Friday, August 10, 2012

How Customers Interact With Your Dealership's Website?

Seeking the ideal car online is usually a daunting task for consumers. But by knowing how consumers interact with your website will help you create an ideal experience for them, and make them loyal customers in the process. While creating your dealership's website it is important to keep in mind that you are creating it for your consumers and that you should be providing the said consumers with a seamless car buying experience. But the creation of your dealership's website is not a one time - set it, then forget it - experience. You must understand how consumers interact with your website, to improve your website and your consumer's experience. Here are a few tips on how you can understand your consumers' interaction with your site:

Dig Through the Analytics
To make informed decisions on how you should change your website, look into your site's analytics. It is here that you will find all of the data you need to see how people are interacting with your dealership's site once it is created. You can see what pages are attracting consumers' attention, which pages repel consumers and most importantly what pages are converting consumers. These insights will help you see what you can do to properly optimize your website, so as to attract and retain more consumers. While looking through your analytics it is important to look at a large sample of data. One day, or even one week, of activity is not enough to glean proper insights into how consumers are interacting with your site. While looking at your site's analytical data, the rule of thumb is to analyze a minimum of one month's data. The larger the sample the clearer the insights will be.

Your site's analytics will be your roadmap, guiding you to make changes to your site. Your analytics won't tell you exactly how to change your site, but you will be able to generally see what parts of your site needs improvement. Looking through your site's analytics will help you make informed and decisive changes to your website.

Create and Test New Pages/Content
Once you know where your site needs improvement, it is then time to create test and new variations of landing pages and content on your site. By creating different landing pages and by varying the content on your site you will not only keep your site fresh but you will also be able to see how your consumers interact with your site after these changes. Does new content on a page make consumers stay on your site longer? Does one landing page convert better than another page? Even the slightest changes to a page within your website can change how a consumer will interact with your website.

When creating test versions of landing pages or testing new versions of on-page content it is important to remember that you don't need to be testing for testing's sake. If you are seeing that your consumers are interacting with pages in a positive way then you probably don't need to change anything on that page. Remember to look into the analytics for your website after you have made changes to see their success.

Get your Consumer's Feedback
Sometimes, in order to truly understand how consumers interact with your website it is best to just ask. By asking for feedback from your consumers you eliminate speculation and can make improvements based upon what your actual consumers are saying. One way to do this is to create short, voluntary surveys on your website for consumers to fill out when they convert or when they are leaving your website. You could also email the same survey to the members on your mailing list or have customers in your physical store fill out the survey if they came to your dealership because of your website.

Asking consumers to give you feedback on your dealership's website will ultimately help you create the best online experience for them. Consumers can eliminate the speculative nature of creating test pages and content by telling you what they specifically liked or disliked about your website. Once you have compiled enough consumer reviews then you can make informed changes to your website.

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