Conversion Rate Analysis of Automotive Sites

Free website conversion tool for your automotive website

After extensive research and conversion rate analysis, we built a free website conversion tool you can use to measure or predict your own conversion rate.

Our conversion rate experts took automotive parts website data and conversion rate stats covering more than five years. That’s over 1 million transactions. They worked with our Google Analytics team to create this free website conversion tool for you to use.

A quick note on how to calculate conversion rate: website conversion is calculated by dividing transactions by web sessions. Here’s an example: If you had 50 conversions from 2,000 web sessions, your site’s conversion rate would be 2.5%. That’s because 50 ÷ 2,000 = 0.025 or 2.5%.

Conversion rate analysis: Start with site speed from Google Analytics

The website conversion tool above is designed specifically for auto parts and accessories eCommerce sites. A major component is site speed as measured in Google Analytics. This conversion rate analysis may not work for non-automotive websites, but give it a try and give us your feedback.

Here’s how you find your site speed for the conversion tool.

First, in the Google Analytics menu, navigate to Behavior > Site Speed > Overview as shown in the screen shot on the left.

This page in Analytics will show you a lot of metrics on site speed including average redirection time, average domain lookup time, and others. But, the important metric for this automotive website conversion tool is “Avg. Page Load Time (sec)” as shown in the screen shot on the right.

Next, at a minimum, select a couple of months as the time frame. If you look at this longer time span you’ll be able to see significant changes to your site speed. This will help you see if there’s been a increase or decrease in site speed.

You’ll want to look at site speed by month, as shown in this screen shot. Don’t worry about daily or weekly numbers, there’s too much variation.

Don’t select hourly, day or week, because that won’t give you a high level viewpoint. It will be too granular for this website conversion tool. Just select the number closest to what you see for “Avg. Page Load Time (sec)” in the tool. Round up if there isn’t an exact match for your site speed.

How email marketing helps conversion rate

Whether you do email marketing on a regular basis or not impacts our conversion rate analysis. That’s because when you do regular email marketing, you bring engaged customers, who know your brand, back to your site. You also help prevent them from browsing on competitor auto parts and accessories websites. It won’t eliminate customers from looking elsewhere but it certainly helps.

Website conversion tools: heat maps

Heat map analysis is a great way to optimize your automotive parts site’s conversion rate. A heat map shows where visitors click on your website pages. This is useful because you can see if customers click on the wrong things.

Heat mapping also helps conversion rate optimization because it shows how far down visitors tend to scroll on a page. That can be useful, in case your call to action (like a buy now button) is too far down on the page.

We’ve used heat mapping software to optimize menu navigation, improve layouts of product pages, and improve content and layout of auto parts category and sub-category pages. These improvements help with the user experience (UX) and in turn, improve the conversion rate.

We’re testing the new heat mapping tools from Microsoft Clarity and they look very promising.

Other website conversion tools

CLICK TO ENLARGE: Average conversion rate doubles when load time drops from 8 seconds to 5 seconds. Going from 4 seconds down to 3 seconds increases conversion rate 44%.

Google offers some free website conversion tools to help with your conversion rate. PageSpeed Insights is a good one to use to measure your site speed and get hints from Google on how to improve. The default result is for a mobile page but you can also select the desktop version of a page in the upper left. The PageSpeed Insights tool will give you a score from 1 to 100.

Don’t overlook the importance of mobile speed, however. Today, 70% or more of your site traffic should come from mobile devices. As our Google rep put it on a recent phone call, “if a client is trying to choose between a good-looking mobile site or a fast mobile site, pick fast!” Today’s shopper demands fast-loading mobile sites over sites with a lot of graphics.[bctt tweet=”Average conversion rate doubles when load time drops from 8 seconds to 5 seconds. #cro #conversionrateoptimization” username=”HedgesCompany”]

WebPageTest.org is another tool for site speed. It gives you a lot of detail on what elements load on a webpage. The default setting for location is Dulles, VA and the default browser is Chrome. You can change these to other settings, but it’s important to remain consistent if you use WebPageTest.org over time. The actual settings aren’t as important as is using the same ones every time. GTMetrix is also very helpful.

Here’s a free tip for testing your site speed in WebPageTest.org: If your website uses https:// (which it should), do not enter http:// for the URL. When the webpage redirects from http:// to https:// it will increase the amount of time it takes for a page to load and give you inaccurate results.

Lighthouse is also a great way to test your page loading speed but we prefer the Chrome plugin. It gives you more detail especially with site security.

There are many other conversion rate tools that look at site speed.

Optimizing conversions using chat

You can also improve conversion rate by proactively communicating with your site visitors. Chatbot platforms like MobileMonkey let you answer customers’ questions in real time. In particular, MobileMonkey’s OmniChat^Ⓡ platform covers multiple platforms including social, and has a unified inbox, giving you a broad opportunity to capture more leads and improve conversion rate.

The most common conversion tool: Google Analytics

Do you look at Google Analytics for your auto parts and accessories website on a regular basis? There are a lot of ways to use Google Analytics for your conversion rate analysis.

We like to look at important metrics related to UX in Google Analytics, such as bounce rate, pages with a high exit rate, and page value. It’s easy to prioritize and spot problems with your conversion.

Other conversion rate analysis tools

There are literally dozens of conversion rate optimization tools you can use, ranging from free to expensive. A comprehensive list would be too long for this article!

But, let us know in the comments below what some of your favorite ways to optimize conversion rate are.

If you’re looking at improving your website you may also be interested in our auto parts eCommerce platform article, too.

If you have any questions on conversion rate optimization (CRO) give us a call, we specialize in improving conversion rates for automotive parts and accessories websites.