Measuring an auto dealer's website conversion rate

Many auto dealers ask: how do we calculate the conversion rate of our website visitors? Sounds like a straight forward question, yet the answer is far from easy.

In the pre-Internet car market the conversion rate was the number of vehicles purchased from a dealership in a specific month versus the total number of people who visited the dealership that month.

Things changed when the Internet came along. Now we have much more detailed information about the website traffic so we can identify the conversion rate in many different ways.

The most traditional definition is still the number of purchases from the website vs. the total visits, but this is not always the way online marketers measure your conversion rate.

Here are some other measurement methods:

1. Number of form submissions vs. your total number of unique visitors
2. Number of form submissions vs. your total number of visits
3. Number of form submissions vs. you number of form views
4. Total number of leads from your website (emails, forms, phone calls) vs. your total number of unique visitors
5. Total number of leads from your website (emails, forms, phone calls) vs. your total number of visits

So when your marketer tells you that we can improve your website's conversion rate to 3% what do they really mean? If for example you base your conversion rate on the number of form submissions vs. the number of form views (option #3 above) then you will most likely get a very high conversion rate, as opposed to basing your conversion rate to option #2 where you'll probably get a very low rate.

The bottom line is that no matter which method you use you should use it as your one and only method of calculating the conversion rate. Then you should make sure that you keep track of the ups and downs of this rate over time and monitor what kind of changes on your website make it move up or down. Obviously changes that help your rate move up should be kept and improved upon.

e²media (e-squared media) is an internet marketing and interactive advertising company based in Edmonton, AB offering affordable internet advertising, search engine optimization, web development and corporate identity services. Over the past 12 years we've worked with many organizations mainly in the Edmonton and Calgary area. We're specialized in the automotive industry and in Internet marketing and web development in general, but we've also worked in several projects for small, medium and large size organizations ranging from website design, flash movies, databases, shopping carts, search engine optimization (SEO) to full Internet marketing campaigns and corporate identity design. For more information on any previous projects, or for client references, please click here to contact us.