anews-smallA client sent me an email this week which stated “We had a good used car month at the dealership. It is the store at which we are testing LotLinx. Yes we received VDP views from LotLinx.” The closing line of the email was:

How can I attribute any of our success to LotLinx?

I wasn’t surprised that my client had seen an increase in sales because of their investment using LotLinx.

I was the first auto industry consultant to outline how LotLinx works and present actual data showing how it accelerated shopper traffic. This week in Automotive News, David Barkholz wrote a story highlighting the impact that LotLinx had on two other dealerships in the United States.

Since everyone in the automotive industry is finally waking up to the benefits of adding LotLinx to a dealership’s Web Presence Management strategy, I thought I would show dealers additional evidence on how LotLinx is working to increase sales velocity.

I’ll do this by showing you how the traffic from LotLinx is engaging with VDPs and SRPs on the dealer’s website and also how these same visitors are triggering Google Analytics conversions.

deanEvansI also want to congratulate Dean Evans, CEO of LotLinx, for raising the awareness for LotLinx at the dealer and OEM level. I love this excerpt from the Automotive News article:

Vehicle detail page views “are the Holy Grail of efficient digital marketing,” Evans said.

Starting From the Ground Up

Let’s start with some basics. Dealers do not need more traffic to their websites. Traffic is cheap and is not directly related to an increase in car sales. Dealers need more shoppers to visit their websites.

Shoppers are valuable. Shoppers will look at vehicles on the dealer’s website, look at special promotions, and visit the hours and directions page. Shoppers view Search Results Pages (SRP) and drill down into Vehicle Detail Pages (VDP) to inspect the vehicles that match their interests.

An increase in shopper traffic WILL increase the sales velocity of a dealer’s inventory.

Google Analytics is a tool for dealers to understand their website traffic. Google Analytics categorizes traffic into distinct channels: organic search, direct, referral, paid search, and social. LotLinx falls into the referral category, and so does traffic from Cars.com, Autotrader.com, KBB, Cargurus.com, blogs, as well as CRM emails or email promotions that have links back to the dealers website.

Paid search is really a type of referral traffic and dealers are investing thousands of dollars a month on Google AdWords campaigns. Facebook and Twitter advertising is on the rise in the automotive industry yet represent only a small percentage of advertising budgets today.

Inspecting Referral Traffic

What I find odd about the automotive industry is that until recently, dealers were not trained to inspect the quality of their website traffic. Dealers did not have the tools to easily monitor whether visitors to their website were actually looking at SRPs and VDPs. Now, tools like ROI-BOT™ have simplified the inspection of website traffic.

The Referral Traffic Performance widget in ROI-BOT™ shows a dealer how many SRPs and VDPs were viewed from each referral source to their website. In seconds dealers can now see if the referral traffic to their website is demonstrating shopping behaviors; looking at SRPs and VDPs. Soon the report will show when they made a call!

The dealer who emailed me did not have Google Analytics goals set up, so his report (shown below) does not show lead form submissions or other critical website goals, which I highly recommend should be in place.

referrals-roibot

You can see from this powerful ROI-BOT™ chart that the 804 Lotlinx visitors were highly engaged with the dealer’s inventory. LotLinx was the second highest referral source, beat out slightly only by the dealer group’s umbrella multi-store website.

LotLinx shoppers viewed 199 SRPs and 1,136 VDPs. Approximately 90% of the LotLinx traffic to the dealers website clearly engaged with inventory; the highest quality traffic compared to all other referral sources.

Some skeptics might look at the LotLinx shopper Time on Site (TOS) and think that 1.5 minutes is a short time to be on the dealer’s website. Actually, this is the exact opposite case. Since LotLinx connects in-market shoppers with a specific piece of inventory, consumers do not have to waste time search for a vehicle that matches their criteria. Also, notice that every visit generated almost two VDP views (1.86 to be exact).

Next month ROI-BOT™ will be adding a “calls” column on this report to show call conversions by referral source for dealers using dynamic call tracking. This will further enhance the value of this referral traffic report.

But even this great report does not tell the complete story; LotLinx is performing even better that what is shown. I have some new research to show you that documents the some of the shopper behavior of LotLinx shoppers that dealers are likely missing.

Multi Channel Sales Funnels

If dealers configure their Google Analytics accounts properly, they can see how conversions take place on their website. The specific feature is called Multi Channel Sales Funnels, and it allows you to visualize how many times it takes a consumer to trigger a conversion event that is important to your marketing strategy.

A conversion event can include submitting a lead form, requesting an e-price, or visiting the hours and directions page. Dealers can set their own conversion goals; it is not set or pre-defined by Google. Dealers should also be setting goals for call conversions; something that can be configured by companies like Century Interactive.

Top-ConversionPaths-LotLinx

When you view the Multi Channel Sales Funnels report, you can see the path and sequences that trigger a conversion. What was very exciting to see was that LotLinx was in the top 10 conversion paths for a LotLinx dealer that had conversion goals in place.

It shows that 159 conversions were triggered by LotLinx with one BIG caveat. After the consumer visited the dealer’s website, a direct result of how LotLinx works, many consumers came back a second time and converted.

In this case, the second time they came back as a “direct” visit. This is likely due to the fact that the dealer’s URL was remembered in their browser. This is the first time anyone has documented that NOT ONLY does LotLinx generate high quality shoppers on the FIRST click, there is another behavior set that brings back LotLinx shoppers to the dealer’s website to convert.

This is an eye opener.

Without Multi Channel Sales Funnels dealers would never see that LotLinx generated the conversion. The conversion would be attributed to a direct visit.

As dealers take the time to inspect the quality of traffic generated by LotLinx, they will continue to move more of their stores on to this powerful sales acceleration platform.

Getting Started With LotLinx – Live in 5 Days

roibot-logo1If you would like to get started with LotLinx, let the team at PCG Digital Marketing help you. Not only will PCG setup LotLinx for your stores, we will get your dealership set up on ROI-BOT Lite; a special version of the industry’s most powerful data management dashboard that comes with our LotLinx sales promotion.

The team at PCG can also set up your Google Analytics account to include Multi Channel Sales Funnels. Working with PCG on your LotLinx roll-out makes great sense because of the extra value of reporting and analysis we can provide. LotLinx is a month to month commitment; a dealer centric proposal.

Call our sales team at: 1-732-450-8200.

Get your store’s inventory into the LotLinx network. If you still don’t clearly understand how LotLinx works, request a demo. You can also watch a video I recorded on the subject: Understanding LotLinx.

So what are you waiting for? Get your 2015 online marketing strategy fortified with high quality shopper traffic to your website.

 

About the Author

Brian Pasch is the founder of PCG companies. PCG provides customized marketing and training solutions for businesses that are committed to dominate their local market.