Ford’s looking for a better idea in site search
E-commerce is accounting for about 9% of all sales at Ford Motor Co., but better site search can help the company build on that total, says Steve St. Andre, CEO of Ford Direct, a joint venture Internet marketing company Ford operates in conjunction with its participating dealers.
Today visitors to FordDirect.com, which receives more than 3 million total visits each month, can search the site to build an interactive vehicle, get a price quote or search for available inventory.
But to improve performance--and drive more web-generated leads to the 3,900 Ford and Lincoln Mercury dealers participating in FordDirect.com--St. Andre says the company is evaluating ways to improve site search such as addressing page indexing issues, making better use of natural search and analyzing how customers are searching individual pages. “We are looking at how they are searching the Internet and major search engines to get to our site and then trying to maximize getting them to search the pages they are most interested in,” he says. “If a shopper goes down a particular page path we want to better analyze going forward what they are most interested in, such as finding a particular price or vehicle package.”
St. Andre says better site search—and a better idea of who is coming to FordDirect.com, and why, to shop for a vehicle—will result in better and faster leads being distributed to dealers.
In 2003, FordDirect and other e-commerce initiatives from Ford generated more than 1.5 million new vehicle referrals for participating Ford and Lincoln Mercury dealers.
Ford, like most other auto dealers, defines the conversion rate as the number of customers who buy a car, usually at a dealership, after initiating contact on a web site, as opposed to retailers who define the conversion rate as the number of customers who make a self-service purchase at a site.
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