If you have been following my recent posts, I have been helping auto dealers understand the factors which impact the conversion rates on their retail websites, which I call the five levers of conversion optimization. Every General Manager and Marketing Director would like to see more leads generated each month from their website traffic, but wishing is not a strategy.

So let’s agree that dealers need a strategy which includes accurate measurement, month-over-month progress reporting, and specific instructions on what to fix, change, or remove.

The instructions which dealers receive to increase leads has to be from a trusted source. With 21 years of experience working with automotive dealers pertaining to online marketing and measurement, I believe the framework I created is scalable across all OEM brands and markets.

Five Levers Which Can Be Adjusted To Increase Conversion Rates

To generate more net “new” leads in the CRM, dealers need to know what to focus their time and efforts on, so I encourage managers to look into these areas:

• Conversion Measurement – Software tools (i.e., payment, trade, credit, coupons, unlock button) on the dealership’s website must send compliant ASC conversion events into Google Analytics! Without accurate conversion data, you can’t plot the Form Conversion Rate (FCR) monthly to see how conversion rates are changing over time.
• Page Load Speed – Slow page load times is a revenue problem which many dealers ignore. Understanding the causes of slow page load times and addressing them will increase Form Conversion Rates. The investigation will often reveal some shocking news that vendors who were once cancelled are still getting data from your website.
• Quality of Paid Media Traffic – It’s easy to send traffic to a dealer’s website, but is the traffic filled with bots, accidental clicks, and poor engagement? When dealers understand that vanity metrics (i.e., VDP Views) end up wasting money, FCR can increase. Sadly, many agencies configure Google Analytics in a manner which makes it hard to see actual conversions, so dealers are flying blind and wasting money.
• CTA Conversion Tools – Dealers love to add CTA buttons to SRPs and VDPs but rarely have they done any real testing on CTA design and conversion rates based on page type. Dealers need a consistent way to measure changes in vendor tools (i.e., changing chat or digital retailing) to know if the change increased FCR.
• Merchandising and Design – The quality of merchandising has always been known to impact conversion, but rarely has it been measured. More dealers are realizing that four CTA buttons on SRPs hurt FCR. Dealers are also seeking advice on pricing and fee details (prompted by the FTC), but now they can see how transparent pricing details impact FCR.

To automate the inspection of dealership websites with the goal of increasing monthly lead conversion rates, I developed KPEYE software. Finally, dealers have a sustainable, trusted framework to inspect and diagnose their website design, CTA vendors, and agency partners so they can increase website conversion rates.

Fixing Conversion and Engagement Blind Spots

Dealership leaders may be skeptical about website conversion optimization because they believe that they have everything covered. To showcase the lack of actionable data in dealership operations, I ask all marketing managers and engaged General Mangers to see how many of these questions they can answer because they have the data readily available for each store under their management:

1. What are the software products loaded on your website which are causing it to fail the Google PageSpeed Insights test? What steps have you taken to fix these problems? Over 90% of dealership websites fail according to Shift Digital so it’s clear that most dealers have not attempted to fix this problem.
2. Which vendors on your website, who also collect consumer lead data, are not sending conversion events into Google Analytics? If you can’t see lead conversions in Analytics, you can’t optimize your Google paid media campaigns. Lack of conversion signals, in turn, wastes money with Google advertising including popular VLA campaigns.
3. Which website engagement events in Google Analytics are marked as key events but are not recommended to be marked as a key event by the Automotive Standards Council (ASC)? Improper marking of key events makes using Google Analytics difficult to use for inspecting campaign performance.
4. Which paid media source(s) are converting (triggering a real conversion key event) at less than 1%? What changes have you made to increase real conversion rates in paid media campaigns? Can you track month over month FCR by campaign? The majority of dealer reports include vanity metrics in paid media reports which inflate conversion rates and hide poor traffic quality.
5. If you are paying for SEO, what is the monthly growth of organic lead conversions, for the past 12 months? How does the number change when removing out-of-state organic conversions?
6. What is the CTA conversion rate (CCR) of your payments CTA button? How does the CCR change on new vs. used vehicle VDPs? How does the CCR change on OEM brands which only allow you to show MSRP?
7. What is the CTA conversion rate (CCR) of your trade-value CTA button? How does the CCR change on new vs. used vehicle VDPs? How does the CCR change on OEM brands which only allow you to show MSRP ?
8. Which CTA buttons have a low CCR and are being tested to be removed from specific pages or from the website completely?
9. What were some examples of CCR improvement when changing the text on the primary CTA buttons?
10. Which digital retailing platform has the best CCR of the major companies offering DR widgets on dealer websites?
11. Which chat platform and implementation strategy has the best CCR of the major companies offering chat widgets on dealer websites?
12. What is your plan to inspect your website(s)’ SRP and VDP pages to confirm they are in full compliance with your pricing and fee disclosure templates? How will you be alerted when someone changes the design of the match block?
13. What is the consumer sentiment of your last 50 Google reviews for sales and service practices? What percentage of the last 50 reviews have used words which could trigger an FTC compliance audit?

How well did you do?

Subscribe and Start Increasing Website Leads

If you have answers for all these questions, and you review your website engagement and conversion data each month, then you don’t need to subscribe to KPEYE. Is your conversion rate increasing each month?

However, if you would like to have all the data you need each month to lead a conversion optimization plan, then it’s time to subscribe to KPEYE software.

Simply click here to subscribe. Enter the number of websites you want to score each month, and we will send you the onboarding instructions. We do not need access to your DMS or CRM. We only need READ-ONLY access to your Google Analytics account.

Once we receive your subscription payment, we will send you the simple onboarding instructions, and then we will schedule a startup call. It’s that simple and your dealership benefits from my 21 years of experience with online marketing.

Pricing is $299/month per website. Discounts start at 10+ websites.

Dealer Reaction to KPEYE

Early adopters of KPEYE know that they don’t have the time, resources, or expertise to increase website conversion rates at scale.

“With lead volume no longer showing the growth patterns we once saw, our goals have shifted to getting a higher number of leads from the website traffic we already have. That will require an improvement in our Forms Conversion Rate (FCR). From the beginning of this project, it was clear that one of our biggest challenges was going to be collecting accurate data from all of the various CTAs that reside on our websites, and making certain that each vendor that supplied those CTAs was sending the required ASC event data to GA4. KPEYE has proven to be a fabulous solution to check for ASC compliance, calculate the CTA Conversion Rate (CCR) for each CTA button, and identify the other factors which impact FCR including page load times, paid media traffic quality, VDP page design, and merchandising compliance with new FTC guidelines.” – Tom Moore, COO, Morgan Auto Group

“We spend a lot of our time optimizing ad spend, and we know our business. But even the best teams benefit from an independent set of eyes. KPEYE gave us a level of website conversion accountability we didn’t have before, surfacing gaps and opportunities our internal view was missing. It changed how we hold our sites and vendors accountable. Some might think a 1% improvement in conversion rate is a small win. At our scale, we see millions.” – David Ortiz – Executive Director of Sales, Castle Automotive Group

Learn The WHY? Behind KPEYE Software

Bonus: Grab a copy of the KPEYE product summary here: