Based on your research of online viewers, what are the prime periods when automotive industry shoppers are actively on a given website?
Every site is different, but at carwoo.com on average we see low levels of consumer traffic from midnight to 4 a.m. At 6 a.m. the traffic starts to pick up, hitting the second-highest point in the day around Noon. After 12, traffic dips slightly and then peaks at 7 p.m. From 7 p.m. on the traffic remains high, but starts to decline around 10 p.m.
Car dealer traffic, on the other hand, peaks around 9 a.m. and stays moderately high until a second peak at 6 p.m. And then it drops off dramatically starting around 7 p.m.
Because dealer traffic dips right when consumer traffic peaks, we’ve started suggesting to dealers that they consider adding a swing shift. Due to the real-time nature of our online marketplace, dealers who are willing to work later will do a better job at servicing these users. On the flip side, dealers who closed shop at 6 p.m. are missing out on a huge opportunity.
How can a business owner better accommodate online traffic to their company’s website?
The most important thing is to look at data. It’s through data analysis that we identified a crucial way for you to better accommodate your online shoppers.
Other important data points to pay attention to include: Conversion rates, bounce-rates and exit pages. You need to know the site’s overall conversion rate. What the conversion point is depends on the nature of the site. If it’s an ecommerce site, the conversion event is probably a completed order. The conversion event can also be a newsletter signup, downloading a whitepaper or just staying on the site long enough to view X number of ad impressions.
If the conversion event happens on a page other than the site’s homepage or landing page, then some additional analysis can be done. Wherever there is user drop-off, there is room for improvement, and understanding where the largest drop-offs are will help you prioritize your conversion improvement projects.
Digging into your site’s bounce-rate and exit pages will also give you valuable insight on what visitors like and don’t like about your site. If there’s a particular page that people tend to leave your site from, then you know that’s a page you’ll want to improve in order to accommodate your traffic’s needs.
We also look deeply at where the consumers are coming from geographically (to help us target dealers to match them to); how they are arriving at our site (in order to provide an experience in the right context); and what hardware and software they’re using (to make sure our site is fully optimized to their browser, OS, and monitor size). In fact, because much of the communication between the dealer and the consumer happens on our site, we’re also able to identify linguistic changes that result in a more positive online experience for shoppers.
What are some other strategies for reaching online viewers?
The Internet has matured to the point where gimmicks don’t work anymore. We’ve employed refer-a-friend programs, wild stunts, viral videos, Craigslist postings, an aggressive Twitter and Facebook strategy, and we’ve even done a contest to give away a car.
However, the most effective strategy for reaching new visitors has been to focus on creating a great product that people can’t wait to tell their friends and family about. When somebody tells their friend about us, the quality of that new visitor is very high. If that somebody is a celebrity or a reporter, both the quality and quantity of traffic they bring to us is immense.
Hands down, the best traffic we get is when we get coverage on The View, The Today Show, CNN Money, Forbes and other reputable sources.
Partnerships are also key to driving traffic for us. Anybody out there looking for more website traffic should partner with sites that offer complementary services. This becomes a win-win-win.
Both sites win from reciprocal traffic that is cheaper than most forms of paid marketing. The consumer also wins from having a better user experience due to more of their needs addressed in fewer keystrokes. As a new-car buying service, we’ve partnered with car review sites, used car sites, auto insurance sites, auto tips sites and others.
We also employ a wide variety of more traditional marketing strategies, including search engine marketing (both paid and organic), affiliate marketing, email marketing, social media and even some offline marketing.
Organic search marketing is a core competency that every site should be doing. Affiliate marketing is a great way to run ad campaigns with minimal risk. Paid search is getting harder to do, but if you find a highly skilled search marketer or agency, then they will help you break through the noise.
Social media marketing is important for branded sites that want to build a long-term relationship with their users. Offline marketing is the most difficult to track for a website, but there are still ways to measure ROI if you have good analytics in place.
What are some tips for convincing online visitors to buy your products and/or services, keep coming back to the site and also recommending it to their friends and family?
You need to provide a good experience. Your pages need to load quickly, your content needs to be unique and useful, your site needs to be easy to navigate and you need to deliver what you promise every step of the way.
You’ll also need to make sure your value proposition is very clear. Consumers read as little of the page as they feel they need to, so it’s important to reiterate the value proposition at key points in their shopping experience.
In our industry, there’s a product called a free online quote. This is a perfect example of a product that is quickly becoming a dinosaur because it results in a very poor user experience. Basically, it’s a promise that if you fill in your email address and phone number, a car dealer will give you a free, no-obligation quote on the car you want. The resulting user experience completely fails that promise. The user’s contact information gets sold to multiple dealers and the user ends up getting called and harassed at all hours and spammed mercilessly. The dealer won’t give a firm quote without the consumer going down to the dealership, and this just results in a lot of frustration to the user. This is an example of what not to do.
The CarWoo! experience, on the other hand, is completely anonymous and gives the user complete control over who can contact them. Our marketplace is also built in a way to incentivize dealers to give real quotes to users on real cars, and the transparency helps drive the offers to competitive levels. As a result, we have industry-leading conversion rates, as well as very high retention and referral rates.
Of course, part of having a great product is to make sure your site is at the top of consumer’s minds at the right moments, using timely email campaigns. If you have a login for your site, you’ll also want the account creation and login process as seamless and secure as possible.
To encourage referrals, you may want to experiment with a small reward for referral, such as “Earn a $10 site credit for every person who signs up for the site using this unique link.”
Whether you have a reward or not, you’ll want to build a referral system that is easy to use and easy for the user to share.
But overall, whether your goal is for them to use the site once, or use the site every day, or tell all of their friends about it, there is only one tried and true method: Build a great product.
What is CarWoo!?
CarWoo! is an online new-car buying marketplace where buyers receive competitive market-driven prices while remaining completely anonymous.
We’re a free service to buyers, who save a ton of time and are able to compare prices from multiple dealers at one time. Dealers also benefit from the transparency and are able to use CarWoo!’s communication media to sell cars online using their own unique approaches. Over 13,000 dealers and hundreds of thousands of consumers have engaged with one another on our website, located at www.carwoo.com.
How does it work?
First, you tell us what kind of car you want. Then, we go out and contact 15 dealerships and get them to start giving you offers. As the offers come in (most buyers usually get an offer within 24 hours) we present them to you in a standardized, easy-to-understand format.
Once you’ve received an offer you really like, you accept it, at which point we connect you with the dealer. Then all that’s left to do is go to the dealership, present your CarWoo! claim certificate, sign some paperwork and drive off in your brand new car.
How did you come up with the idea?
When I bought my last car, the experience was horrible. I shopped online, but all I got was spam email and phone calls from dealers, none of which answered my questions. All they wanted was for me to come into their dealerships.
The time that it took me to shop multiple dealerships, compare their quotes, negotiate and finally settle on a car was overwhelming. At the end of the day, I was still not sure whether I had gotten the best overall deal or if I had just been beaten down. I knew there had to be a better way. There had to be a way to truly shop online and not just be sold off to several dealers as a lead. I wanted a way to be sure that I had gotten the best offer and to have fun while I was doing it. So, we created CarWoo!.
Who are the people behind it?
CarWoo! was founded in 2009 by serial entrepreneurs Tommy McClung, Erik Landerholm and Michael Young. A member of the 2009 Y Combinator (ycombinator.com) class, CarWoo! is based in Burlingame, Calif. and is funded by Blumberg Capital (www.blumbergcapital.com), Comcast Interactive Capital (www.civentures.com) and Interwest Partners (www.interwest.com).
Where did the name come from?
It’s pretty simple really. The name is a reflection of the excitement people feel after buying a new car. We noticed that people said “woo!” a lot when they drive away in a brand new car. So we put “car” and “woo!” together to echo how people feel buying a new car with CarWoo!
