For this week’s Wednesday Workshop, we’ve got a special treat! Our VP of Customer Service was visiting the SEO team in Dallas, so I grabbed him and put him on the spot… He shares 4 awesome tips to help dealers online. Watch and learn some simple tips that will help your dealership excel online (and in the future).
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another Wednesday Workshop from DealerOn. This week, we’ve got a special treat for you! This guy right here is Mike Somerville, our Vice President of Customer Experience.
We had several execs visit the Dallas office this week, so I jumped on the opportunity to have him on this week’s video. Mike, let’s start by giving everyone a brief rundown of your history with DealerOn.
So between running the Client Results team and now your new position as VP of Customer Experience, you must have lots of awesome tips to share with dealers. Let’s share your top 4 tips that will help dealers online
Number one: In order to properly understand how well your website is doing, you obviously need to have insight into how it’s performing. Now most products come with their own analytics, which is great, but if you’re like me, and a control freak, you need to have your own as well.
This first thing I would do, is ask your provider if they have google analytics on your website, and if they do, ask to be a user. You don’t necessarily need to be an admin, but it’s nice to be able to see what they’re seeing.
The next thing I would do, if you don’t already have your own, is to create your own Google Analytics account and have your provider add it to your website. You just need to send them the little code that Google Analytics gives you after you create the account.
It’s important to have your own account because then you can set it up however you want. You can have your own goals, own customized reports, and most importantly, take it with you wherever you go.
You’ll never have a break in reporting, and will be able to measure your performance with a neutral reporting platform.
Tip number 2: Now that you have access to your own Google Analytics account, it’s important to set it up to track everything. The first thing you want to set up is the goals, which are typically going to be your lead forms.
By doing this, you will be able to see leads per channel, by device, basically you think it, you can probably track it.
Leads aren’t the only thing you can set up as up goals, you can also set up VDP page views, time on page goals and so on. Most providers will already have it set up by default if you have access to their Google Analytics account.
But if you really want to take it next level, make sure you have your website provider set up Google events on your website as well.
Events give you insight into the “advanced analytics” or as I like to call it, the game within the game.
On the DealerOn platform, we have events set up to track which banner was clicked, what model on the model bar has the most interaction, the number of mobile click to calls, just to name a few.
You can put an event on most things, so anything that has a customer interaction associated with it, I would make sure an event is there as well
Number three: If you feel your website could do more but it’s not, the next thing I would do is take time to set up a few calculated risks.
I say calculated because you never want to change things too drastically or without the ability to track the results real time, so set up an A/B tests on some of your main calls to actions on your website.
It’s typically best to start the tests on high traffic pages, so I would focus on the Home page, Search results page, or the VDP’s.
And if you’re comfortable with the verbiage of your call to action, then try changing up the color or size.
Once you have your high traffic pages where you want them, you can then start setting up A/B test on other, lower traffic pages as well to increase their performance.
Only do a few tests at a time so you know what works, but always be testing, no matter how small it may seem, every little bit helps.
And my last tip: Now that we have the behind the scenes stuff taken care of, one trick to selling more cars is your Website CMS or back end.
Now hang with me on this one for a second before you think I’ve gone completely crazy.
Most websites have some type of lead generation pop up type tool or bar that goes across the top of the site. It looks different for every provider, but it should give you access to make real time edits.
So if you see you’re going to get 10 inches of snow this week, instead of accepting that it’s just going to be a bad week to move metal, let’s offer a snowstorm discount or some type of incentive for coming in and braving the storm that expires that Friday or the end of the storm.
By doing this, it does a few things: it lets your customers know you are paying attention to what’s going in your community, and it give your team an excuse to reach out to their prospects and offer them something different.
Dude, those were awesome tips. We definitely need to get you on these videos more often!
Yeah, we’ll see about that…
So anyway, thanks for watching this week’s Wednesday Workshop video. As always, if you’ve got questions or comments, leave ‘em down below and what will we do?
We’ll get back to you shortly.
And don’t forget to come back next week for another Wednesday Workshop from DealerOn.
