Organic website traffic offers a different mix between sales and service customer opportunities. Working with a Toyota dealership to review their website analytics and measure the performance of their internet efforts. I have partial data for the month of April that includes website visitors and various engagement metrics.
For this time period they had 2,704 total visitors and 265 phone calls. They are using track-able phone numbers on the website for new sales, used sales, service and parts. They do not have accurate goal tracking in place on their site analytics, instead we referenced web contact from specific page urls for the contact us form, quick quote page and the service appointment page. These page visits totaled 164. Add that to the total phone calls of 265 and the total represents about a 15.86%.
Total web visitors 2704
Total Phone calls 265
Totals web contacts 164
Total Engagement 429
Conversion percentage 15.86%
While this doesn’t appear to be too bad, there is much room for improvement. The current site design greatly impacts performance of these metrics. Most users to a dealer site are look to inventory and specials once they land on the home page. In this case the dealer site does have links to inventory and specials in the top navigation, but nowhere else on the home page.
One other observation regarding the conversion numbers above, is that all of this traffic is organic, none of it comes from paid search. Because of this fact, there is a bias towards service customers. The numbers support this fact;
Total Sales Engagement 127 opportunities or 29.6% of total engagement
Total Service Engagement 302 opportunities or 70.4% of total engagement
This split of 60/40 to 70/30 between service and sales from organic traffic is quite common. The split for paid search traffic is the exact opposite with sales traffic gaining the bigger share of web visitors. For this dealer to increase sales from the website, a paid search marketing campaign is in order.