Initial Impacts of BMW Website Redesign
Written by Chris Coad (contact - e-mail) -- February 7th, 2008 | Recommend This
Boston, MA. February 1, 2008 – Compete’s automotive service experts help OEMs better understand how consumers interact with their websites. In the latest edition of the Compete Automotive Website Engagement Study, a monthly study that analyzes what percent of OEM website visitors use shopping tools, the team assessed the change in visitor use of three shopping tools following BMW’s mid December website redesign.
Build Your Own Vehicle
- The site now features two links to build your own vehicle
- BMW kept the traditional start/stop button in the bottom left of the screen, and added a new link in the top left corner, an area that commonly attracts visitor attention
- 26.9% of the visitors to BMW’s website used the build your own vehicle tool in December
- This represented a 5.1 ppts increase from November
Offers
- The addition of a prominently displayed link to the offers page increased visitor traffic from 5.7% of total site traffic to 9.3%
- The new link is displayed as part of a sliding menu bar in the bottom right hand corner of the homepage
Locate Dealer
- Redesigning the locate dealer tool from a simple zip code entry text box at the bottom right of the home page to the site menu bar led to a 4.3ppts decline in visitor usage
- 7% of visitors used the tool in December compared to 11.3% in November
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February 7th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
This is interesting - thank you for this post
February 8th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
This is a very interesting post. I would like to understand where you gathered these stats from?
February 11th, 2008 at 10:00 am
M3 Fan,
Our research is powered by millions of people who share their online behavior to create a more trusted, transparent and valuable Internet. To learn more about how Compete uses this data, please visit: http://www.competeinc.com/about_compete/whatWeDo/.
Regards,
Chris
April 17th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Did the overall time on site increase? If it did not, then the traffic was simply shifted.
Ultimately, a decline in people contacting dealers seems like a bad result in the sense that it is what drives the bottom line: buying a cart.
Admittedly, moving that car builder, and model names to the top is something I would have started with (perhaps they wanted to roll it out slowly), but generally speaking, you always bring out your websites unique selling points front and foremost, and not hide them in footers. But again, it’s probably hard to measure the ultimate value of these types of tools (unless you track funnels/paths).