Best PracticesDealership Marketing

Mobile Visitors on the Rise

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Mobile Visits to your Dealership are on the Rise

This isn’t news. We know that more and more mobile devices are accessing the web on a daily basis. What might news to you, however, is the coming mobile tidal wave reports are predicting. Cisco’s spring 2011 study cites 2010 mobile data traffic nearly tripled (2.6x) for the third year in a row. A Tech Crunch article states mobile traffic is expected to rise 40x in the next 5 years. Fortune’s August 2010 article sums it up: “The numbers don’t lie: Mobile devices overtaking PCs.”

The coming tidal wave of mobile devices is turning into a tsunami. As such we need to evaluate how mobile users are engaging with our virtual storefront.

Your Mobile Visitors

Have you looked at your site’s mobile traffic? Here’s how to with a Google Analytics account:

  1. Log in to your Analytics account.
  2. Once logged in, you need to look on the left hand column for “Visitors.”
  3. Under “Visitors,” click on “Mobile.”

You will then see statistics of people who viewed your site with mobile phones.

Chances are you’ll be surprised at the number. Even more interesting – look at how that number has increased over the last few months. DealerRefresh focused on this topic in May of 2010 – read the comments section from participating dealers.

Hosting a weekly video series “Mobile and the Dealer” allows me to chat with dealers around the nation. Dealers are consistently reporting 15-20%+ of total web traffic coming from mobile devices. This has increased ten fold for some over the last 12 months!

Bouncing or sticking?

Take a look at how mobile visitors are behaving on your site. Specifically look at bounce rates of mobile visitors and compare them to traditional visitors. If you’re like many, you’ll see sky-high bounce rates on your mobile visitors. In this podcast: Eric Hanson talks about mobile visitor bounce rates of vegas.com and how optimization strategies effectively lowered those stats.

Understanding Mobile Visitor Behavior

More and more reports are showing different behavior patterns for mobile visitors vs. desktop. This only makes sense, but we are now seeing data to back it up. What’s clear: giving a mobile user a desktop experience results in bounces and decreased conversion, if any.

Time on site metrics for traditional desktop users continues to be higher than metrics for mobile devices. Mobile visitors are on the go. They consume information many times in sections rather than a single sitting. The essence of being on the go doesn’t allow for prolonged spans of attention. An interesting study by ClickTale, puts some numbers to the speculation that mobile users don’t like to scroll. Long loading times, scrolling, zooming,: – all of these functions are turns off and contribute to bounces for a desktop formatted website.

Capturing Mobile Visitors

Top dealers are providing a mobile-optimized experience for their customer. These dealers are using mobile sites and mobile apps designed to capture the customer, providing first the information they are seeking, then spurring them to action. If you buy a mobile site or mobile app from a quality vendor serving the dealer market, you’ll see a lot of attention has been placed on channeling the customer through a specific set of processes.

Now that dealer apps can be downloaded right from the dealership website, dealers are using apps to create long-term relationship channels with the customer from pre-sale to post-sale service and incentives.

As mobile device traffic increases, make sure your marketing strategy doesn’t forget your mobile customer.

What is your dealerships mobile marketing strategy for the near future?

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    Ryan Thompson - The Canadian!
  • September 9, 2011
I was waiting for the Mobile Title Wave to hit and I think its finally here!!! This thread is very relevant subject: http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/dealership-mobile-website-who-you-using-2013.html
J
Great work Ben, TY!
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Cars are big ticket items, so people do lots of research before purchasing.  Since more and more people are browsing on a mobile device looking for information, a dealership needs to have a mobile friendly web presence.  There's a lot of competition out there and avoiding mobile is a quick way to lose customers. 
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The people visiting your mobile site aren't just casually shopping - this is a much more serious buyer and needs deliberate call-to-action ... things that would aid the customer to buy today.  Where your traditional website is built more useful to the casual browsing consumer - more research and such there for instance.   I gotta figure that the % of mobile site visitors who view automotive content within the 48 hour period prior to purchase is very high.
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