Mazda North American Operations, a division of Mazda Motor Corp., is getting ready to deploy a web analytics program from Omniture Inc. to more thoroughly analyze its site’s product search performance.
The main reason: Finding new ways to build on the vehicle manufacturer’s e-commerce sales, which last year totaled about 10% of all sales. With improved site search, Mazda wants to more closely analyze which pages of MazdaUSA.com customers are visiting first, next ranking visits on which customers are coming to the site to build an interactive vehicle, check on available inventory or request a quote, and then sending more detailed Internet leads to its dealers.
“As customers move through and search the site, we ultimately want to know how hot a sales lead each individual visitor represents,” says Rudy Privatelli, Internet marketing manager for Mazda North American in Irvine, CA.
Eventually, Privatelli says analytics will help MazdaUSA.com determine if it needs to improve guided navigation to get new car shoppers more quickly to the pages they are looking for or making individual pages or tools such as the interactive payments calculator or vehicle configurator more prominent on the home page.
“If their intent is to buy within 10 days, a better analysis of how they search the site will help us identify who that buyer is and get the lead referred to the dealer,” he says.
Mazda and its dealers use Applied Virtual Vision, a web lead generation application from Autobytel Inc., to exchange online sales information. Through the use of analytics and improved site search, Privatelli says Mazda North American will improve its monthly online sales conversion rate, which today averages between 10% and 12%. Auto dealers define 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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