We own another dealership and get around 7%+ from that dealeron site. I do the SEO myself for our sites. Our other dealership is http://www.universityparkaudi.com although they have certain features turned off that affect the conversion (e.g. they do not have the "request sales price" button on new inventory.) They think their customers do not like that.

The coupon popup is what sold me initially on dealeron, because they allowed me to use it for free on my previous vendor's website and immediately saw a 1.5% increase in conversion. We now receive 60% of all our leads from our own website and around one third come from the pop-up. They turn in to sales in a high percentage also.

If you are interested in trying the coupon feature on your site, so you can see how well it converts, let me know. I am sure I can get dealeron to give it to you for a few months for free.

9+% is SMOKIN!

I can quickly see how Sutherlin got hot strong lead counts, a strong brand, little competition (for such a large market), deep inventory, a great dealer rep and (most important) a 45 min drive from Atlanta.

You're not so easy to figure out.

You have 5 other Acura players in your market. Your Dealeron site is rockin the Acura search. A quick look has you with >200 new acuras in stock (quick look, your biggest player in Dallas area?) I can see of all of the brands out there, Acura demos must be top3 for "likely to use the net" PLUS a brand that dosent discount (haggle) much. Hmmm… The 9% is sick! I'd love to see how it stacks up against other Acura players in gigantic markets.

I'll read your links this weekend!

How is that annoying pop-up coupon thingy working for you?

I noticed you mentioned Sutherlin Nissan for having a 7% conversion ratio. I do not want to brag (but I guess I will), but over the last 3 months I am getting a 9.18% conversion ratio from my dealeron.com site (filled out lead forms divided by unique visitors). I do not include phone calls in conversion numbers, because customers will call back those tracking numbers when they are not on your website anymore, which will inflate your conversion.

Regarding where dealer websites will go? read these articles on what trends move the market:

http://trendwatching.com/trends/transparencytrium…

I think our customers will want to see more transparency. I think customer testimonials are a good example of this and they will become more and more important.

http://trendwatching.com/trends/nowism/

This article writes about Nowism. Great example of this is that more and more customers want to visit your site on their mobile phone and not wait until they get home behind a computer.

My anti-SM rant and Brian's vision have a common denominator… "on page optimization". IMO, until we dig and find out what is on our shopper’s minds and address these issues with on-page solutions, Brian's ecommerce game plan won't ever get to 1st base.

Our shoppers use our sites as a catalog site, not a commerce site. IMO, we can't get to an e-commerce dealer site until we get our shoppers so comfortable with the onpage experience that they _readily_ use the forms on the pages we offer them now.

For example, Sutherlin Nissan rocks with a 7% conversion ratio, this is the highest visitor-to-lead stat I've ever seen. Most of us normal dealers are coming in at 3% or lower. Regardless, these numbers suck. 95 of 100 shoppers are un-motivated to communicate with us (let alone give us money) IMO, numbers this poor come from a LOT of unanswered questions on our shoppers minds. On-page optimization needs to addresses these mystery issues.

Because we have a home-brew indie web site http://www.usedcarking.com (thnx to Matt & crew at HomeNet!) we are free to explore new ideas without the legacy problems of the big boy vendors. For example, we added a simple and bold tradein button on the VDP and the response was amazing, we doubled our lead count overnight. This simple act confirmed to me that the upside from on-page optimization is huge.

I am not saying that our customers will ever embrace ecommerce, but to get to ecommerce, we need to Crawl, Walk, Run.

Sutherlin Nissan conversion stats thread: http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/free-24-7-live…

My entire presentation at Digital Dealer will be focused on this topic. Please come by if you want to hear more about my opinion on the topic.

As to Brian's question, the answer to what is next is obvious – mobile communications. Consumers don't answer phone calls from sales people, don't want to talk on the phone, don't listen to voice mails, don't get emails siphoned off by ISP blocks and spam filters and don't often open emails due to email inundation.

What do consumers like? The ease and anonymity of text messaging. Your website should be engaging people through their mobile devices, capturing their mobile phone number and earning the right to keep in touch directly with the one device they always have with them and in the method that they strongly prefer – text messaging.

I can understand that you do not want to come off as self serving so let me come from a completely different angle.

I applaude you for using the word custom website. I mean truly custom and custom strategy and custom plan. Your industry reminds me of the travel industry in early 2000.

The travel industry was giving dollars to expedia, hotels.com and the many others like them. Finally the hotels, rental car companies and others said NO MORE and took back control of their industry and started making money.

Today you can go to a hotel website and be given a guarantee that you will not find a lower rate. The hotels developed their own plan of action.

I apologize in advance for my negative tone. I am certainly trying not to get business off of this platform but encouraging you people to look for help outside of your industry. Bring in a fresh pair of eyes.

I own an interactive agency and I stumbled across this website doing a little competitive anlyasis for an auto group.

The one thing that stands out to me (an outsider looking in) is that most of you are developing/marketing websites but got your start from the auto industry. In other words you grew up in this verticle but you are in your own little bubble and not seeing what other industries are doing.

In this industry you have cars.com, auto-trader.com and many more ready to guarantee this and promise that. You are buying leads you could have gotten on your own if you would just put a strategy in place.

Most of you are talking about Social Media when you dont used Advanced Analytics (use one outside of your vendor like google) nor do you have a true strategy planned out.

You are using way to many vendors and the vendors are here today gone tomorrow – just waiting for the next guy to walk in the door and promise you 150 leads .

You guys need to SLOW DOWN, pocket some money and formulate a strategy.

One of our clients is a large rental car company. It took us a year to figure out their strategy online. Through trial and error we had successes and failures but we firgured out what worked, documented why and over time developed a rock solid strategy so we knew if we spent XXXXX in online advertising we could expect XXXXX in sales as a result.

You see the measurement is the true value of the web. This is something that most dealers never had before. Put your vendors through the ringer and see who is providing value. I bet most aren't.

As an agency we would never take on two dealerships in the same market however some how they have convinced you guys that it's okay.

You are cannabalizing yourself. If you want to breakout then think outside the box. Hard to think outside the box when you are taking advice from someone who really isnt on your team.

I would hate to be in an industry where it is all about $500/month for this and $250 for that.

Are you really happy with the performance of your vendors?

Do you know with certainty the true value they are bringing to the dealership?

Are you managing your own set of books to make sure what they are saying is reality?

The time is now for you to learn how to measure what promotions are working, what your website traffic is really doing. Or example…

what percentage of website visitors are looking for cars?

what percentage are service department customers looking for a phone number?

Have you filtered out your own employees from your web traffic stats?

How much traffic does your competitor have on their website every month?

95% of the dealerships cannot answer these questions yet.