New Craigslist Tool Will Work For Any Website & You Can Use Any Phone Number
Newest & Fastest Tool For Craigslist
Having an internet sales staff of 6 full time employees gives Mike at Park Auto Mall plenty of help meeting internet shoppers half way. They’ve always been posting their inventory to Craigslist, but it was hard to keep the staff motivated because they know the lead will come to the internet department and whomever answers the phone will get the lead.
With the help of Showroom Logic’s newest Craigslist tool, the problem is solved. Each salesperson can now not only post automatically, but they can have the ads go to any website they want and they can use their own cell phones numbers for the ad.
Since they started using this last week, the amount of self generated leads have quadrupled. Mike says “I usually come home at night and post about 5 vehicles on Craigslist. After I post I always look at who else is posting at the same time. Lately I have been competing with my own staff, and it’s great to see the tool getting used by the hungry ones.”
Mike loves it when they do it from home because it’s a different IP and we don’t have to worry about Craiglist suspending our accounts. Some of them even have their spouses do it.
What I like best about this software is my staff doesn’t have to log in to any website to use the tool, so I don’t have to give them any passwords and they can do it from home as well
“It’s a win win for our dealership and the staff. Some people will click through to our money site, which is what I want. This weekend alone, we had over 2oo people click from Craigslist and the bounce rate was only 8%. The average amount of vehicles looked at was 15 and the average time on site was 13 minutes. Online credit applications are up over 600%, and obviously the leads and appointments are up as well. What I like best about this software is my staff doesn’t have to log in to any website to use the tool, so I don’t have to give them any passwords and they can do it from home as well. They simply go to the posting page on Craigslist and the boxes appear. I have about 6 different vendors that include Craigslist posting tools, but I don’t use any of them. Why would I want to take the time logging into a website’s backend and choosing templates when I don’t have to?”, says Mike.
Mike also does some experimenting. Sometimes he’ll have the add click to one of their high definition YouTube Videos, and sometimes their blog. But he especially likes being able to point to our main money site. “Just because my staff is posting now doesn’t mean I’ll stop”, he says.
Here are a couple of screenshots of the new tool: (Click each to enlarge)
Now Our Car Dealers Have Full Control Over What Website You Want The Viewers To Click To, & What Phone Number To Place On The Ad. The 3 boxes on the top is all you need to fill in. When you click "load" everything fills in automatically
Whichever phone number you included will be displayed on the ad. When a user clicks any of the photos or more details they customer will be brought to whatever url you pout in the box
This Craigslist tool comes with a complete microsite and is available for only $200.00 a month. Contact Patrick Bennett at 801.400.9178 to get started or email us at sales@showroomlogic.com.
White labeling is available.
Att Car Dealers: YouTube Videos & Channels WILL NOT Boost Your Rankings In The Search Engines
Every vendor on the planet is jumping on the video bandwagon, and they’ve been pounding at my door over at Park Auto Mall. We already use AutoTrader and Cars.com, but they’re constantly trying to up-sell us for videos.
If you want to gain a little knowledge, read this:
The last straw was yesterday when the regional manager from cars.com came in because she felt her reps didn’t do a good job the day before. After a few minutes of chatting, she told me “you know, having Youtube videos will increase your website’s ranking on the search engines…..”
After letting her finish, I told her that wasn’t true. If the links from YouTube were clean (which they are not), it would be beneficial. But, the links we are allowed to place in the comment section of your YouTube video will posses the “nofollow” tag.
What Is The Nofollow Tag?
I found the best definition of the nofollow tag on Wikipedia:
nofollow is a HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring. – Wikipedia
Now some might argue that the nofollow tag will help “a little bit”. Take a minute to watch this video from Matt Cutts, who is an Engineer at Google and he is the head of the spam team.
The only clean backlink I can find from YouTube is the link allowed on my YouTube Chanel Page. By looking at the code, there isn’t a nofollow tag present. This could possibly be a sole backlink, but I highly doubt it. Perhaps YouTube instructs each Chanel page via htaccess not to follow it? If that’s the case, we will never know.
If you right click and view source, you can find out of a link is no follow. This is a screen shot from our YouTube Source showing the nofollow
If it is a clean link it will automatically get discounted anyway because it will be considered a link exchange, unless you are not linking to your YouTube Channel. If you’re not linking to your YouTube Channel in any way, shape or form you will not have any authority because of the lack of backlinks.
Ever notice there aren’t many spammers on YouTube?
Sure, you will get email spam from YouTube Members. But you will not see many spammy, crappy videos on YouTube unless you dig deep. Why do you think that is? I’ll tell you why, it’s because the links are nofollow! Even spammers will not waste their time.
YouTube can be a great source of branding for your car dealership, and that’s about it. Our Youtube videos were viewed over 8,000 times since the launch a couple of months ago. I can assure you, these videos do not come from Google searches. Out of the 8,000 views, only 49 of them came from a Google Search.
This Screen Shot from my YouTube Insight Shows That It's Not Google Searches That's Getting My Video Views. It's simply our hard work and proper use of keyword tags (Click To Enlarge)
If you are a car dealer and your videos are getting found on Google search, that just means that your area lacks SEO for whichever terms they’re showing up on. Go ahead, find a video show up on a good Google search and leave a comment below. I challenge you!
If you want to have a successful YouTube Channel it takes some effort, but it can be fun as well. Although YouTube in the 3rd most popular website on the planet (below Google & Facebook), people will not go to YouTube and search for a car to buy. That is why I love YouTube for branding purposes. People will find us by accident and learn more about us.
I also love the embed feature for Youtube. I sling our videos everywhere including testimonial videos on our website, Car of the week videos on our Blog and our Facebook Fan Page.
So there, I said it. YouTube has no SEO Value To Your Website! It can help you get more traffic, but it won’t comes from searches. It will come from Google clicks.
I love a good debate, so if you agree or disagree you will be rewarded with a nice backlink using keyword love from this blog if you leave a comment.
I am going to end this post with this one sentence:
There is no such thing as video SEO!!
A Wealth Of Information Is Gathered For My Car Dealership’s Website Using Piwik Live Stats
I have always been a stats guy, and I take the management of Park Auto Mall’s virtual showroom very seriously. Our real showroom is a beautiful
Each Colored Folder Represents A Page View. This happens Live
place, and it takes many vendors to keep it that way. We have a decorating company come out once a month and put balloons and other eye candy around, we have a woman who comes by often to water the flowers. We have a nightly cleaning crew, we have a car detailing department and another company that comes out and power washes our vehicles every so often.
All this time and money spent, yet our virtual showroom was once neglected. It’s unacceptable to launch a website and just throw an inventory feed on there. It’s unacceptable to have an outdated staff page or a bunch of empty pages on your website.
I watch my virtual showroom like a hawk. I watch my visitors behavior patterns live as they browse my website. I watch as customers come from our blog, YouTube and Facebook. I watch as my traffic comes from search engines, and I pay close attention to what keywords convert.
The sales managers up at the tower will have Reynolds & Reynolds desk log loaded, and they will be able to see all appointments for the day and what’s going on with the current deals in progress. It’s their job to do this, but it’s my job to get the leads and appointments.
My virtual showroom version of their desktop manager is Piwik Live Stats. It’s a free, open source traffic analytics program that I installed on our own server. I have a decent hosting account for our self hosted WordPress Blog, so I installed it on that server.
Now I always use Google Analytics to run reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. However, Google does not offer live stats. For this reason, I use Piwik to monitor my website as it happens.
Although it does many things, my favorite is the live stats. If you look at the screenshot to your right you will see what I mean. Each colored folder represents a pageview by the potential customer. I can even hover over each to get the url of the page they viewed.
The best way I utilize this program is by monitoring the phones. We have 6 full time employees in our BDC, and when the phone rings I listen. Most of our calls come from our website, so just by listening I can pinpoint the actual visitor to the phone call. If they are calling about a particular vehicle I can easily find out which one is them.
Now I can properly update my lead to view the actual source. Sure, it came from our website…but where were they before? Did they come from a Google Search? Was it a tower ad on Auto Trader? Was it a PPC click? Direct visitor maybe?
The next image shows my keywords. This snapshot was for a Sunday morning. Not a bad start, and as you can see we get some nice organic traffic. We already had traffic from 54 different keyword phrases.
Piwik Allows Me To Keep An Eye On My Keywords
I also like the instant data for my conversions, bounce rate etc…
These Sunday morning stats are great so far, and I love seeing this.
Most of our traffic comes from organic searches, and to see a bounce rate of only 20.74% for today (so far) makes me content.
I’m also impressed with the 13.1 pageviews per visitor, so for today I don’t have much to be concerned about.
My conversion rate is great so far as well, and I love the way I can look at all of this data live.
As I said before, I will always run reports on Google Analytics for my main research, but Piwik is great for the live action on my website. I particularly like it when I send out an email blast.
Last week I sent out an email to over 10,000 people. About 20 minutes later, the phone rang and a woman asked for me. Her niece was looking for a car, and she was heading down to a Hyundai dealership that day. This woman was a previous lead of ours, who didn’t even buy a car from us. However, she liked the way she was treated here. She told me her source, but if she hadn’t I would of figured it out quickly by looking at the live stats.
Instant Live Conversion Performance Data
If you want to get valuable data for your internet department, check out this free open source software. I highly recommend It.
Free Live Stats
AutoXLoo: New Car Dealer Website Provider Catches Others Sleeping At The Wheel
Best Layout For Dealer SEO
Patrick Bennett and I have been consulting for Park Auto Mall in the Tampa Bay Florida area for the past year. Since we took over, Park Auto Mall has a dominating presence in the Tampa Bay area.
A couple of months ago the dealership had some problems with their internet director, so I had to step in and regain control. Everything was hijacked by the former employee, including their Google Map Listings (which phone number rang to his personal cell phone), and their Google PPC account.
It only took about a week to regain control, then I stayed on board because of the savvy owner. Thanks to him, I have a virtual playground with full control of his internet department. Including myself, we have an internet team of 7 full time employees.
Since then, we have opened new channels including our YouTube Channel and Facebook Fan Page. During the past year, the owner constantly asked me if they should change website providers. He had a local guy build and maintain his website. Last year I suggested he stop using I-frames, and he did. After seeing a decent traffic spike, I figured we’d let a sleeping dog lie.
About 60 days ago the General Manager asked me to listen to a vendor pitch. It was from a company called AutoXLoo. I never heard of them, but anyone who actually comes by the dealership will always get my time.
I brought them into my office, and Joe pulled up a sample website. Not even 5 minutes into it, I told him to stop. I totally got what they were doing. They had everything I would have wanted in a dealer websites, including the side widgets. I told him a had to get him a meeting in front of the owner, and I did a few days later.
Fred was also very impressed with it, and I had explained to him why I liked it before the meeting. Here is what I really liked about it:
- Most Searched Text Link Widget - Obviously the longer you have a vehicle in inventory the less money you will make on it. As time goes by, your older inventory will always have more impressions than your new. This module will help your older inventory show up in searches by providing a direct text link from your homepage.
- Newly Added Inventory – This widget will allow your new inventory to get crawled and indexed in all search engines in a day. Plus, with both of these modules your website will be forever changing in the eyes of the search engines. This means the Google Bot, Yahoo Slurp and others will come back more often. You will see that your page cache will update more frequently. Park Auto Mall’s former site was the same every single time a spider visited it, but now things are better (see stats below).
- Inventory On Home Page – I want inventory to show up on the homepage, and this allows me to select not only how many to show, but it lets me decide which ones. I can either have it display newest inventory, a random list or I can pick them all. I chose a random pull because I already have the new ones linked to from the side widget. This will allow my other inventory to stay strong in the searches. If you look at Park Auto Mall’s website, you will see 12 vehicles come up. If you refresh (control & F5) you will see new cars. Now, every time a search engine bot stops by the page will be different every time. They love that, and they will give you more authority.
- More Control – I have the ability to add whatever I want on top, bottom, left or right of every page. I can embed videos, clickable images to other pages, widgets and more. I can now engage our visitors. That is why we have average pageviews of over 6 pages per user. That may not sound like much, but when you’re getting close to 400 visitors a days it is. Our bounce rate since the launch is only 22%.
- Vehicle Detail Page Videos – By default, AutoXLoo makes a video for every vehicle in our inventory. It displays a video tab on every vehicle page. We make our own videos, but we don’t have the time to make a video for every car. When we do make a new video, we can easily add it to our vehicle detail page and it will show up instead of the default video. You can see this Corvette listing as an example. (Click the video tab).
- Mobile Phone Website – I’m sure all of us are aware of the increasing number of people that view our websites using mobile devices like Blackberries, Droids and I-Phones. Although smart phones are fully capable of viewing normal websites, they simply take too long to load. CarXLoo provides a mobile website with the main website. Their code automatically recognizes a smart phone visitor, and will redirect it to the mobile site (automatically). You can view the mobile site on a pc by going to m.parkautomall.com. It may not look like much on a PC, but it’s simply perfect on a smart phone.
I could keep going, but I want to get to the numbers. I have been working the internet since 1994, and I’ve launched and relaunched websites in a variety of industries including seafood, printing and the car business. Typically when a website gets a major overhaul it will usually take a dip for a couple of weeks. Lucky for me I have some strong backlinks going to parkautomall.com, so the dip only lasted a couple of days.
Since the launch a week and a half ago, I have already observed a 25% increase in website traffic. I use 2 different web analytics programs, Google Analytics (of course) and Piwik Live stats. Piwik is a free open source program that you can use for free. We have a self hosted Wordpress Blog, so I installed it on that server. This software gives me a wealth of information, and I use that on a daily basis. Matter of fact, I have it up all of the time. I can track each visitor as they navigate. I can even figure out where a visitor came from when a customer calls. I can see exactly what page they’re on, and were they came from. When I find out, I will select the appropriate source in Reynolds & Reynolds so I can have accurate reports. I only log into Google Analytics weekly to run reports. I even added a live visitor widget to our car blog (below right).
Here are some screen shots:
This screenshot is from my Piwik Live stats, and you can see the jump in traffic since the launch. I even excluded all visits from our buidling's IP address so we are not counting our own visits.
This Screenshot From Google Analytics Shows The Last 4 Days. It has only been 4 days since I installed it.
Between those numbers and our Tampa microsite, we’re getting over 600 unique visitors a day. Plus our YouTube videos have resulted in almost 7,000 video views so far. Not bad considering it’s only 42 days old. You want to see how we do it, check out this awesome vehicle video by Danielle or this one by Tiffany (there’s some funny outtakes at the end of Tiffany’s video of me trying to show her how to drive a standard).
Things will only get better as I juice up both websites, so check back in a couple of months to see more results.
Our Microsite Nets 175 - 275 additional visitors every day
My YouTube Experiment For A Tampa Car Dealer Is Paying Off. See The Results So Far
It’s a fact that YouTube is the third most popular website in the world, right behind Google & Facebook. It’s basically a video search engine, and it is owned by Google.
Use Faces Instead Of Vehicle Screen Shots, Your Views Will Rise. It's That Simple
On this blog post I will give you my results so far for the YouTube Channel for Park Auto Mall I made. As of today, here are some stats:
- The YouTube Channel is only 42 Days Old
- Our videos have been watched 5,193 times
- 2,212 of the views were local
- 27% of the views came from our channel
- 35% of the views came from an embedded player (our car blog and Facebook page) We do embed videos on our website, but we just started that 2 days ago.
- 5% came from a mobile device
- Only 7.1 % came from a YouTube search (let’s face it, people don’t go to YouTube to search for vehicles to purchase)
- Only .56 % came from a Google search. Too much competition in Tampa for YouTube
All of those stats can be found in your “insights” page when logged in to YouTube.
Now before I even started our YouTube Channel I looked all around Tampa Bay to see what other dealers were doing. Their views were unimpressive, so I knew we had to try something different. Here is what we do differently:
1) We make sure our freeze frame shot is a face, not a car. Whenever you upload a video to YouTube, you will have the option to pick a screenshot when the video is fully rendered. YouTube will only give you 3 choices, so if a face is available select it. People will be more prone to select a face than just a vehicle. See how it sticks out here?
- Note The Difference In Views From Other Local Dealers (Click To Enlarge)
- Select A Face Thumbnail If One Is Available
2) Use proper tags when uploading. Be sure to fill in your tags, and make sure whichever tags you use are in your title and/or description. You will be surprised of the amount of local websites your video will automatically appear on when tagged properly.
3) Add Outtakes. We had our video guy make us a beginning and an end that we reuse on all of our videos. I added an outtake to the end of a video a few weeks ago, and play them after the close. People love them!
3) Hire Some Personality. Most people are self conscious about being themselves on a video, and it takes a little time for them to relax. Besides obvious reasons to hire somebody, we look for unique skills that they don’t even realize they have. We want our future customers to get to know us, and they will!
Our internet staff is so good, 40% of our customers give us a video testimonial! I know some vendors suggest to create a separate YouTube Channel for testimonials, but we decided not to. We mix them all together.
I know by now your thinking about time, cost and personnel. This is all it takes:
- A Decent Digital Video Camera: $500.00
- Video Editing Software: $500.00+ (I use Sony Vegas)
- 2 People (1 to shoot, and one to demonstrate)
- 10 Minutes Of Time To Shoot The Video (2 people)
- 20 Minutes of time to edit the video (1 person). It used to take me longer, but it’s become so repetitive I’m a lot quicker. The video will take some time to render, but I can do other things while it’s rendering.
We have 86 videos so far, and you can expect more. I let each person pick the vehicle they want to do, that was they’ll have more to say. All of our employees have a unique way of doing the videos, but this one is our best yet:
If you have any YouTube Tips for car dealers please leave some feedback below. This is a dofollow blog, so you can earn yourself a nice backlink for each comment.
Now You Can Post Your Vehicle Inventory On Craigslist Without having To Log In To Any Vendor Website
Just Put The Vin Number In, Click Search & All Fields Will Be Populated
This week Showroom logic launched an even faster way to put your new and used cars on Craigslist. There are many vendors out their offering a Craigslist tool, but each has a backend you have to log in to.
I’m tired of having too many different sites to log into, and if I wanted to hire someone to post for me I wouldn’t be comfortable giving them my user name and password for any website.
With Showroom Logic’s new Craigslist tool, the only site you will have to log into is Craigslist itself.
Your listing will include all photographs you currently have for the vehicle, along with clickable links to your main website’s vehicle detail page or a microsite.
Now you can have your entire staff post along with you, and you don’t have to give out sensitive passwords and user names.Watch how easy it is with this quick online demo:
Park Auto Mall Adds A Bit Of Fun To Their You Tube Videos
Recently, Park Auto Mall decided to take videos a bit more seriously. They plan on investing the time to create real videos, not just moving pictures with a robo-voice.
Their new You Tube Channel is only a month old, but with a team of 6 in the BDC Department they manage to find plenty of time to make the videos. Internet Director and BDC Manager Mike Annable says it really doesn’t take that long.
“We currently make customer testimonial videos and car of the week videos”, Mike says. “The car of the week videos take about 10 minutes to shoot, and about 10 minutes to process. We try to have a bit of fun as well by lately adding little outtakes at the end of each video. We had our video guy make a beginning and an end for each video, and we take the middle and sew them together. We gave me a quick tutorial on how to edit the videos to make them a little bit professional looking. We learn as we go, and here’s an example”:
The customer testimonials can be a bit harder, only because many customers don’t want to be on video. “I would like to get at least one a day, and that would help me saturate the internet with over 300 videos a year”, he says. “Between the car of the week videos and the customer testimonials I can have over 600 videos in a years time. It’s important to note that you will not see thousands of vews for each video, but it adds up. Auto Trader, Cars.com and many other vendors are trying to sell us video, but I look at the views for their current customers and there are very few. Our videos are getting more views because we promote them on our blogs, our Facebook Fan Pages, plus we send the link to each participating customer and they usually send it to their friends.”
Of all the videos they did so far, the outakes video received the most views. It was really funny, and they plan on adding more. Mike says although they take this seriously, they like to have fun doing it. “When you have funny outakes, the staff alone sends them out to friends and family and posts them on their Facebook Wall”:
Take a look at this one:
Check back next week and you’ll see their new beginning and end for each testimonial video.