Auto Dealer Monthly Magazine is the daily operations publication serving the retail automotive industry. This automotive publication serves dealer principals, officers and general managers with the latest best practices.
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industry expert / advertising & marketing Why Your Website Visitors Are Not Converting to Leads Paul Potratz is COO of Potratz Advertising and an industry speaker in digital, mobile, behavioral and social media market- ing. He shares his expertise weekly through online workshops and hosts the weekly video series "Think Tank Tuesday," which reaches more than 42,000 automotive professionals. PPotratz@AutoDealerMonthly.com D o you know how your vehicle detail pages are converting compared to specific landing pages on your website? Ever want to know what in particular on your website is catching your audience's eye and converting leads? What ads offer the highest conversion to leads? Well, with heat-mapping, eye-tracking technology and multi-channel funnels you can get these answers and put the information to use in your traditional and digital marketing strategy. Website analytics make up a very important piece of the digital aspect in marketing. You need to see how the potential customer interacts with your websitethe click paths and page depth and page exit percentages, as well as how they got to the website. Although your marketing campaigns may be driving a lot of traffic to your website, often dealerships find many of these visitors aren't converting into buyers. In fact, an average dealer's website does not convert 97 percent of all website visitors. You need on-site analytics which tell you what people are doing and not doing on your website. Do you know where to place information on your pages to 18 drive the highest conversions? What you need to do is expand your website tracking, under- standing shoppers' digital body language and what specifically is working or not working on each individual page. That is where heat-map- ping comes into play. Heat maps are a visual way to analyze different types of click tracking. Maps consist of a range of colors from black and dark blues up to bright reds and whites. The "hotter" colors indicate areas that mouse cursors spent more time on while "cooler" ones represent less or no activity. In the old days, these heat maps were created via a large, expensive eye-tracking machine, but in today's world, nothing that elaborate is required. On-site analytics track several different types of data, all of which are obtained from a site visitor's digital body language. Some items tracked include: • Clicks on specific points of a page, images or tabs, • Hover points of a visitor's mouse, • Page scrolls, and • Day of week and time of day specific clicks are most popular. Heat maps show where potential customers are look- ing and what is catching their eye enough to actually click. Heat maps also show how far visitors are willing to scroll down a page, allowing you to place your most important in- formation in the areas that will receive the highest conversion. Heat maps can be used in sim- ple A/B testing or split-testing methods to compare changes on a new page from its original design to see if modifications are effective. By testing your changes before implementing them, you can better under- stand what changes will drive positive results. To find out even more about your incoming traffic, you can introduce the use of multi-fun- nel channels. A conversion can be defined many ways, but what is also important to track is the activity that takes place before a user converts. Those steps leading to the final con- version are just as important, if not more so, than the last one. Multi-channel funnels allow you to see the big picture, so you can determine the pattern customers follow to get to the conversion. Channels include, but are not limited to, paid and organic search, referral sites, affiliates, social networks, e-mail newsletters and custom campaigns. Multi-channel funnels track and report the channels utilized to drive a user to a conversion. From this you can see the patterns visitors follow coming into the site, allowing you to change keyword and channel strategies so they can work better for you. Heat-mapping, eye-tracking and multi-funnel channels will provide actionable information that can be used in your dealership marketing strategy. We have found that used car shoppers are most likely to engage a website on a Thursday. The second-most popular day is Wednesday. New-car shoppers are much more even across the week. Used car shoppers exhibit increased engagement when vehicles they are interested in have walk-around videos embedded into the website page. New-car shoppers, on the other hand, tend to engage more with on-site chat pop- ups. Another interesting bit of data we collected was that people who directly type in a website URL spend less time on the website than those who got there via a search engine. These tools will allow you to build a higher-converting web- site and reduce your traditional advertising cost. Learn what it is that makes your website good, and fix the things that aren't helping. Before you know it, your conversions will skyrocket and your advertising cost per lead will decrease. The best leads available are the ones already on your website. The question is, are you ready to increase your own website's conversion?