Homepage Elements with the Highest Conversion Rates
Conversion Optimization: probably the most important topic imaginable for building car dealership websites, and a topic we’d like to shed some light on. Here’s what we at Strathcom discovered during our tests for conversion rates!
A Call to Action is Like Asking for the Sale
You train your Salespeople to close the deal, and the same kind of logic behind that also applies online. There’s no denying the insane importance of a Call to Action (CTA), and knowing just when and where to ask for the sale is just as important. In our tests, we excluded clicks from top-level menus. Here are the stats:
The Most Clicked-on Webpages
- New/Used Inventory – people like to browse, so let’s suggest taking a test drive, for example
- Specials – let’s load this page up with incentives; that’s the idea here anyways, right?
- Service Appointment
Highest-Performing Design
Button-style CTAs outperformed “image + text” CTAs. Main CTA buttons account on average for almost half of the clicks on a webpage, making them by far the most important CTAs to include.
Best Placement
The higher above the fold, the higher the conversions.
A Convenient Quick-Search Bar
Makes sense, doesn’t it? Users want to find what they’re looking for right away and if they don’t, they’ll go somewhere else. The stats:
Usage
One of the top-performing homepage elements to encourage conversions – we found in our tests that quick-search bars average around 20% of all site clicks.
Placement
- Placement on the homepage doesn’t matter, as it’s consistently used wherever we put it – it’s just a matter of making it accessible
- When placed lower on a page, users will actively scroll down to use it
A Ton of Links
One paragraph on the homepage could contain links to just about every other section of the site, giving readers an easy way of searching for and finding what they need. Stats:
Most Clicked-on Links
- Contact Info/Location/Directions/Hours – some users are customers already, and they just want to find out where and when they can drop by, so let’s be sure they can find out easily
- Book Service Appointment
- View New/Used Inventory
Highest-Performing Design
Links with button styles, but ONLY when used sparingly – let’s be smart about how we use buttons.
For our testing purposes, “conversions” was defined as clicks which took a user to an internal webpage. We tested using heat maps, click maps, and Google Analytics data, and our tests were done over multiple sites with differing designs.
