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.

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.

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