Dealership website traffic is very important and there are many articles and blog posts about driving more people to your site whether it is SEO, SEM, Social Media or any other online marketing techniques, but today I want to talk about something else that is just as important. In fact I think it is more important. Focusing on your dealership conversion and how to optimize it is the real half of the equation that you need to turn your site into a lead generation machine.

Online conversions are measured through a shopper taking one of the following actions.

• Dealership Live Chats
• Web Forms
• Phone Calls

You need to understand why most of your website visitors are leaving without taking any action. To accomplish this goal you will need to do some analysis. Here are three tools that I suggest that might help you to better understand how people are using or in a lot of cases, not using your website.

Survey Monkey- Set up a quick survey that will ask shoppers 3-4 questions as they are exiting your site. You really never know until you ask. This is a great tool to accomplish that goal and to give you insight into your shopper's behavior.

Click Tale- This program is awesome, it creates a video of shoppers using your site. You can watch their mouse movements just like you were standing over their shoulder. It is a great way to develop real life user data. They also have a cool feature that provides heat maps of user sessions.

Google Website Optimizer- Here is a great free tool to help you test different elements on your site using split a/b testing. For example, change the headline, website copy, picture, offer or anything and test it to improve it. To be successful you must continue to improve your site to push people deeper into the sales funnel.

Conversion rate optimization is the most important factor that will drive success for your Internet dealership in today’s increasing competitive marketplace. Today I challenge you to take the time and work on techniques and strategies to convert more traffic instead of just driving more traffic.

Step one is about measurement and learning what is working and what isn’t working on your website. These three tools will put you on the path of success. Next time we are going to cover another area of conversion rate optimization for your dealership website.

Happy Chatting

Todd Smith