From the category archives:

Dealer Web Sites

Secure Your Domain Names… Like, Yesterday

by Mitch on July 8, 2008

One of the identifying marks of a car dealership absent of any serious Internet Marketing personnel is a domain name(s) WHOIS with old, outdated information. This shouldn’t be a big deal to any business but in many small companies it often is. Here’s a timeline that shows why:

  •  1998. 1998 was a big year for dealers getting their first websites, because that’s when Reynolds realized it had some value and pushed it on all their uninterested dealers. “The guy who knows about computers” in the company is asked to buy the domain. Naturally, he uses his own personal data to fill out the WHOIS, because he doesn’t have a corporate email address, and there’s no one else’s name to put on the thing besides his own. Maybe he buys a five-year term… maybe 10. No one cares about the site so it really doesn’t matter to him.
  • 2003. If they’re lucky, ”the guy who knows about computers” still works at the dealership, so he’s around for that domain renewal email that comes to his personal inbox. If he’s not around anymore, hopefully someone else there has some clue as to what’s going on and takes it upon him/herself to renew the domain. Of course, he/she doesn’t change the WHOIS, because he/she doesn’t want to get involved in this mess. So whether the original domain lease term was 5 or 10 years, it’s still going to have the original guy’s WHOIS info when 2008 rolls around.
  • 2008. Speak of the devil. Here we are, and ”the guy who knows about computers” has been fired, and his replacement has been fired, and that guy’s replacement has been fired. Now the dealership’s domain is up for renewal and the notice is going to an email address that a) is totally unrelated to the dealer, and b) probably doesn’t even exist anymore, given the rate people change their email addresses. If the dealer’s lucky, they get something in the mail to remind them… of course, then it becomes a madhouse as a handful of computer-illiterate alarmists try to figure out how the hell to keep this thing from expiring. Maybe it does expire… and someone like me picks it up and blackmails you for it to the tune of $5,000. Not that I’ve ever done that.

Are you seeing how much confusion is being created here? When I go in to consult with a dealer, the WHOIS info on their domain names is one of the first elements I look into. Changing all that data over to an administrative setup is excrutiating for people like me - and excrutiating for me means expensive for you. This stuff is your virtual real estate. It’s pathetically cheap to maintain, but it’s as valuable as your business name. In a few years, it may even be as valuable as your physical real estate… so take a moment to get your house in order here.

Step 1. Find out what your WHOIS info says. You can visit any domain registrar like Network Solutions or GoDaddy, find the WHOIS section, and enter your dealership’s domain name. Most of the time it will spit out the name of the business, address, and administrative contact information. The most important element by far is the email address listed under the administrative contact. The person with access to that email address can do whatever they want with this domain name.

Step 2a. If this is an active email address in your company, get access to it, and set up a mail rule on it that will forward copies of received mail to several administrative personnel (you, the CFO, the I.T. Manager if you have one, etc.). Go into your domain administration using this email and change out any personal or outdated info. Change the renewal method on the domain to auto-renew, and if you can, enter a corporate credit card into the database so the domain can renew itself without you having to lift a finger.

Step 2b. If you have no clue where this email address goes, send an email to it. If you get nothing back, you’re what we like to call S.O.L. - you now have to contact your domain registrar and request a Change Of Administrative Contact fax form. You’re going to need to prove that this old email address is no longer relevant to your business and that you deserve to be given access… and you prove that by sending in a fax form on letterhead with your driver’s license. Obviously, make sure the right person at your dealership is doing this. Once you are granted access to the domain, go back and do Step 2a. That’s it, you’re done forever… problem solved. Well, unless you have a few dozen domain names…

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The Dirty Bomb Of Great Video Selling: YouTube Annotations

by Mitch on June 16, 2008

In a perfect world, what would car dealers need to create a great video for showcasing vehicle inventory? Let’s see… a Steadicam or some dolly-type device for professional, steady shooting… high-quality recording hardware to do the voice-over… effects software to overlay images and text… about a dozen takes…

Ah, but you work at a car dealership, and you’re lucky if the General Manager approves a P.O. for a mouse pad. Plus, you probably wouldn’t have the knowledge or time on your hands to utilize the aforementioned resources, even if they were available. In the end, I guess automotive dealers are confined to posting those psuedo-videos… you know, the ones that are just a set of photos fading in and out Ken Burns-style. See ya later, conversion rate.

Well, the kings of Web 2.0 may have saved your asses again. Last week, YouTube announced the implementation of Annotations (read the YouTube blog post) in their videos. Annotations are basically text overlays of “video notes” that you can plop into your video, available in three different iterations:

  • General Note
  • Speech Bubble
  • Highlight Area (mouse rollover)

Why is this awesome? Because now you or any other member of your staff can shoot a quick and dirty vid with a cellphone or digital camera, post it to your YouTube account, and fix’er up to be infinitely more appealing and useful to the consumer.

I created an example video for marketing dealer inventory to give you an idea of how useful YouTube Annotations can be. It’s not just about adding content either; if you conduct a less-than-stellar walk-around on the video and don’t have time for another take, you can use Annotations to correct your missteps. I purposely neglected items while shooting this walk-around so that I could overcome them with the video notes:

  • Failed to mention vehicle’s mileage
  • Failed to open hood and trunk
  • Failed to point out all of vehicle’s highlight features

Check out the vid, and take notice of what is annotated and how it’s said. You can really make the video more engaging and useful for consumers with this new capability, and I promise you, that will lead to more units rolled. Of course, it’s a beta feature at this point on YouTube, which means I can’t embed the video here yet… and like a lot of YouTube vids, you might have to refresh the page once or twice if you get the notorious “no longer available” rejection. Come on you smug little billionaires, and get this thing into full operating status!

Click to watch the YouTube Annotations For Car Dealer Inventory Marketing video

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Where Is “The Top” Of Google?

by Mitch on June 9, 2008

If I had a dime for every dealer who demanded to be at “the top” of Google… trouble is, most of them don’t know where the top actually is. Or, they know where the top is and (as usual) prefer to invest money for instant ROI rather than invest time and effort for long-term ROI. In both of these cases, the dealer inevitably lands on spot #2: the top of paid search.

But folks, that ain’t the top.

If you’re a dealer asking questions about getting to the top of Google, then you already have some understanding of the power and value of search engine presence. But what you haven’t realized - or refuse to realize - is that “paid search” (PPC) marketing is not the magic bullet of search engine marketing. While PPC is highly cost-effective and can be tracked and analyzed to no end, it’s still just rented ad space. If you don’t pay for your ad to be there tomorrow, some other competitor will take your place… just like print ads.

Organic SEO on the other hand, builds upon itself. These are the results that “naturally” list out along the left side of the page; the sites which Google has deemed relevant to what users are searching for. The closer your site gets to the top of that area, the more clicks you receive, the more Google values your site, and the higher your site will go. It’s the snowball effect, and there’s really nothing like it in any other area of automotive advertising. Build a high-quality site and maintain it frequently, and you could be on top of the natural listings within a few months. That’s the discipline to keep in mind: the top of Google is in the organic/natural listings, not the paid listings.

The #1 result in the organic listings (Spot#1) gets about 40% of the click share on Google and other search engines. The #1 paid result doesn’t even come close (maybe 20% of the click share on a good day when listed above the organic side (Spot #3), and more like 10% at the top of the sponsored side (Spot #4)), and often you get better results as the #2 organic listing (Spot #2) than you would as the #1 paid listing. That means the majority of people are going to look past your PPC advertising efforts to find the page that Google has declared the most relevant page on the queried topic. That’s because users know PPC marketing listings are ads, and to a degree, they’ve trained themselves to avoid looking at such listings. It’s also because the organic results deliver more information in their results, so the user has a better idea of what they’re clicking on.

Now there are still a ton of people who mistakenly or purposefully click on paid listings, and I’m not suggesting you give it up. It is, after all, the second best marketing expense in this industry right now. But it’s still an expense, and that’s why it’s in the same boat as newspaper, direct mail, radio and TV advertising: when you stop paying, you stop getting leads. If you’re on a tirade about being #1 in Google, your first step is to realize that it’s not going to happen overnight, and that PPC marketing is not what gets you to #1. Your second step is to find a website developer who rocks at SEO and can build you a killer site… unfortunately, that means looking outside the offerings within this industry.

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Are Dealers Really Still Doing This?

by Mitch on May 21, 2008

When I see a dealer showcasing blatantly outdated photos of its pre-owned cars online, I know I’m looking at a store with no serious grasp of Internet Sales. This used to happen all the time years back, but by now I figured that both dealers and the vendors who take photos have realized the importance of taking non-incriminating shots.

Alas, it appears I’m wrong. I came upon this Wrangler just a few days ago while checking out Ramsey Chrysler-Jeep in North Jersey. Note the pile of snow it’s sitting on. Note the fact that the last snowfall in New Jersey was about 4 months ago. So it’s just about time to take this baby to auction I suppose, eh?

Listen, Internet buyers are smarter than ever, and they’ll only get more resourceful as time goes on. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out from this photo that Ramsey Chrysler-Jeep will accept pretty much any offer on this truck… but then, is it even worth the money? If it’s been sitting for that long, perhaps there’s something wrong with it, no? A lot of thoughts go through the consumer’s head when seeing a photo like this, and not a single one of those thoughts is “wow, I want that car and I’ll pay anything for it”.

Here are a few dont’s to take note of when your photos first go up for a pre-owned car; and honestly, I can’t believe I’m writing this in 2008.

- No snow. Shovel out a spot or put the car inside for the photoshoot… no white stuff on camera.
- No people in the background. When the guy in the background is wearing a t-shirt and the consumer is looking at the car online in January, you can kiss your gross goodbye.
- No dashboard pics showing the temperature. You get the idea… 35 degrees on the information display doesn’t hold water in springtime.
- No seasonal crap in the background. Avoid having anything on or around the car that indicates the season, i.e. christmas trees, memorial day/4th of july banners and balloons, etc.
- No visible tailpipe smoke. If you’re shooting the car in the cold, don’t leave it running… the smoke from the tailpipe will be visible and expose the fact that it’s a wintertime shot.

Of course, you could avoid all this and just do a better job of turning over your inventory…

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The .Mobi Craze: Not A Craze At All

by Mitch on April 8, 2008

Yesterday, a dealer asked me what my thoughts were on buying up .mobi domains for his rooftops. First of all, I’m just happy to know that someone in the auto industry actually knows what a .mobi domain is… we’re making progress folks, slow but steady.

But seriously, don’t buy into this .mobi crap.

I don’t know if it was initially intended to be a scam, as technology trends tend to make fools of many a forward-thinker… but a scam is definitely what it has become. For those of you unfamiliar with the .mobi concept, it’s a new-ish domain extension (like .com, .net, .org) that requires the developers of the domain’s website to create mobile device-friendly content. If you’ve never checked out a typical website on a mobile device, trust me - it’s a mess. To appeal to current mobile device users, you have to minimize the quantity of your content and re-organize it so that its’ easier to browse from such limited devices. So the idea of .mobi is that if you wanted to surf BMW.com, but were on your cellphone or Blackberry, you’d just instinctively go to BMW.mobi instead and the content would be appropriately organized. From a layman’s point of view, this sounds like a great idea. But then, a lot of scams sound like great ideas to laymen… that’s how scams work.

So, why is .mobi not the wave of the future?

#1: Your current site is just as capable of being mobile-fied. The .mobi domain doesn’t actually do anything to make your site mobile-friendly or mobile-exclusive… it’s just understood that a .mobi site will look correct in a mobile browser, which is your responsibility as the site owner to ensure. And how do you design a site for mobile devices? With a combination of HTML and CSS, the two primary coding languages responsible for all the websites you normally view. So what, you say? Well, there’s one important stipulation in CSS that needs to be mentioned: you can use CSS to deliver a different layout and organization of content automatically to mobile device users. CSS will sniff out whether or not the user is on a computer or mobile device, and if you’ve designed a CSS stylesheet for mobile devices, that’s the one a mobile device will see. So if you want to go to BMW.com, and you’re on a mobile device, you go to… BMW.com. The site will know you’re on your phone, and deliver you a page that looks something like this (ironically, BMW’s .mobi site). Obviously the big benefit here is that people already know your .com name… why would you risk a leak in traffic by forcing them to acknowledge another site? Just let them come to the page they always come to and deliver it differently.

#2. Technology has already leapfrogged the mobile stylesheet concept. From the BMW.mobi example, you can see what sites look like when the developers cater to mobile device browsers and build a mobile-specific CSS stylesheet. Small, bare, and unimpressive. With the larger screens available on newer mobile devices and faster data connections being generated, wouldn’t it be great if phones actually showed you the real Internet instead of this tiny mobile stuff? Rejoice, my friends: it already happened. The Apple iPhone uses the Mac’s native Safari browser, and does not declare itself as a mobile device to the websites it surfs, but rather, as a typical desktop computer. So considering my previous point, you actually don’t have to do anything to your site in order for an iPhone user to experience it properly… meaning again that if you wanted to go to BMW.com on your phone, you just go to BMW.com. Except on the iPhone, instead of the mobile version of BMW.com, you’d actually get the BMW.com you’re used to seeing. And make no mistake - the iPhone has been responsible for preposterously high levels of Internet usage amongst mobile devices since its inception, and that’s not going to end. Eventually, all the popular Blackberry/PDA-type devices will make the same transition, and we’ll have little concern for this whole mobile-specific issue.

So there you go: short term solution, tweak your own website… long term solution, it’ll work itself out. The only issue with my points made here - from an automotive retail perspective - is that most of the dealer website vendors build horrific websites that don’t stand a chance in hell of being tweaked to fit a mobile stylesheet. Plus, half of the vendors wouldn’t know CSS if it hit them in the face. So if you were to approach your vendor about creating a mobile stylesheet, you may very well be met with a lot of resistance. But it’s like I always say - these companies serve you, not the other way around. If you don’t like the answer you hear from your vendor when you ask them about a mobile stylesheet or mobile version of your dealer site, pack up your contract and move to a website developer that actually knows what they’re doing.

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