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I once had a dealer come to me at one of our boot camps and ask me to take a look at his new site. It had been up and running for almost a month, and he was really concerned that the number of leads he was receiving had literally shut off like a faucet since changing to his new site.

I took a few minutes to look at his site, and to be honest, the site looked amazing. Some really cool (at the time) functionality, navigation, and look and feel. But it didn’t take too long to figure out his problem. In getting all caught up with the cool factor of the site, they had removed all opportunity to convert from the VDP pages. They had literally turned his conversion machine into a brochure. It wasn’t that the site wouldn’t convert – it couldn’t. This dealer had spent literally thousands of dollars to cripple his site. But, it looked amazing. 

For years, we’ve offered best practices and talked about the purpose of your website, and now that we’re in the business, well… we’re only going to talk about it more.

So as you look at your current site, maybe planning for a refresh with your current provider, or planning to switch to a new one, it’s important to keep in mind the purpose of your website. 

The purpose of your website is to identify visitors and generate leads. That’s it.

It sounds simple, but it’s amazing how many ways we can get innocently sidetracked with the unimportant. Like looks, for example.

It’s extremely important that your website reflect WHO you are as a dealership and WHERE you are geographically, that’s a non-negotiable. When we design sites for dealers, our graphics team is told to create the site using a splash of info from the dealership Facebook page for personality, and a splash of local info for geography.  We don’t ever want to create ‘cookie cutter’ types of sites, where you could cut out one dealer logo and drop in another and nobody would know the difference.  Designing sites this way provides dealers with sites that are as unique as a fingerprint.

 While it’s important that your site look good, first and foremost it’s supposed to be a conversion machine, every page must have some type of call to action and conversion opportunity or it is a distraction. I know that sounds a little harsh, and maybe rigid, but if you want to maximize the potential of your site, that’s how it is.  Every page should have an opportunity for visitors to engage in some way to identify themselves and/or provide their information to cause them to become a lead of some type or department. This is especially important on VDPs (Vehicle Display Pages), for a particular unit. These pages typically represent 80% or more of page visits, and that makes total sense. Visitors WILL be on these pages, so there MUST be some way to harvest them as a lead available.

It’s frighteningly easy to get caught up in the look and feel of your site and lose focus on what really matters. You want to have an overall sort of theme to your site, but it has to be just that – an overall theme. The reason for this is because with all of the different devices, operating systems, browser versions, screen resolutions, and user preferences, no matter what you do your site is going to render differently in many different ways. That’s why having a responsive site is critical nowadays. Get the theme right, and don’t go nuts trying to get it exactly perfect, because it’s going to be different on other devices. Get the theme right, and let the responsive design handle the specifics across platforms and devices. 

Top tip: if you’re breaking out a color wheel and ruler for your redesign, you’re focusing on the wrong thing. Focus on conversion opportunities and follow up, because cash in the bank is the truest measure of success.

Talk soon, 

Brad