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
You May Have A Viral Campaign At Your Car Dealership Without Even Knowing It
Last week I was over at Park Automall in Tampa Florida visiting Fred, the owner. While I was in his office he showed me this real estate listing. It didn’t take me long to see where he was going with this.
He actually took this home in on trade. A man bought 2 cars with it, and he used his home as a trade-in. As soon he filled me with the details, a big devious smile came across my face and I said “man, this has viral written all over it”. Then he smiled and said “I’m glad you get it, this is what I’ve been trying to say!”
Now when I say viral, you’re probably thinking about Digg or Stumble Upon. Well I’m not, maybe 2 years ago I would of. unless you’re part of the Digg or Stumble Mafia I wouldn’t count on getting anything from there. Of course I still submit to those websites, but I don’t hold my breath waiting for results.
I go for “local viral”, meaning the news. About six months ago we submitted a professionally written press release to lure a local newspaper or TV station to pick up the story. At the time, Twitter was big news so we wrote about “how a car dealer is using social networking to help sell cars in troubled times”. I used a local woman who had connections to write and distribute the press release, and within 24 hours a TV news crew showed up at the dealership and did a story on them. It was broadcasted every hour for an entire 24 hour period on Bay News 9 in Tampa.
This Local Viral Campaign Brought Park Automall Huge Business. Click The Screenshot To Watch It
They have the news footage on their website, and he really should check it out here. This resulted in a huge spike of showroom traffic and sales.
Now we’ll go back to the house story. Stop thinking like a carguy or cargirl for a minute and think about it. This is news!
I wrote a simple blog post about it 3 days ago, and a local news station picked it up. Now I don’t want to jinx anything, but I will finish this blog post after it is aired.
Until then try to be creative in your area and think about a unique situation. You can hire a local press release writer to write and release a story idea for about $300.00.
Believe me when I tell you, it’ll be the best 300 dollars you’re ever spent.
How ECar List Is Saving Izmo Cars
ECar List Saves Izmo Cars
I love technology, and because of that I’ve never been a big fan of Izmo Cars. They do create really nice looking websites, but the way Izmo handled their inventory has always been poor. I knew there was no way to optimize their inventory pages, so I never even bothered to try.
One of my car dealer clients is in Orlando Florida, and a few months back I started helping them juice up their main website. At this time, I had no choice but to select their corporate dealer.com website.
I blogged before about how great dealer.com was, but since working with their corporate site for Napleton I was unimpressed. It wasn’t their fault, but the options available for such a basic website isn’t enough. No matter what you do to it, it looks tacky (like a Cobalt Website). I’m sure there are upgrades available, but Napleton already has a monster of a websites created by Izmo Cars.
A while ago they mentioned they were doing something with E-Carlist, and they were going to incorporate this into their Izmo site.
Today I was poking around, and I like what I see, and here is why:
ECar List Is Using Subdomains Instead Of SubFolders
In case you don’t know the difference, a subdomain is usedcars.napletoncjd.com. A subfolder would be napletoncjd.com/usedcars. If you don’t know the difference you can read the wiki article on subdomains here.
Most companies would use a subfolder because it’s easier to rank and pass along juice. I’m assuming ECarlist is forced to do this because if they did use subfolders, it could conflict with what the main Izmo website is doing.
We use subfolders creatively with our miscrosites, and it works out great with Yahoo & Bing. We can actually get 3 or 4 different pages of the same principal website to show up on page one searches. It’s a bit tougher with Google, but it is possible.
One of the biggest problems with subdomains is simple. A subdomain is treated as an entirely separate website, so it takes some extra work building links to it to obtain rankings.
Inventory RSS Feeds
Finally, somebody else is using inventory RSS Feeds. There are many cool things you do do with an RSS Feed, and here are just a few:
- You can update your Facebook Automatically(get directions).
- You Can Update Twitter. We have a licensed Twitter app that’s more flexible, but you can take your RSS Feed and update your Twitter with Feedburner. If you don’t use FeedBurner, try it out. Burn your feed then click the “socialize tab”.
- Mash Your Blog & Inventory Together. If you already have a dealer blog, I would hope it has an RSS Feed. You can take that RSS Feed AND your inventory feed and mash them together using Yahoo Pipes. This will take 2 or more RSS Feeds and convert them into one. then, take you new RSS feed that Yahoo made you and burn that into Feedburner. You can used the mashed RSS to update your twitter and Facebook Via Feedburner as well.
- Make your own little Smart Phone Application: All you need is an RSS Feed, and you can easily make your own Smart Phone Application here.
- Update LinkedIn: I’m not a big fan of LinkedIn, but you can update LinkedIn just like Facebook and Twitter.
- Deep Link your Inventory using Your Car Dealer Blog: Add an RSS Widget to your blog (for your inventory). This will help in getting your inventory crawled faster by the search engines. I added the RSS feed of Ecarlist to one of the Blogs Napleton has. Look on the right here (scroll down a little). You can also make that cool looking widget on that blog with an RSS Feed. That makes a great call to action. Note, the widget won’t pass authority. It does make a great call to action for humans, but be sure to have the regular feed as well for the bots. I added the widget to the top tight of this blog so you can check it out.
- RSS Direrctories: There are tons of free and paid RSS Directories out there. Spend the time adding your RSS feed to these, it can create much needed backlinks.
Internet Saturation:
Now Napleton has an Izmo Site with 2 subdomains, so that counts as three websites. Plus, they have a corporate Dealer.com website and a Showroom Logic Microsite with a Wordpress Blog. So all together they have well over 2,000 web pages indexed on Google alone. The more pages you have indexed in Google, Yahoo and Bing; the more traffic you will get. It’s simple math really.
I am not sure if Izmo and Ecarlist have a working relationship or not, but in either case I hope Izmo appreciates what they did. You don’t see many companies work together like that. For me, it’s a perfect marriage. Let Izmo work on the design of the website, and let Ecarlist manage the technology.
Izmo should at least send the crew at E-Carlist some pizzas or something.
How To Make A Free Smart Phone Application For Your Car Dealership
Get Your Own Free Dealer Smart Phone Application
Note: This can be used in any industry, but my niche is Car Dealers so the examples I use are for cars.
Car Dealers all over the US have been intrigued by the possibility of having their own Smart Phone Application. The problem is, many car dealers feel it’s too early to pay a developer to create an application. There are many unanswered questions like will people even download this?
I can tell just by looking at my stats that more and more people are using Smart Phones like the IPhone and the Google Droid.
This little application won’t cost you a dime, and it will allow you to present your latest new and/or used car inventory in a block of photographs. Each image is clickable to the actual inventory page. Every time your website inventory is updated, it will update your dealer app.
This could be a great tool for your sales force as well, allowing them to have their inventory information on the fly.
If you have a Smart Phone, follow these instructions to check out Frontier Motor’s Application in Pensacola Florida:
Open the url below in your iPhone’s Safari browser:
http://www.wowzio.com/m/gallery/68208 (If you’re on a PC you can click that to see what it looks like live)
Then, ‘Add to Home Screen’ by clicking on the ‘+’ button.
Pretty cool huh? Now I will give you some simple instructions on how to set it up:
- Go to Wowzio and get your app. For now, you have to email them and ask if you can use it. They do this to avoid porn and other undesirable websites to use it. You will get your approval within 24 hours if you ask them nicely.
- You will have the opportunity to make many different widgets. Simply copy and paste your inventory RSS Feed url into the box, and follow the instructions.
- Now you will have a few layout opportunities. You can use each as a blog, website and/or Smart Phone Widget. You can choose any one:
A Few Different Smart Phone Apps. Pick One, and it's FREE!
If you do not have an RSS Feed for your inventory, you really should get one. Check with your website vendor, you may have one and not realize it. Showroom Logic will give you an RSS Feed with a directory listing here.
Once you have an inventory RSS Feed, you can:
- Update Your Facebook Automatically With Inventory
- Update Twitter Automatically. (Directory users can use Showroom Logic’s Twitter App for Free)
- Submit your RSS Feed to directories, which will automate by itself.
- Do many cool things with Feedburner (too many to list)
- Update LinkedIn
- And now, you can have your own Smart Phone Application
Here is an example of what an inventory RSS Feed will look like:
http://www.tampa-used-cars.com/feed.php
Note: Technically this is a widget that is displayed on a webpage, but it functions just like an app. This will work with I-Pads too!
If you have any questions or comments, please comment below.
New List Of Must Have Worpress Widgets For Your Blog
My Favorite RSS Widget. Click it to see it in action, along with other widgets mentioned on this post.
Depending on your niche, each and every widget can serve a great purpose. I have always been a widget guy, and I’m always looking for new ones to try. I have a bunch of blogs, and I’ve always felt that widgets can make a nice call to action. My niche is car dealers, and I’ve been looking for a good RSS to photo widget for months now. Last night I found one that’s perfect!
The problem with widgets is you have to figure out which ones to put above the page fold. Some will convert, and some won’t.
My Favorite Wordpress Widgets:
BLVD Status Block Party Widget:
BLVD Status is a live stats program. I use this software more than any other program I have. On a weekly or monthly level I use Google Analytics, but the BLVD lets me know what’s happening on my website right now. For example, when I add vehicles to Craigslist I want to know when is the best time to do this. I’ve figured out that after 10:00PM is the best time for the Orlando Craigslist. How did I do this? Simple…the BLVD tells me where my visitors are coming from live. I not only use Craigslist as an advertising method, my main goal is to get the user off of Craiglsist and on to my website. This is why we make our miscrosites look like a third party website.
Not only does this software show me live stats, they also keep track of keyword rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo. It helps me identify what my hot keywords are, and it will let me know if I’m losing or gaining rank. For example, if my best keyword was “Ford Mustang” it would keep track of what position I’m in from all three search engine. If I lose my rankings it will tell me, even if I just drop one spot. If there is a keyword I am trying to rank on, I can set an alert where it will notify me when I do rank.
For my Orlando Dealer, this is how I learned the term “Used Cars Orlando” was not a good keyword to go after. The BLVD helped me identify better keywords that convert. Yes, the BLVD can track conversion as well.
Anyway, last week they launched a new widget called the BLVD Block Party. It shows what articles are being read now, and where the social media traffic came from.
There are many other widgets out there, but the problem is you don’t want to add too many. Simple observations will show you which ones work best. Last night, I found a widget I’ve been searching for:
Wowzio RSS Image Widget
According to the Wowzio Website, they currently have 3,556,195,800 live widgets. If you want a widget from them, you have to ask. I applied late last night and I had an invitation in my email inbox this morning. Why do they do that? They want to stay clean, and they don’t want their widgets showing up on porn sites and such. Here is what it looks like:
Anyway, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. It automatically reads my RSS Feed and displays the images in a widget. I use it for my microsite RSS Feed. It shows my 10 newest vehicles added to inventory, with photos. The great thing is the automation, when the new inventory feed rolls in this will update automatically. Each photo is clickable to the actual vehicle, and the design and layout is awesome! There are some other widgets out there, but none look professional. Even Feedburner offers something similar, and it’s called Buzzboost. The problem is it doesn’t look very well, and it ends up being too tall. The widget space above the pagefold is valuable real estate, and I don’t want one widget taking up all of the space. Wowzio displays a widget of 8 small photos. The photos are sized perfectly, and they allow the possibility of the next widget to show above the pagefold. I elected to have 8 photos show because I want to observe. I can always change it to 6 or 4 to allow the Facebook Widget to protrude more. Wowzio offers more widget styles than that, and you can see them all on their website at wowzio.com. I’m trying another one of their widgets on this blog. You can see it on the right up a little bit. I like where they’re going with this one. People love seeing and clicking photos, and this can be a great tool for car dealers. I’m really excited to see results from this widget.
Facebook Widget:
The Facebook Widget is a great call to action, but it depends on how you use your Fan Page. If you link to other websites on your Facebook Fan Page, you may send your visitors away. When a dealer put their inventory on their wall, that’s when it becomes a great call to action. People like to look at photos, and they can scroll down and see the newest inventory. I also like the potential of obtaining new fans.
Twitter Widget:
I used to have my Twitter Widget on the top. Looking at my stats, it does make a great call to action. Basically, it scrolls and shows a car dealer’s newest inventory tweets. Whenever a visitors clicked one of the bit.ly links it would bring them right to the vehicle’s page.
Regular RSS Feed Widget:
This is a must have for all blogs. If you are a car dealers and you have an RSS feed for your inventory, be sure to add this. It’s not a great call to action, but it’s a great way for your new inventory to get crawled and indexed quicker in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Normally it will just be text links, and the photos won’t show. Again, I do this only for search engines. The RSS Feed will change automatically every time your inventory is updated. This means Googebot and Yahoo Slurp will see fresh content when it visits your blog or website to look for changes, which will make them visit more often.
Funnel Traffic To Your Main Website Widget:
About 5 years ago I attended a Yahoo! seminar in Boston. One of the speakers was talking about traditional advertising verse internet advertising, and she mentioned using people in your ads is still the way to go. Think about it, the big corporations who market use people most of the time right?
Many car dealers have such a high turnaround in their internet department, so you won’t see them use this method. Last month I added Dani Lunsford’s Photo to Napleton Orlando’s blog. Since then I have observed a 50% increase in visitors clicking to their main dealer website.
This is why I think this widget is important. It’s a simple clickable image that even a novice can do. Just make a new text widget in your Wordpress Blog and add you own code:
HTML Code for your Widget
The above code will make a clickable image just like this
If you don’t know simple HTML, you can use this Free Online HTML Editor to generate your code. When you create your clickable ad, be sure to size it accordingly so it will fit tight on your blog. If you’re a Firefox user, check out this free extension called Measureit. You must also upload your image somewhere, so the easiest way is to go to “Media” in your backend and upload it that way. Then click “view image” and copy and paste the url. That will be your image location. If you don’t have image editing software like Photoshop, try Gimp. It’s open source and FREE.
Recent Comment Widget
I use the recent comment widget to reward my readers who comment on my blog posts. This is a dofollow blog, and I have the widget so the commentor will be rewarded with a dofollow link to their website directly from my homepage. Obviously I won’t approve spam comments, but genuine comments will be rewarded. If you want more participation on your blog, I suggest you follow suit. I even go one step further and send each comment to Twitter and my Facebook FanPage.
Why Are My Blogs So White?
Remember, the main reason to have a blog is to drive traffic somewhere. You will not get a lead from somebody reading your blog, and if you do it will be a rare occurrence. I blog about a dealers inventory. Once a week I will look at their newest inventory and I’ll simply pick a car like this. I prefer more text than images, because this is how I get the traffic from searchers. The search engines love text, and they gobble it up like candy.
If you look at that post, you will see that I linked to the category page of the Dodge Challenger, plus I sent a deep link to an actual Dodge Challenger listing. It’s really simple. Did you know you can have a self hosted Wordpress Blog for less than $100.00 per year?
This is a dofollow comment blog, and educated responses will be rewarded with a nice link from our homepage comment widget.
How Imporant Is Bounce Rate In Determining A Websites Performance?
The bounce rate of a dealer’s website seems to be the biggest concern lately. There are a few things you must understand, especially if you hired an SEO Firm to optimize your website. If they did a good job, you will find that your bounce rate increased. On the surface that doesn’t sound very good right? It actually is good, and I’ll tell you why.
Look At Your Dealer Stats:
You may be proud that your bounce rate is at 20%. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but look at your top 10 keywords. I would bet that most of them contain your dealer name right? This searches are looking for you, so you can be assured they will not become a bounce. I’m sorry to inform you, but you cannot really credit that with your internet department. These are people driving by your dealership, or perhaps someone who saw your TV ad and forgot what your domain name was. Now I would hope that you rank first on all of your dealership’s queries, but you really can’t count that as seo. That’s a gimme.
The more organic traffic you get, the higher your bounce rate will be:
Here’s the problem. Yourself or a good SEO company will obviously optimize your website or misrosite for local traffic, using city and state related keywords. It wouldn’t make sense to target the word “Chevrolet Dealership”. Not only would it be costly, but why would you want Alaska traffic going to your website if you’re located in Miami Florida? If it was an easy keyword to rank on, I’d say go for it. That would be a great Google Map Phrase to advertise with the local business center, but to rank on that keyword phrase in searches would cost 10’s of thousands of dollars.
The reason why your bounce rate goes up is simple. The more you optimize your website, the more organic traffic you get by accident. This morning, my Orlando Dealer got a visit from a user that searched for light blue toyota sienna 2009 on Google. There was no mention of the word “Orlando”, or “Florida”. Here is another example:
The odds that this click was from the Florida area is pretty slim, therefore this will be a sure bounce. The more of these impressionsyou get, the higher your bounce rate will be. This unique long-tailed search term was number one on Google out of 3/4 of a million websites.
This was an accidental visit, and the odds of that person being located near Florida is pretty slim. That keyword phrase even shows up in Google’s UK Servers. So the odds of this visitor becoming a bounce is favorable.
How a bounce is calculated?
“A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.” – Says Wikipedia
This makes it obvious that you have to be careful which stats program to use. Never trust stats that a vendor gives you. Always use a third party program like Google Analytics. If you use a vendors stats, they can set their bounce rate to be “anyone who enters and stays for more than 2 second will not be a bounce”. I have also found that many stats programs count spiders as visits. That is so wrong! You know how many spiders are out there crawling around? Some shady SEO Companies can write bot codes to crawl your site too, to make it look like human traffic.
This is what Google says about their bounce rate:
“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.” —Says Google
Now if you were selling CD’s which could be shipped anywhere, this wouldn’t be applicable to you, but you are selling a high dollar items. Cars that many people just won’t buy without kicking the tires, or seeing it in person. Why would somebody from California buy a car in Miami Florida? Unless it’s Jay Leno, I don’t see it happening.
There are factors in other niches as well:
“While bounce rate is a useful tool for e-commerce sites, it is of more questionable value for sites such as news and information, where many visitors go to scan headlines and conduct research, and can find what they want immediately on the entry page. Indeed, for any kind of informational site, sophisticated users are likely to bookmark a page within the site, which then becomes their personal entry page, check it (e.g., for sports scores, the price of pork bellies etc.), then bounce right off. The page will have done its job, but might still have a bounce rate above 80%, bringing up the average for the whole site. For such sites, metrics such as returning visitors vs. new visitors might be more informative and should be used to understand the overall picture better.” —-Says Wikipedia
Read more about Bounce Rates on Wikipedia here.
Is Toyota Getting Bad Rap From the Press? Cat Thinks So
Cat Ellis writes articles for us. She’s a die hard Toyota girl, and she wanted to give her two cents about the latest Toyota Recalls.
The recent Toyota recalls have certainly garnered a lot of attention in the media. And, why not? It makes for great drama, and drama sells. Toyota has had a long standing reputation of making reliable, safe vehicles that hold their value well.
As a long time, highly satisfied Toyota owner, I became very curious as to whether or not the media hype was an accurate reflection of the recall situation. Like many current Toyota owners, this could easily be the deciding factor whether or not I will purchase another Toyota again in the future.
Cat Ellis Of Showroom Logic Defends The Toyota Recalls
One of the biggest selling points for Toyota cars and trucks has historically been how well they hold their resale value. Toyota vehicles have traditionally required very little in the way of maintenance costs over the life of the vehicle. Where most new vehicles suffer massive depreciation, the initial depreciation associated with purchasing a new Toyota has been mild in comparison. When Toyota owners have traded in or sold their used car or truck, they have been able to recoup much more of their initial cost.
For those buying a used Toyota, one could reasonably expect the vehicle to last a long time without a major repair, and continue to hold its value better than other used cars and trucks. Potential repair costs are usually the biggest concern for used car shoppers. Toyota has proven to be a predictable, low-cost-to-own choice in used cars for people all over the world for decades. It takes a long time to build up that kind of reputation.
These recalls involved over 8 million vehicles worldwide. (That does not mean that all the vehicles recalled had experienced problems.) On the surface, this sounds alarming, however when one takes a look at exactly what was involved and the numbers associated with each recall, a different picture begins to emerge
Now, here come the recalls in question. Recalls involving floor mats, sticky accelerators, and ABS braking software have been in the news since 2007. These recalls involved over 8 million vehicles worldwide. (That does not mean that all the vehicles recalled had experienced problems.) On the surface, this sounds alarming, however when one takes a look at exactly what was involved and the numbers associated with each recall, a different picture begins to emerge.
The initial recall involving floor mats was the result of optional all-weather mats and unsecured mats intended for SUVs that ended up in other models. The recall involved just under 4 million vehicles worldwide, representing approximately half of all vehicles affected by all three recalls combined. Another point to consider is that there was nothing with the Toyota vehicles themselves. The issue was with the floor mats. The fix required nothing more than removing the mats.
This recall was ultimately amended to involve sticking accelerator pedals. This expanded recall involved all the same vehicles as the first. What was expanded were the precautions taken to prevent accelerator pedals from being caught by the inappropriate floor mat or floor mat installation. The amended recall provided for a reshaped pedal to avoid entanglement with floor mats, a brake override system, a newly designed floor mat, the removal of the old mat, and a reimbursement to the owner if they did not want the new floor mat. Again, there was nothing wrong with the vehicle itself, but was a precautionary measure.
The second recall involved sticking accelerator pedals that had nothing to do with floor mats. Certainly, a vehicle accelerating suddenly and not responding to the brake would be enough to rattle anyone. However, when tests were performed on affected models, independent sources like Car and Driver and Edmunds.com were able to slow and stop the Toyota vehicles in question.
The third recall involved a much smaller numbers of the newer 2010 Toyota Prius. The ABS braking software caused braking malfunctions, leading to the recall and rewrite of the software. The response time for this recall and solution was very quick, just a matter of days.
While the sticking accelerator recall did not include the Prius, some Prius owners have claimed that their vehicle suddenly accelerated. However, the Prius has a unique feature, something akin to a “black box”. Information from these devices have been checked by third-party and government inspectors, and have come to the conclusion that driver error is to blame. According to the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA), the information is more consistent with having the accelerator fully engaged, rather than the brake. In other words, the driver had their foot on the wrong pedal.
Pressing the accelerator instead of the brake has been a common driver error for as long as folks have been driving. The question is, how many of the problems reported that prompted the sticking accelerator recall were also driver error? Unfortunately, Event Data Recorders (black boxes) are not currently standard on most vehicles, though that will be changing in 2012.
While many media outlets speculated that these recalls would result in a massive drop in Toyota sales, this has not proven to be the case. Based on interviews with US auto owners conducted by marketing research firm TRC, Toyota’s solid history of designing and manufacturing quality, safe cars and trucks is winning out over media hype. The interviews revealed that most people still perceive Toyota as a safe, reliable automaker based on the product’s historical performance. This bodes well for Toyota maintaining their reputation of manufacturing vehicles that hold their value, and keeping Toyota at the top of the pack for reliable used cars and trucks.
My own experience as a Toyota owner has been a good one. I have owned both a Corolla and a Camry. They have both been economical to own, needing only routine maintenance that would be required of any other vehicle. Both were purchased as used Toyotas, and both have lasted over a decade. My Corolla made it to over 210,000 miles, and my Camry is still riding like new at around 150,000 miles. Both vehicles have been very inexpensive to operate, even with rising gas prices. After looking at all the information, I would absolutely purchase another Toyota.
After looking at all the information, I would absolutely purchase another Toyota
For those looking to buy a safe, reliable car or truck, Menlove Toyota Scion in Bountiful, Utah has a large inventory of both new and used Toyotas. Menlove Toyota Scion also has their own financing, as well as Service and Part Center for your convenience. Their Toyota Dealer web site, provides Bountiful-area car shoppers with details about Menlove’s inventory, hours, and current new and pre-owned specials. Utah auto shoppers would do well to check them out.
A Quick Note About Your Customer’s Privacy & Your Websites
If you plan on using different microsites, be sure you think about how to secure your contact forms. Your customers put their trust in you, and if you make it easy to find their information I’m not sure they would appreciate it much.
I was just looking at the live stats for one of my dealers websites. This particular website has Google Adsense Installed, and one of our ads popped up.
The customer clicked it and was brought to my site. I saw that the url had a session ID on it, so I clicked it.
There was all of the womans information filled in. You should all make sure you are not using sessions ID’s like this:
When I Clicked This URL, All Of the Womans Info was on there (still). I blacked out her info