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 It’s unacceptable to have an outdated staff page or a bunch of empty pages on your website.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
Florida Chevrolet Dealership Near Tampa Proves That Radio Advertising Still Works
When Bill Heard Chevrolet in Plant City Florida abruptly closed at the end of last year, it was quickly re-opened under new ownership. It’s now called Stingray Chevrolet.
Being “related” to the largest volume Chevrolet Dealer in The United States (Classic Chevrolet in Texas), it’s obvious they know what they’re doing.
I am without a doubt pro-internet, and I believe there is a huge future in it for everybody. However, I cannot help to notice that a large dealership like that with a non-existent internet presence can still sell cars.
Other than Autotrader, you will not find this dealer anywhere on the internet. I happen to live nearby, and I have been researching area car dealers for years. This past Christmas when Stingray Chevrolet opened it’s doors, I expected to see them everywhere.
I am guessing they probably only have a few internet sales managers, without a director. If they had an experienced director, their inventory would have been saturated. If they do have one, I wonder what they do all day?
Anyway, what they did was a form a brilliant relationship with Bubba The Love Sponge. It all started back in May when Stingray Chevrolet was unveiling the new Camaro.
They hired a DJ named MJ to make an appearance. Apparently MJ and Bubba the Love Sponge have some problems. Extra security had to be called in because some of Bubba’s fans were expected to show and cause problems. Respectfully, Bubba told them all to be good. But we all know anything could happen.
Anyway, this is how the relationship with Bubba started. I think Stingray Chevrolet realized how much of a following Bubba has, so it wasn’t long before Stingray Chevrolet was advertising on Bubba’s show.
The relationship grew so strong that Bubba started personally endorsing Stingray Chevrolet on the air. Soon Bubba got himself a demo from the dealership, and since then even Bubba’s good friend Hulk Hogan received one.
Currently their three strongest assets is their relationship with Bubba The Love Sponge, their location (visible from highly traveled I-4) and their inventory. If you’re looking for any Chevy Product, the odds are good that they will have any style and color you want.
Many people don’t realize it, but they do have a used car department. It’s a separate building on their lot, with about 80 used vehicles.
Basically, what I’m saying is simple. There is no single answer to selling cars, but the right relationships with the right people can make a world of difference.
I did see one thing I’m not sure I agree with, they are advertising on a website that sells marijuana growing supplies. I’ m not sure why a dealer would want to have a relationship with a company like that.
If you look at this screen shot, you will see that somebody embedded this YouTube Video from Stingray Chevrolet’s Youtube account, using tags related to Marijuana (outlined in red).
Marijuana & Used Cars Don't Mix
It is important to note that Stingray probably doesn’t even know about this. Anybody can embed a YouTube Video on their blog, but I’m not sure why anyone would in this case.
If it was up to me I would contact that blog owner and have them take it down asap.
Alexa Rank Means Nothing For Car Dealer Websites – Stop Getting Fooled By Vendors
When I worked at a car dealership as an internet director, many vendors including Autotrader used to brag about their Alexa Rank. The lower your Alexa Rank is, the better the website is.
This could become a long post if I went into details, so I won’t. Instead I will perform a simple search on Google and prove to you how untrue it is.
If you look at the screen shot below, I have the SEO Quake toolbar installed so I don’t have to click each website to find it’s Alexa Rank. Each will be highlighted in red:
Alexa Rank Is Meaningless (See Below)
The search I performed was “used cars lakeland”. If Alexa was accurate, the results would have been in a different order (Remember, the lower the Alexa Rank number is the “better” the website is suppose to be).
- Number one on the Google results was a Showroom Logic website. It’s Alexa Rank is 1,443,038
- Number 2 & 3 was Automotive.com, with an Alexa Rank of 4,502. Now how come these 2 pages didn’t show up first? They have suck a great Alexa Rank.
- Number 4 is Lakeland Toyota. They have an Alexa Rank of 3,250,526.
- Number 5 is Lotpro, which has an Alexa Rank of 80,654.
I don’t even think I have to go much further. If Alexa rank meant anything the search results would have been presented differently. Matter of fact, if you move on to page 3 and 4 you will see Alexa ranks better than any of these results.
Alexa Rank can be easily manipulated if you want to try a little experiment. Simply install the Alexa Tool Bar on your browser and watch it decrease on a weekly basis.
So, the next time a vendor tries to sell you with Alexa Rank and them to prove how beneficial it is.
5 Reasons Why Car Dealers Should Have Their Inventory On Craigslist
Live Visitors From Craigslist
Last night I did an experiment on the Orlando Craigslist. I posted 6 cars within a span of 15 minutes using our Craigslist Posting Tool. Many car dealers don’t realize the instant traffic obtained from a Craigslist post.
We use live stats on all of our websites, and we can log in at any moment and see what’s going on. I had this software running in the background as I was making each post.
Reasons why you should:
- 1) Craigslist Is A Huge Source Of Traffic. These potential customers are on Craigslist because they are looking to buy a car.
- 2) Obtain Quality Traffic To Your Website From Each Vehicle: The idea is you want to get the user to visit your website, and get them off of Craigslist. You want them to see the rest of your inventory, so you need a call to action. We show all photos in our posts, and all but one are thumbnails. When the user clicks anything, they are brought to your actual page. As they scroll down they will see similar inventory, and we want them to keep clicking.
- 3) 90 Days Of Free Advertising with Keyword Search: Many dealers are unimpressed that their Craigslist post stays up for 90 days. They must realize that Craigslist has a keyword search. If a user searches for “Mustang” it will show all Mustangs posted within the last 90 days. The 6 posts alone I did will send several hundred visitors to that website in a 90 day period. If I did 6 posts a day, I would get thousands of visitors.
- 4) Leads You Wouldn’t Normally Get: Overnight we received 3 email leads so far, and a few phone calls already came in on a Sunday morning. Not bad for 15 minutes of work!
- 5) Craigslist Ads Show Up Frequently On Google Searches: For that 90 days period, each of your ads will show up on Google searches. Although Craigslist in no way dominates the Google Searches, it’s still a great source.
So now let’s look at the quality of the traffic. Besides our live stats, we use Google Analytics. People familiar with GA know it is a few hours behind in reporting, which is why I waited until this afternoon to check yesterday’s stats.
47 Visits In About 4 Hours Last Night
- Visits: From about 8:00PM to midnight, 47 people clicked a link on the ad that brought them to our website. Keep in mind, these are just the people that clicked from the ad. I’m sure hundreds of people saw each ad.
- Pages Per Visit: Out of the 47 visitors, the average person clicked 2.02 cars. With a bounce rate of 75%, that means that 12 people looked at more than one vehicle.
- Average Time On Site: 54 seconds doesn’t sound like much, but that’s a lot of time. Go to one of your vehicle listings and count to 54 while you look at the vehicle details.
- New Visits: 93.62% percent of the visitors have never been on this website before. This means that about 6.4% of the people from last night came back and took another look. Another words, 3 people clicked from Craigslist last night more than once.
- Bounce Rate: A bounce rate of 75 percent is expected because we link to each vehicle. They were presented with what the came for and hit their back button and moved on. But, 1 in 4 people chose to look at more vehicles which is what we want.
UPDATE:
Updated Craigslist Stats
After a full 24 hours I checked the stats for all Craigslist visitors. 168 people actually clicked through to the website, looking at an average of 2 cars or trucks each.
I looked deeper and 6 users actually spent over 10 minutes on the site looking at an average of 30 cars. This is what internet advertising is all about, and it’s up to you to get your inventory out there.
You want your inventory on Craigslist? Showroom Logic can do that for you. Call Mike at 863-666-0130 or send me an email: mike@showroomlogic.com