Tag: search marketing

Dealer.com’s New SRP Delivers Efficiencies for Consumers

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No one likes detours. A wrong turn that requires re-navigation is both frustrating and time consuming. And detours in the online car shopping experience only distract your customers from finding what they want. That’s why it’s so important to facilitate an efficient online experience and help steer your customers down the right path, toward the right VDPs as quickly as possible. 

Avoiding Buyer Roadblocks 

VDP views are an important website engagement indicator, but many shoppers spend a significant amount of negative sweat equity researching multiple Vehicle Deal Pages (VDPs) in search of the right vehicle. They search from a group of listings, click on a VDP, check the vehicle out, and view some photos before backing out to the listings and repeating the process. 

You might say this is just part of the automotive digital retailing experience, but in reality, every click back and forth is a detour—and a potential roadblock—that could force an abandoned search and lead to a bounce or interruption of the buyer journey. 

With the core belief that a dealership’s digital storefront should always be evolving to improve efficiency for the customer, Dealer.com’s User Experience team has designed, built, and tested a brand-new Search Results Page experience (SRP) that reduces some of the back and forth, helping consumers find the right vehicle and growing your dealership’s automobile leads. Shoppers and Dealers alike benefit in the following ways: 

  • Effortless Mobile Shopping – This new, responsive search experience features mobile-minded menus and tabbed content areas that make vehicle selection fast and easy from any device.   
  • Convenient Search Tools – Faceted Search tools and a Free-form Search Bar (with auto-complete suggestions) offer multiple ways to shop and select. 
  • Customizable Design – Grid or List view provides flexibility for dealers and shoppers alike.  
  • Photo Carousel – Moving one of the more popular elements of the VDP higher up in the shopping funnel helps shoppers more quickly identify the vehicles they like and don’t like. 

This, and other features like this, will reduce the back and forth that might jeopardize the user experience. Instead, the new SRP will help customers reach the right vehicle more efficiently than ever before.  

Proven In UX Testing 
During qualitative and quantitative testing, with the new photo carousel feature enabled, shoppers viewed 18% fewer VDPs on mobile and 9% fewer on desktop. Importantly, however, there was no change in lead volume. This suggests shoppers were able to filter more information from the SRP and find what they wanted earlier in the shopping process.  

Pilot Feedback 
The final design incorporated feedback from both dealers and consumers, and during the Pilot, dealers provided their thoughts on the redesigned experience. 
 
“It is a better VLP overall. It has larger images and the search capabilities are much better.” 
—Jeff Ramsey, Jones Junction 

“The mobile experience is the best part of the new design. Loved the tabbed content widget, and the ability to scroll through photos. The look and feel on mobile is 1000 times better.” 
—Town East Ford 

Coming to Dealer.com Websites This Fall 

We are constantly evaluating and tweaking our platform to make it friendlier for your customers and more effective for you. And we can’t wait to deliver this exciting, no-cost upgrade and give your customers a more efficient inventory search experience.  

Dealer.com will soon begin migrating all car dealer websites to the new SRP experience. Our clients can expect advanced notification via email, ControlCenter, or their Performance Manager ahead of the changes. If you have any questions, reach out to your Performance Manager for more details.  

Searchers, Browsers, and Tool Users: How Different Types of Car Shoppers Find What They Need with Dealer.com’s New SRP

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Did you know that on average, your customers spend about 60% of their total shopping time online. That’s a lot of time spent researching cars. And this trend is likely to continue (even increase), given current circumstances and social behaviors. But even though nearly every shopper spends time researching cars online, every customer is different. In fact, online car shoppers can be categorized into three main groups: Searchers, Browsers, and Tool-users. And your Digital Storefront should cater to each of these customer types. 

Available this coming fall, our all-new Search Results Page (SRP) experience was built with each of these shoppers in mind. Understanding that different shoppers use different devices–tablets, phones, home computers—and that shoppers approach car buying differently, our new SRP delivers a more efficient inventory search, and helps every type of shopper reach the right vehicle earlier in the shopping process. 

Searchers 

Searchers are confident in what they want, and are frustrated by website experiences that force them into predetermined paths that don’t meet their primary motivations. These shoppers feel empowered by choice and prefer tools that allow them to specify the exact information they want. Searchers make up the smallest number of online car shoppers, as many customers don’t know enough to articulate exactly what they want through a search tool.  

Our new SRP experience caters to Searchers by offering features like auto-complete, suggested searches, free-form or faceted searching, and more organized search information that eliminates negative workflow. In testing, our User Experience Lab found that shoppers viewed fewer vehicles overall with no volume drop in automobile leads. In other words, shoppers worked less to achieve the same result. 

Tool-Users  

A second type of car shoppers, Tool-users, desire a more interactive online shopping experience. They like to set up parameters and manipulate information within a widget. These shoppers are the puzzle-solvers, the gamers, and the high-level explorers of online car research. Tool-users like to learn about cars through the relationships that exist between information on a car dealer’s website and the variables that can be manipulated through that website’s tools. 

With new Tabbed Search Content and Search Facets that allow shoppers to refine vehicle lists quickly and efficiently, our new SRP gives shoppers tools to interact with the car buying experience in a more intuitive way. Tool users favor mobile browsing, and the new SRP design features mobile-minded menus that make interacting with search facets easy for shoppers on-the-go. Interestingly, while designed for mobile shoppers, in testing these facets saw an uptick in use on desktop, suggesting easy engagement on any device. 

Browsers 

Our third group, Browsers, are more casual by nature. They’ll consume whatever information is in front of them at the time, and may wander through different high-level categories of vehicles until they eventually find one that meet their needs. Browsers tend to be learners and explorers, a low-intensity strategy for finding the right vehicle. 

Catering especially to these types of customers, our new SRP experience brings the Photo Carousel feature from the VDP further up into the funnel, and allows browsers to see additional product photos within the listings page. Moving this feature to the Search Results Page provides another layer of engagement to help shoppers find the right vehicle. In testing, 35% of mobile shoppers and 16% of desktop shoppers used the photo carousel feature on our SRP. As a result, shoppers viewed fewer VDPs but there was no change in lead volume, as customers found what they wanted earlier in the shopping process.  

Our new SRP Experience delivers critical vehicle information to consumers more efficiently than ever before. Through mobile-minded tools, multiple ways to search, and a customizable, responsive design, we’ve created an experience that helps shoppers narrow their consideration set and reach the right VDP.  

In designing and building this new automotive digital retailing experience, we wanted to ensure that the right content and the right tools were in place for every type of shopper. We also wanted to ensure that your dealership benefited from a more efficient inventory search that helped shoppers reach the right vehicle earlier in the research process.  

We can’t wait to bring you this no-cost enhancement starting this fall! To learn more about your website’s new Search Results Page and its new shopper-friendly features, visit https://www.dealer.com/explore/search-results/.