How Website Management Can Be Helpful for Car Dealerships

In today’s competitive automotive market, having a well-managed website is crucial for maximizing leads and staying ahead of the competition. Here are three key reasons why website management (WM) is essential for your dealership:

  1. Stay Up-to-Date: Keeping your dealership’s website updated with the latest OEM incentives is crucial for providing accurate information to your customers. Regular updates help you stay competitive and ensure potential buyers remain engaged throughout their research process, ultimately guiding them toward making a purchase.
  2. Track CTAs Efficiently: Tracking all calls-to-action (CTAs) is essential to monitor performance and make data-driven decisions. WM ensures that every CTA is properly tracked, giving you insights into which areas are driving conversions.
  3. Maximize Leads with Optimized CTAs: Most importantly, WM helps optimize your CTAs to align with current market challenges and customer needs. By tailoring CTAs to match user behavior and market trends, you can drive more conversions from the traffic generated by search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media efforts.

Without proper WM, your dealership misses the opportunity to fully capitalize on the potential of SEM, SEO, and social ads. A static or outdated site can prevent your digital marketing efforts from reaching their full potential, as even the best traffic won’t convert without the right CTAs or an updated user experience.

Here’s how WM helped several dealerships boost their marketing performance by optimizing CTAs, using insights from our case study involving several auto dealerships.

The Challenge

A Chevrolet dealership in Illinois’s original CTAs were not effectively driving conversions. Users would browse inventory, but many would leave the website without taking any further action. Some of the key issues included:

  1. Poor CTA visibility: Many were placed below the fold, requiring users to scroll to discover them.
  2. Cluttered design: Excessive text and engagement buttons distracted users from the main actions we wanted them to take
  3. Lack of trackability: The use of third-party forms made it difficult to track leads effectively.

The Solution

To address these issues, we implemented a series of CTA optimizations and the impact was substantial:

  1. Repositioning CTAs: Highlighting “get today’s price” form skyrocketed its submissions by 2,329%.
  2. Simplifying Page Layout: We decluttered the site, removing unnecessary text and buttons, which helped focus users’ attention on the key CTAs. This led to an 11 percent increase in click-to-call actions and a 25% rise in total leads.
  3. Adding Trackable Forms: Switching from third-party forms to trackable ones such as “Schedule a Test Drive” allowed us to better monitor leads, leading to more actionable insights and further improvements.

The Right CTAs for Changing Market Conditions

CTAs should be tailored to the ever-changing market and user needs. For instance, when the COVID-19 pandemic took place, there was a chip shortage, therefore the “Confirm Availability” form worked particularly well due to high demand and limited inventory. Conversely, during times of low demand or price increases, a “Get Price Alerts” form is more effective, keeping users informed of price fluctuations and maintaining their interest.

Below is an example of one of our Ford dealerships:

  • Replacing poor performing forms with a confirm availability form: 82% leads increase (from 190 to 340 form submissions)
  • Highlighting the click-to-call so mobile users can easily contact the dealership led to almost 70% improvement, lowering the cost/call to 44%

Below is an example of how SEM and WM were able to increase leads to another Chevrolet dealership:

What Happens When Optimizations Are Reversed?

Finally is an example of how one dealership faced a decline in leads after reversing the optimizations done by WM. Unfortunately, we noticed that some of the CTAs placed by the WM team were removed for various reasons, which led to a significant decrease in leads for the dealership, as shown in the graph below.

Conclusion

Optimizing CTAs is one of the most cost-effective ways for dealerships to increase leads without spending more on ads. By improving CTAs, you enhance the potential for conversions from all traffic sources — whether from SEO, SEM, or social media — maximizing every opportunity to turn visitors into leads. It’s a simple yet powerful strategy to drive results without any additional advertising budget

The Aronson advertising collaboration with dealerships has proven the impact of combining SEM campaigns with WM. Together, we’ve maximized leads while lowering the cost per lead by strategically optimizing CTAs and aligning them with the market’s demands.

Let us help you turn website visitors into customers with expert website management! Contact us today.

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