being utilized. It's sitting in the Ethernet someplace., and if you could take that and you could harness it, the kind of powerful results that you can get from it is extraordinary.

Like Gino just said, we utilized it in this one instance, in this beta test to see, well, would it really make a difference if we person took the data on these shoppers, personalized the website in real-time and see if it did anything? And to our surprise, it did way more than we ever thought possible. 53%, 54% first view conversions. It's unheard of and the only difference, the only difference was that we turned that personalization feature on. That's extraordinary. And that's only one instance where we used first-party data just to see if it would really make a difference and get people down the funnel faster. And now we know for sure it does. Yeah,

What is the impact of your website on your marketing?

I like to make this point a lot maybe people are sick of it, but website and marketing are not two different things. You can't talk about websites in one breath and then your digital marketing in the next because both need each other and both have the same goals. And if your website is not synced up with what your marketing is doing or saying, it's just a massive mess.

I see it myself every day. You look at an ad on Google that says "Lease this car for $499 a month". And when you click on that ad, it takes it to the home page or it takes to a page with vehicles on it where it doesn't have anything about that lease offer, It's like, well, you told me you were going to lease it to me for $499 a month. I want to learn more about that. That's why I clicked on the ad. But I don't see that info anywhere.

It's like we go back to your salespeople in your dealership. If I walked into the store and I said, "Hey, Eliana, I see you guys are leasing a Jeep Cherokee for $499 a month", and Eliana looks at me like "We are? What are you talking about?" I'm going to leave. I'll go somewhere that people know what's going on.

You cannot look at websites in marketing separately. It just doesn't work that way. They have to be completely synched up working together because they are the same thing. It's just digitally finding and selling customers and making sure that message is complete and carries through no matter where they see anything from you. Wherever you're a digital footprint is, it should all match

What does a dealer have to do to capitalize on CRP?

To get that up and running, the dealer does not have to do anything. They have to sign up with Dealer eProcess, which they should do anyway. But you don't have to do anything. As a dealer, if you have the personalization engine running, it will do all this, all the great stuff we just talked about. Now, what a dealer can do though, is invest in a system like a CDP that can funnel additional data into this system.

If you think about our website platform like a high-performance car, you can either put regular gas in it or high-octane fuel. If you have that data from that outside source pumping into this, that's that high-octane fuel. So the car is still going to run great on normal gas but is going to run even better with the better, better fuel.

That's really it. But if you don't have that, you can still get tremendous results out of this. The dealers that we've been running this beta on that got that boost in first was a conversion, they didn't have any other data running it. They haven't decided which CDP partner they want it to go with yet, but we wanted to start testing this anyway. So they've just been running it on the data that we as DEP collect and utilize to personalize the site.

I also want to point out that the beta test, was four dealerships. All for the same brand. The only thing they changed is two dealerships turned on the personalization engine and the other two didn't, and that is how we tested it. And that is where the difference was very, very obvious. They didn't change advertising. Nothing else except for let's flip the switch on this personalization engine and see what happens.

Every customer should receive a tailored website experience

Your dealership doesn't have any extra work. Guess what? Your visitors to your website don't have any extra work either. As Gino said earlier, they don't have to make an account or log in and sign up. I don't know about you, but I mean, I just finished eight, you know, six months' worth of car shopping. If somebody asked me to make an account so that I could see the cars and see the prices Now, I would never have done I would never have gone back to that.

It's also important to note this works for every customer, too, not just people who are in your DMS or who are our previous customers, every customer to your site should receive a personalized experience.

And that's our motto. And it reminds me of my favorite quote from Jeff Bezos. He said back in 98, way ahead of the curve. He said, If we have four and a half million shoppers, we shouldn't have one store. We should have four and a half million stores. Now, dealers aren't going to have four and a half million site visits, but they might have 10,000. So you should have 10,000 unique experiences on the website because everybody's coming there with different wants and needs, just like you would train your salespeople to figure that out and, you know, cater to those needs. The website has to do the same thing.

Upcoming NADA webinar

It's this Thursday and Gino is going to be talking firsthand about how to make your website so that customers fall in love with it.

We're only a couple of weeks away from Valentine's Day so there are things that you can do on your website to make customers fall in love with it. If they love the experience with your website, I promise you they'll come back for more. I cannot even tell you how many websites my husband and I did online for my car. I can't even tell you how many websites sites like, "This website. It's terrible. I can't I'm never going to go back to that website". And that's it. His shopping journey on that website was over. And so what you want to do is you want to make them fall in love with your website, Gino has got all the tips, tricks, and strategies. It's going to be an NADA webinar, but you can find the link on the delivery process website. It's going to be January 25th at 1 p.m. Eastern time and just go to dealereprocess.com/webinars.