Today’s car shoppers are getting to know dealers long before the in-person meet-and-greet and test drive. They are doing online research, trying to find the right car and the right car dealer to do business with. To succeed with modern shoppers, dealerships must be able to facilitate these digital introductions and engage customers on their terms.
Embrace Flexible Buying Experiences
Many customers will continue coming to your dealership the way they always have—through traditional in-person visits to your showroom or calls to your salespeople during normal business hours.
But more and more car shoppers are taking the car-buying process into their own hands. They are researching dealers and vehicles at all hours of the day and night, including times when your salespeople aren’t available.
To cater to these modern shoppers, it is important for today’s dealerships to implement flexible buying experiences. That means allowing shoppers to browse vehicles on your website, begin the car-buying process, and complete as many purchase steps online as they prefer.
These flexible buying experiences give your dealership a digital introduction to in-market shoppers and allow them to seamlessly proceed through the car-buying process on their terms and in their time.
Maintain a Strong Online Presence
There are more ways to introduce your dealership to modern customers than your website alone. Leverage the power of social media to make your dealership (and your flexible buying experience) known online so that you can grab the attention of in-market shoppers.
Partner with a competent internal marketing team or a trusted automotive digital advertising agency to keep your online presence strong and coordinated. This can ensure that your marketing stands out and provides customers with consistent price quotes and information across channels.
A good marketing and website partner can also help your dealership deliver dynamic content to each customer based on their past browsing behaviors, optimizing their experience and personalizing it to their interests every time they visit your site.
By offering flexible buying experiences and maintaining a strong online presence, you can introduce yourself to shoppers at the start of the car-buying journey and stand out from the competition.
Given today’s inventory shortage challenges, it can be tempting to cut back on advertising. After all, what’s the point in marketing when you don’t have as much inventory to sell. But experience has shown that cutting advertising can lead to significant, long-term setbacks.
Henry Ford understood this concept way back in the early 1900s when he said that stopping advertising to save money is like stopping a clock to save time. But that doesn’t mean your marketing has to stay at status quo. Here are a few smart ways to evolve your marketing strategy for lean inventory times.
Adjusted New-Inventory Campaigns
Now is a great time to focus your marketing on vehicles with more availability. Promote in-transit inventory and vehicles scheduled to arrive. Remove bargain pages and raising prices to match demand. It may also be wise to add urgency to advertisements that help customers understand the realities of availability limits. Fear of missing out can bring in new customers, even if those customers have to wait just a little longer to get their vehicle.
Used Car Advertising Campaigns
New cars may not be immediately available, but there are a lot of pre-owned cars in the world, many of which are prime for purchase and resell opportunity. Shift your used car advertising dollars toward pre-owned campaigns, targeted at shoppers with trade-ins and who are more likely to buy used. As long as you can continue to source used inventory, you can sustain sales operations until manufacturers catch up to meet new inventory demands.
Pre-Order Purchase Campaigns
A car doesn’t have to be physically on the lot for you to sell it. Advertise the opportunity to pre-order a car and promote the option to hand-select features, giving your customers a customized, personalized vehicle purchase experience. These types of pre-order campaigns can also direct your automobile leads to your dealership’s digital retailing tools, allowing them to complete large portions of the buying process online.
Brand Awareness Campaigns
Inventory may be scarce, but buyers are still out there. Brand awareness campaigns can keep your dealership top of mind with active or soon-to-be active shoppers, while reinforcing all the reasons to buy from your dealership. Just as importantly, these types of campaigns prevent competitors from stealing market share by filling an advertising void.
Service Campaigns
Less inventory also means more miles on your customers’ current cars. Shift some of your advertising spend to promote your service department. In doing so, don’t forget about lesser-known services like your wash bay, auto detailing, and other services that can be attractive for drivers wanting to make small upgrades and make do with what they have for the foreseeable future.
Conclusion
As Henry Ford predicted all those years ago, time and car sales continue to march forward. And while inventory shortages are only temporary, the customers you bring in through your marketing can last a lifetime and help your dealership sustain short- and long-term success. To learn more strategies for thriving in the current inventory environment, check out our free Lean Inventory Playbook.
In the new age of online car sales, your digital marketing is more important than ever, and increasingly so. In fact, traditional marketing like radio spots, TV ads, and billboards, generate just $1,702in profit per vehicle sold, while digital marketing generates $2,514per vehicle sold. As your dealership delves into the new age of automotive marketing, ask yourself the following questions to gauge the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.
1. What does your digital traffic say about your SEO?
If your digital traffic has slowed, you may not be doing enough to connect with your target audience. Custom content like blog posts, news articles, vehicle pages, and more can make your website more relevant and return search results for in-market shoppers. Partner with a proven team of SEO experts to optimize your SEO strategy for local search and enhance your site’s visibility.
2. Does your campaign creative attract quality customers?
The quality of your digital traffic is just as important as the quantity, if not more important. If few of your website visitors are turning into actual leads, you have may have a problem with the type of customers you’re attracting. Speak directly to your target audience by delivering compelling, strategic campaign creative every month. Review your creative often to ensure that your campaigns are performing to expectations and evolving to meet needs of your customers.
3. What’s your dealership’s digital reputation?
Customers sometimes say the darndest things, and your online audience is listening. For better and for worse, customers are persuaded and dissuaded from shopping at your dealership after reading online reviews. Make sure your dealership has a comprehensive review and response plan. Cultivate a steady stream of positive customer reviews and a plan for dealing with the negative ones promptly. Doing so will help you leverage your reviews as a viable marketing tool to boost sales and bottom line.
4. What does your website say about your dealership?
You can drive all the traffic to your dealership’s website that you want, if your customers don’t like what they see when they get there, it doesn’t really matter. An overwhelming 76.5% of people say that the look and credibility of a website are among the top factors in deciding to make a purchase. Make sure that your website content is aligned with your overall digital marketing strategy by keeping your creative and content consistent with what’s actually on your site.
Automotive marketing is evolving. Is your dealership’s digital strategy evolving too? To learn more about how you can keep your digital marketing strategy up-to-date, see our checklist Modern Marketing for Modern Dealers.
The look and feel of your dealership’s website matter to your customers. In fact, more than 3 out of every 4 people say that the look and credibility of a website are among the top factors in deciding to make a purchase. And, nearly one out of every two people say that a website’s design is the number one criterion for discerning a business’ credibility.
As more people shop for cars online, your website will speak volumes about your business. What do you want it to say?
Update and Optimize Website Content
If your website appears outdated, or it doesn’t optimize to give each user a great experience across all devices — tablet, phone, computer, etc.— then you may be losing shoppers to your competition. Even if your digital marketing strategy is on point, and you’re driving lots of traffic to your website, the buying journey will be forced to detour if they don’t like what they see when they get there.
Have you ever clicked on an Ad and struggled to find more information on the next page? It is a common experience, and one you want to avoid happening to your shoppers. Few things are more frustrating than finding discrepancies between what brought customers to your website and what’s actually on your site.
Here are examples to situations to avoid: differences in actual inventory and online inventory, differences in sales personnel information, incorrect contact information, and differences between digital marketing specials and offers and what’s actually stated on your website.
Partner with a Trusted Provider
So, how do you update and optimize your site? The good news is you don’t have to be a professional designer or an expert web developer.
You can give your customers a consistent, optimized shopping experience by partnering with a trusted website management provider that knows the automotive sales industry and understands how to align your website content with your overall digital marketing and sales strategy.
Together, you can keep your content consistent with how you’re attracting your target audience through social and marketing channels. And, you can keep your site up-to-date and relevant with image postings, business hour changes, navigation updates, featured vehicle configurations, incentives, and more.
Take the Next Steps
Your website speaks volumes about your business, so you need to ensure it says all the right things that will bring in new shoppers, and keep your customers progressing down the buying path.
For as long as businesses have been on the internet, they’ve been counting—and touting—their website traffic numbers. In the early days of e-commerce, more visits quickly became a proxy metric for more success.
As time went on, companies began to realize that more site visits did not necessarily translate to more sales. The reason is simple: not all digital traffic is quality digital traffic. When developing a digital marketing strategy, your dealership can learn from the mistakes of these early marketers by focusing on the right metrics and by trading in high numbers for healthy results.
How to Differentiate Traffic Quality
If you were forced to choose between low and high traffic volumes, it would be wise to choose the latter. And your dealership should aim to increase total traffic. But how can you tell whether the people visiting your site are in-market shoppers or simply passing the time?
Tracking a few additional, slightly more advanced metrics can help you determine what portion of your traffic adds value to your dealership. Website visitors tend to show true interest and even purchase intent by what they do after they’ve arrived on your site. Casual browsers bounce quickly while potential buyers take their time exploring your site.
To evaluate which kind of traffic you’re attracting, simply review average time on site and pages per visit. If most people are spending fewer than 30 seconds on your site and barely visiting more than a single page, you’re probably attracting the wrong kind of traffic.
Align Your Campaigns and Intended Audience
If your traffic is high but quality is low, your campaign creative, messaging, or targeting may not be resonating with your intended audience. To confirm that suspicion, check the click-through-rate on your campaigns and compare them to past campaigns and industry benchmarks. If you see low-quality traffic and a low click-through rate, it’s probably time to take a closer look at your campaigns.
One solution: start speaking to the audience you wish to attract. Work to develop consistent, cohesive campaign creative designed to engage your ideal customers and drive quality traffic to the website. While this might feel overwhelming for many dealers, partnering with professional graphic designers and campaign coordinators makes it easier to develop and deliver strategic, compelling campaigns. When selecting creative and strategic partners, be sure to screen for automotive knowledge and experience, which will help keep creative efforts aligned with your dealership’s strategy.
Evaluate, Iterate, and Engage
Great digital advertising isn’t about one campaign or one piece of creative – it’s an ongoing, iterative process. Follow up and review every campaign and piece of creative to ensure that they’re connecting with quality prospects. Remember, a successful digital strategy will drive more than just large traffic numbers. When you’re doing it right, you’ll see increases in engagement as demonstrated by more time on site, more pages per visit, more VDP views, and of course, more leads.
The world of automotive retail is changing and attracting new customers to your dealership is more complicated than ever. As consumers spend more time online, and the marketing tricks and tactics that worked yesterday inevitably change with tomorrow’s technology and consumer demands.
In this new world of automotive sales, dealers must constantly evaluate their digital marketing practices and make adjustments to keep up with today’s consumer demands. And the best place to start this evaluation is by checking your digital traffic.
Stand Out in the Crowd of Competition
The car buying process for most consumers starts online—looking at local inventory, comparing colors and options, and trying to find the perfect car for the perfect price, as close to home as possible. These consumers are thorough in their online research, spending an average of about 14 hours online looking for cars,1 which is great news for dealers like you trying to drive traffic to their website.
Here’s where the process gets somewhat complex. The world wide web is a big place. Consumers can find easy access to the information they need in a number of places, right down to the details of how much they’re willing to pay for their next car purchase. So, it might as well be your website that informs their next purchase decision. On the other hand, if your dealership’s website doesn’t answer or even address their questions, would-be customers may pass you by.
Optimize Your SEO Strategy
If your website isn’t getting enough digital traffic, there’s a good chance your dealership’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy isn’t doing enough to set you apart from all the other dealership’s in the world. It’s the first symptom that your site is getting lost in the shuffle of search results.
To ensure your inventory and dealership services consistently reach likely buyers browsing search engines, your SEO strategy must be optimized for local reach. The specific mix changes from dealership to dealership, but your SEO strategy may include some combination of custom content like blog posts, news articles, and new make/model pages designed to help connect you with local buyers.
This approach is proven to elevate performance across your digital strategy with higher organic rankings, increased website traffic, and more leads from qualified visitors. But because implementing the right strategy can be complex, it’s always a good idea to enlist the help of the experts—a proven team of copywriters, strategists, and SEO specialists—to enhance your website’s overall visibility.
After just one year of running Dealer.com’s car dealer SEO service,2 dealers experienced an average of:
30% more website visits
52% more VDP views
59% more phone leads
14% more form leads
If your digital traffic has seen better days, optimize your SEO for local searches and partner with a team of SEO experts you can trust to drive digital shoppers with proven results.
To learn more ways your dealership can adapt in a new age of automotive sales, check out our free eBook: 4 Questions to Improve Your Dealership’s Digital Marketing.
When it comes to connecting with in-market shoppers online, some automotive retailers are challenged to deliver the user experience (UX) that consumers have come to expect.
It takes more than fast site speed and attractive pages to please today’s consumers, and it can be daunting or confusing to begin steps toward building a better website experience. Sometimes, it takes learning the fundamentals about UX and a mindset change to start improving your digital traffic and conversions.
In this article, we will look at why UX matters for automotive websites, the tools for measuring website UX, and how Dealer.com is advancing the total experience.
Question #1: Why does good UX matter for your dealership website?
Like many industries, automotive is seeing consumer preference for digital experiences gain momentum. As in-market shoppers continue to initiate and complete more activities online, and dealers adopt technological advancements to make these experiences better, the bar is being raised.
It may sound like good UX caters to website visitors and creates an uphill battle for website owners, but this description would be selling it short. A good website experience benefits all parties.
With a good experience, your visitors can enjoy seamless interaction with the site, locate the information they want, build a positive impression of your dealership, become an advocate for your business, and feel confident to visit again. On the other hand, when visitors have a poor experience, they are more likely to leave your website without taking the desired action and less likely to come back.
As a website owner, you want to utilize car dealer SEOto allow in-market shoppers to find your website in Google Search organic rankings, navigate to your site, and engage with it – all with as little effort and friction as possible. Site engagement might include searching inventory listings, viewing a Vehicle Deals Page (VDP), researching trade-in options with a vehicle valuation tool, submitting a deal, or scheduling a tune up with your automotive service appointment scheduling software.
When consumers leave your website before doing anything, you end up with less information about them. That means your leads and conversions suffer—and so does your revenue. For these reasons, UX-focused dealership website design is crucial to your business success.
Question #2: What two (2) types of data are used to assess website performance?
There are two types of data used to measure site speed and performance: lab data, and field data.1 Both are important but serve different purposes, so let us take a closer look at each.
Lab data offers reproducible results and debugging capabilities to help identify, isolate, and fix performance issues, so it can be particularly useful during the site development. In contrast, field data captures real-world experiences across a variety of devices, networks, and other conditions. Since real-world experiences are more relevant to website owners, and correlate to measures of business success, you may benefit from focusing on field data over lab data.
Question #3: What two (2) mainstream website UX reports provide your Core Web Vitals?
There are two reports that provide your performance against Google’s Core Web Vitals, 2 which include field data measurement: Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI), and Google Chrome User Experience (CrUX).3
The PSI report provides extensive lab data and a limited subset of field data about a page, while the CrUX report is powered by real user measurement of key UX metrics across the public web. After comparing the features of these two reports, consider which one will better suit your needs on a regular basis.
Question #4: What does Google say is the most important factor for search ranking?
To further demonstrate the importance of website UX, Google will begin a gradual update of their search algorithm in June 2021 to include a new signal called Page Experience. This will be one of hundreds of signals Google considers when ranking search results. To learn more about this update, visit our blog Are You Up to Speed on the Google Page Experience Update?.
Google has made the priority for search ranking clear: “While all of the components of page experience are important, we will prioritize pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content.”2
Therefore, in order for your website to top the search rankings, increase digital traffic, and produce more leads, the best approach is to prioritize total UX over specific performance measures.
Question #5: How has Dealer.com advanced website UX?
With 55% market share of automotive franchise websites in North America, Dealer.com has unmatched visibility into actual consumer behavior and real-time preferences. We use this information to deliver technologies focused on the total UX, building on what matters most to you and your website visitors.
Our team is continuously and actively improving key elements of site performance. Here are some examples of recent advancements that improve UX for your website visitors:
Delivered a full-service, personalized dealership experience.
Enabled inventory personalization, often on the first visit.
Revolutionized the VDP to be a deal-making destination.
Redesigned search to make finding the right VDP faster and more efficient.
Optimized font loading to allow car shoppers to see the textual content sooner.
Reduced processing time and improved interactivity.
Reduced core JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Dealer.com is committed to providing enhancements to its Websites platform that have meaningful impacts to site performance. We put our data, technology, and expertise to work for your dealership, ensuring that car buyers find what they need quickly and have a productive experience, from start to finish.
See how Dealer.com Websites will help you convert your website visitors into more leads and deals.
Automotive digital marketing and avocados have something in common – both have fairly short “Best By” consumption timeframes, where something that recently seemed new is suddenly past its prime.
The lesson here for dealers: don’t let your automotive web design and curated user experience gather dust. With more consumers doing more online than ever before, they have high expectations with their shopping experience.
From browsing inventory and researching a model, to submitting a lead and reviewing your customer service, there are several points along the buying journey where you can differentiate your dealership and keep your customers coming back for more. Read on for 3 ways your dealership can differentiate the digital experience you offer shoppers, keeping them engaged while delivering more value to your business.
Support Meaningful Conversations
Your dealership website offers a lot of information to consumers. Equally important, these pages collect highly valuable first-party data for your future use, such as targeting in-market shoppers with display ads or video ads.
While retargeting ads have value, they offer one-way communication to consumers. In other words, they are marketing at people rather than conversing with them. As a dealer, you know how important person-to-person conversations are. So, how can you preserve shopper connections and support meaningful conversations?
Through 3rd party integration with LivePerson, Video Chat and CoBrowse are aimed at creating a more engaging environment for online shoppers with more interactive features. As the name describes, Video Chat enables consumers to chat with dealers over video, which can be initiated from the Digital Retailing application. A handy tool for reviewing details, CoBrowse lets shoppers share their screens with dealers while shopping, allowing dealers to guide consumers as if they were side-by-side in the showroom. Ultimately, you want to replicate a good one-to-one experience, but digitally.
Provide Flexible Retailing Tools
Automotive digital retailing is not often described as a leisure activity. Until recently, this step might have been a bit daunting to shoppers, and the turning point where they would hop in their car and pursue assistance at the dealership. This is becoming less and less the case – partly due to environmental circumstances, and also because the tools are becoming more user-friendly.
The latest digital retailing solutions turn this challenging process into simple steps, giving the consumer a bit of validation as they move forward. They also provide flexibility with how and when the lead form is completed. For example, a consumer may be missing some information and they can skip a step and come back to it, rather than running into a dead end.
Digital retailing of today is a self-driven and self-directed process. In other words, people want to be guided, but not forced. To keep people engaged and on the path toward submitting a deal, it is important to provide options for completing the form: pause for a break, get help, save it to edit later, etc. This flexibility translates to generating more automobile leads; a consequence of a consumer-first sales process, which is nothing new, but now it is digital-enabled.
Build Trust Through Reputation
The saying goes that opposites attract, but not when it comes to recommendations for buying a car. When going through an important decision like this, people look for things they can relate to. More and more, consumers are looking for trust and the feeling of it within the automotive buying experience. This is where positive customer reviews can effectively tie a ribbon on your next deal.
One of the ways you can differentiate from your competitors and answer the question “Why buy from us” is by investing in reputation management for car dealers. Your best advocate is the person who just bought from you. By soliciting their goodwill through Review Generation, and helping other consumers see the perks of this transaction, you can convince other people to do the same.
A detailed review can be especially useful in building trust and illustrating the experience for a prospective customer. For instance, here are examples of superior customer service will score big points with consumers today: you offered to meet them wherever they were (i.e., for the test drive), made them feel safe, made the deal transparent, made things easy (deal signing, car delivery), and treated them like an individual.
It gives shoppers confidence to learn that you are going the extra mile to transact in the way they want. There is power and opportunity in public recognition that your business cares, and you can use the tools of reputation management to broadcast this message in an authentic voice.
From Websites and Digital Retailing, to Advertising and digital marketing services, Dealer.com solutions are built to connect consumers with dealers digitally. Let our team help you guide in-market shoppers through digital car-buying, dealership customer retention, and more.
It’s been a long time coming, and there is no going back now: your dealership website merits just as much attention as your showroom floor.
Businesses are leaning more heavily on their digital presence, and for an ever-widening range of functions. With sophisticated data enabling a highly personalized experience, the best approach is to meet the expectations of consumers wherever they might be in their car-buying journey.
Here are some tips for leveraging your website and automotive advertising to reach consumers with the right message, no matter where they are.
Keep Things Simple
Your website can help you achieve many things, but only if it’s built intelligently and purposefully. Take steps to make it as easy as possible for consumers to do business with you.
Create easy click paths. You have probably heard the expression “time is money.” Does your automotive web design meet consumer expectations? Aim to make it quick and painless to reach the core content.
Link targeted ads and experiences. No one likes a dead end, either while driving or after clicking on an ad. Ensure your digital advertising points to specific landing page experiences.
Support every profit center. In addition to promoting new and pre-owned inventory, actively manage your automotive service marketing to keep revenue flowing through your fixed ops.
Showcase Your Brand
Your website is an extension of your brick-and-mortar dealership. Just like showroom visitors, digital foot traffic should be guided through the shopping experience to help build a sense of connection.
Design with purpose. To feel authentic, your website needs to be representative of what they would expect in store from the ownership and brand. Whether your dealership is sleek and modern or colorful and casual, the presentation and messaging should be consistent.
Keep your audience informed. At the most basic level,your website is a communication tool. Leverage this real estate to inform customers and consumers what is going on with you in your individual market.
Get the whole team involved. Support inclusion by asking team members to lend ideas for features. This may range from homepage slides, to dealer promotions marketing, or to ways they engage in the community, such as volunteering and other good works.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
Consider ways you can squeeze more value from resources you already have, including the ones that are working behind the scenes. By investing time to assess and optimize your existing assets, you can put systems in place that net higher-quality traffic and increase efficiency.
Leverage first party data. When it comes to car dealership analytics, nothing beats the data from consumers who have already visited your website. These digital touch points represent an audience that is already identified as likely to buy.
Build feedback systems. There’s a lot more to performance measurement than Google’s data and impressions share. Bolster your data set with real, on-the-ground metrics for your market. Digital advertising generates a wealth of data that can improve the quality and the effectiveness of audience targeting.
Leverage local data buckets. If your first party data isn’t cutting it, or you’re ready to take your advertising to the next level, consider the benefits of external data sources. Partnering with companies like Kelley Blue Book and AutoTrader means your ad campaigns can benefit from zip code-specific data. As a bonus, it’s flexible and fluid, so options abound for trialing, testing, and adjusting.
In today’s market, it’s important for car dealers to pay just as much attention to their websites as their showroom floors. As consumers spend an increasing amount of time online, optimizing your website to improve their experiences has never been more important, and this movement is here to stay. By meeting consumer expectations, wherever they are in the car buying journey, your dealership will gain a competitive advantage.
Visit Dealer.com to explore more ways you can leverage data to personalize marketing initiatives and increase consumer engagement through your Digital Storefront.
By Casey Corcoran, Lead Product Analyst & Jeffrey Pierce, Sr. Director, UX
Key Take-Aways
90% of customers say photos are an important aspect in their shopping journey1
New car listings using actual photos are 30% more likely to get a lead2
The likelihood increases to 40% with used/certified vehicles with actual photos2
VDP visitors who interact with photos are 16% more likely to submit an inventory lead than those who do not interact with photos3
Shoppers Want to See the Nitty-Gritty Details
We all know the old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words, and nowhere is this truer than on websites. Countless cross-industry studies have posited that most web users don’t read, they scan for content relevant to their goals. If these users come across a photo, it helps lock in what they’ve seen. Renowned scientist and “Brain Rules” author John Medina states,
“We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%. Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.”
With the pandemic still top-of-mind and social distancing restriction still in place, car shoppers are more likely than ever to start their shopping journey online, pushing first impressions and contact to the digital storefront. A recent Cox Automotive study found that 83% of car shoppers prefer to do at least one step online and 57% engage with online penciling and purchasing functionality.5 During this shift to remote shopping, photo engagement has increased 11% since last year.6 When a shopper is unable to see what a vehicle actually looks like, dents and all, they have a harder time making an emotional connection, limiting their desire to commit. Harvard Business Review found that customers who have an emotional connection to a product or brand bring 52% more value to those brands than those who are just “satisfied” with their experience.7 In contrast, viewing real photos can build a sense of transparency and trust in your brand. If you bring in more transparency in pricing as well, quality visits increase even more.8
Not having “real” photos not only breaks your customers’ expectations, but can also hurt your customers’ online experiences. Poor or stock imagery is in the top five things shoppers complain about in our long running satisfaction survey. [source] We hear negative sentiments about stock photos regularly in our user interviews:
“These [stock] photos I always find really confusing, I don’t feel like I need to see what the car should look like. I want to see what the car actually looks like.”
Real Photos Improve Key Website Metrics
While keeping customers happy and informed should be enough motivation to use quality photography, actual vehicle shots can have a huge impact on your website’s performance as well.
Best Practices for Vehicle Images on Your Site
What does this mean for your dealership? Here are some practical tips to get the most out of your photos and delight your customers.
Use actual photos. Obviously, the first thing to do is use actual photos of the vehicle whenever possible, especially on used vehicles. On site where over 65% of inventory feature real photos, customers have~5% longer visit time, see ~20% more VDPs, and see ~5% more SRPs.3 That said, a stock photo is better than no photo.
Use a diverse set of images. You might be surprised to discover that the top five types photos that car shoppers ask for are all interior shots. [source] This is not to say exterior photos are not important, but the inclusion of interior photos is high on the list for successful marketing. Additionally, engagement grows are the number of photos increase all the way up to 40+ images.1
High-quality matters. During a recent user testing session, 4 out of 5 shoppers preferred high-resolution photos and full screen galleries because they allowed them to view the vehicle in more detail. Avoid pixelization, extreme (distorted) angles and low-light photos whenever possible.
Do not embed branding in vehicle photos. While this can be useful for aggregator sites like Autotrader, there are several disadvantages to embedded overlays on dealership sites:
On mobile devices, text or logos in the photo can be hard to read and distracting.
When multiple vehicles containing overlays are side-by-side on a page (vehicle recommendations, SRPs, etc.), the page can become harder to scan and add to the perception of clutter.
Overlays featuring the dealership name and contact information are redundant with information found in the website header and on the page.
To continue to use overlays on aggregator sites, consider using the preference on the Dealer.com platform that starts image carousels on the second photo.
Feature a photo carousel on the Search Results Page (SRP).When designing Dealer.com’s new SRP we added a new option to include an image carousel. Of people that viewed at least one inventory page, there was an increase in photo views of 21% on mobile and 8% on desktop with this new functionality.3 Ultimately, we want to empower our dealer partners to make the best decisions for their market. That’s why we provide two different options for layout: list view and grid view. Grid view, with its more minimal layout, will maximize VDP views, while List view will provide customers more information upfront, leading to less ping-ponging between the SRP and VDPs. Either way, there is no change to the number of leads received and photo engagement increases 13-42% depending on device, especially when the new photo carousel is featured.
The Dealer.com User Experience team is always looking for partners to participate UX studies. Reach out to your Performance Manager or email us at ux.lab@dealer.com if you’d like to join upcoming A/B tests and other experiments. Want more best practices? Click here.
Sources & Footnotes
1 Power of Pictures Study, Oct. 2017
2 Stock vs. Actual Photos Vehicle Comparison, June 2018
3Dealer.com’s New Search Results Page: Performance Analysis, Dec. 2020
