Michael DeVito, Author at DealerOn

Michael DeVito In Dealership Websites, Feature Friday

Feature Friday: Geo-fencing

Happy Friday! I’m excited to announce a new series we’ll be rolling out today: Feature Friday Videos!

In these videos, we’ll be showing off some of DealerOn’s top-performing, results-driven features. They’ll give you a more in-depth look at the tools that make us tick. Our goal is to help you better understand some of the features of DealerOn websites that can make your dealership stand out from the competitors.

This week we’ll take a look at Geo-fencing, a feature that allows you to strategically target potential customers based on their location. Geo-fencing creates opportunities for your dealership to target specific audiences for location-based campaigns, like if you wanted to show social media ads to people in your competitor’s showroom, or if you were trying to reach students on campus about your student discount.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

When you’re walking down the street and you pass a shop you might hear, “Come in for the best t-shirts in the city,” or “For you, $5 off your entree.” Pointed messages, directed at you — and they’re enticing because you’re right in front of the store. This is real life geo-fencing.

In this digital age, successful marketing is all about sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Geo-fencing is the technology that makes this possible. By simply selecting an area on a map, your dealership can choose where to run its ads and special promotions.

Think about it. Rather than a blanket message all over town, you can strategically target your customers. Maybe you want to remind people leaving the big game on Sunday about your dealership’s great leasing program. Boom, geo-fencing gives you that opportunity. Maybe customers at your competitor’s lot will be interested in your bigger rebate offers. Let college students at a nearby university know they can use their student ID for a discounted oil change.

With geo-fencing technology and DealerOn’s innovative geniuses, your dealership is closer than ever to closing sales.

Remember, over 50% of all auto shoppers checked their phone for better prices on the dealership lot, which means YOU have the chance to make your dealership shine.

That’s it for today’s Feature Friday. Tune in next week for more tips & tricks guaranteed to rock your dealership.

Michael DeVito In Website Optimization

Third Party Tools Are Slowing Down Your Site. Here’s How to Fix It.

Your site is, in today’s technological age, the first thing most of your customers see. Site visitors become purchasers in the long run, and the speed of your site is an important variable in their decision-making process. On average, 40 percent of visitors will leave a site that takes more than three seconds to load, which means you don’t have any time to waste.

Third party integrations are one of the reasons your site may not be running as quickly as it could. Third party applications are the outside tools supplied by vendors, such as chat apps, service schedulers, trade application tools—anything that comes from an outside vendor. These tools are integrated into your site via third party tags, and careless integration can slow things down at best, and bring your site crashing down at worst.

Take these tips into consideration to streamline your third party integrations.

Communicate with Your Vendors
You should know what your third party vendor is supplying, how it will work, and what you can expect. A good way to know exactly what you’re getting is to have an SLA (service-level agreement). Include your minimum expectations from the tool and a way to measure potential performance issues, this way there can’t be any surprises.

If your third party is hosted in a different country from the majority of your visitors, you’ll want to find out if they use a CDN (content delivery network). Without one, your visitors will experience increased latency and slower load times. That’s enough to send most of them packing. You can also improve site speed by asking vendors optimize their scripts, such as minifying any JavaScript files.

Keep in contact with your vendors so you know immediately if they alter or update their third party tags. Outdated tags can cause a variety of issues for your site’s performance, especially if your code isn’t asynchronous. The web moves quickly, and if you miss an update your page’s loading time may suffer.

Synchronize Your Code
Speaking of asynchronous code, it’s good to remember that you don’t have complete control of your third party tools, which means you have to set up as many fail-safes as possible. This is where ensuring any third party code is asynchronous with your own comes in handy. This will prevent third party tags from having a dependency on your code, which can result in a SPOF (single point of failure) that could bring down your entire site.

Clean Up Waste
You probably have a lot of third party applications on your site, but are all of them useful? Take some time to measure a third party tool’s impact on your business. Do these tools line up with your performance goals? Are they significantly impacting your ROI?

To decide of a tool is worth having, analyze the percentage of conversion rate lost with each second of page delay caused by third party tools. We’ve talked before about the benefits of A/B testing, and this would be an opportunity to put it into practice. Provide one page with the third party tool and one without, and then compare the bounce and conversion rates. If there is a major difference, and the tool does not provide significant benefit to your business, you may consider eliminating it all together.

Third party tools are a necessary part of running a website, but they can quickly attribute to slow loading times if not watched carefully. Keep an eye on your vendors to make sure no outside forces can affect what’s happening on your site.

Michael DeVito In Best Practices, Website Optimization

Site Search: To Filter or Not to Filter?

Let’s be upfront about this: I advocate filtered site search as opposed to free form search, and here’s why.

When it comes to finding things on your website, your customers are either clicking buttons or using a search box. This is true whether you sell cars, cookies, or clothes. Nearly every single person on your website looking for a particular vehicle will either click on the “New” or “Used” buttons that you (hopefully) have in your navigation bar, or they’re mousing over to the search box and manually typing it in. Continue Reading

Michael DeVito In Mobile, Website Optimization

Design for the Device

Website design is about more than just having the sleekest, flashiest thing on the market, it’s about functionality. Above all, your site has to be useable, and that’s even more critical for your mobile site.

I’ve talked before about mobile optimization and different tips & tricks for boosting optimization. A lot of people tend to think that the “mobile” version of their website is simply a shrunken-down desktop version. But that’s not quite true, because there are some site elements that simple don’t translate very well from desktop to mobile.

Which ones are they? Good question.

Rotating Banners

This is a bit of double-whammy, because rotating banners don’t actually convert very well on desktop or mobile. However, while desktop click-through rates usually hover around 1% (with the lion’s share of the clicks going to Position 1 on the banner), mobile CTRs can be even lower.

Another huge reason that rotating banners should stay off your mobile site? Load time. Since about half of your site visitors will only wait 2 seconds for a page to load before leaving, those high-res sliders might cost you qualified traffic.

Printable Coupons

This is a classic desktop-to-mobile disaster. Printable coupons are a wonderful way to create a little incentive to come visit your dealership, but there’s one problem. Nobody prints from their phone, and if they’re looking at your coupon on their mobile device, the odds are pretty good that they’re nowhere near a printer.

This is where the eWallet functionality steps in and saves the day. A mobile site that integrates with Apple Pay and Android Wallet will let your users download & store coupons digitally. If you’re smart, you can set up a geo-fence to alert users when they’re near your dealership and can redeem the coupon. Customers download the coupon once, and you can update as many times as you wish.

Layers & Popups

There’s the old saying, “Less is more,” and it often applies to website design. Technology has advanced so far in the past decade, that designers & programmers have almost unlimited options at their fingertips when building a website. That doesn’t mean they should include everything, though.

Sites often use layers and popup features to highlight a chat window, or maybe some social media share buttons. Whatever you use them for, your mobile device screen is too small for that kind of digital real estate.

If your desktop site is seeing great results from the chat popup, that’s great. But take it off your mobile site, because it does little more than impede the browsing experience. It only takes a swipe of the finger to leave your mobile site, so don’t encourage people to bounce off your site by making it hard to scroll around.

Busy Navigation

Your navbar has all the essentials, and sometimes a little extra. For desktop site visitors, it’s critical to have easy, functional, and robust navigation so that all your content is easily accessible.

But mobile sites? There’s no need for all that content. The “hamburger” style menu lets you collapse the non-essentials out of sight, where they can be accessed with a quick tap.

Of course, your essential still need to be front and center. Put things like your phone number and your hours & directions into neat little icons on your navbar, and make it sticky if you’re feeling fancy. By doing so, users can take action with ease and they don’t have to go hunting for your “Contact” page or try and copy/paste your phone number.

Two Columns

Desktop sites can look amazing with multiple columns, but it’s not a good feature on mobile. Why? The same reason we nixed the mobile popups: digital real estate. A smartphone simply doesn’t have enough screen space to afford a two-column design, so users end up trying to scroll to the left and right to see all your content. No good.

A single-column site will use large, clickable panes to display content – like the mobile version of the New York Times above. Notice how the user doesn’t need to swipe left or right to access content, it’s all right there, optimized for their device. No need to zoom in, either, since the single-column makes sure everything is sized correctly.

The Bottom Line

When you really get down to it, people are using their phones to shop & price-check. So let them do it on your site. Don’t make mobile design an afterthought and assume that the truly loyal customers will simply remember to find your site on their desktop.

Google has consistently shown us that people, especially automotive shoppers, are doing their research in micro-moments throughout their day…and they’re not usually near a computer. So if the future is mobile, then where are you?

Michael DeVito In Best Practices, Mobile, Website Optimization

Split Your Split Testing

Let’s talk some website optimization. Everyone knows that A/B testing (or split testing) is vital to finding out which elements of your site convert best. It’s the fine art of showing your website visitors variables of things like CTAs, banner ads, click-to-call buttons, and more so that you can pick the ones that performs the very best. But, are you splitting your split testing? That is, are you testing across all platforms? Continue Reading

Michael DeVito