How UK car buyers can sell more cars with optimised product pages

What essential page elements do UK car buyers need to accelerate conversions? Find out how we identified a 93% potential uplift for Big Motoring World.

For brands in the automotive space, keeping CRO at the heart of their approach is particularly important. In a crowded market that keenly feels the impact of economic and sociological challenges, automotive brands must ensure their product and service pages are meeting (and exceeding) user experience expectations.

Automotive brands should be mindful that;

• They’ll need to share key technical information about vehicles, that could make or break a sale (such as transmission, mileage, and engine size),
• They’ll need to ensure large volumes of information is conveyed in a simple, easy to digest way,
• Customers will not only want product details, but details of financing options too.
  
  

Our approach to accelerating brand growth and helping businesses get more from their marketing investment is two-fold. We focus on a fully-integrated approach to marketing, ensuring conversion optimisation is considered every step of the way. By using a strategy that starts with CRO, paid media and organic campaigns can ensure they’re directing traffic to high-conversion potential pages. We also use user feedback to gather real impressions of any brand's site, ensuring we're making changes that matter to visitors.

With this in mind, we've taken a look at three leading UK car buying sites - Big Motoring World, Lookers, and Arnold Clark, to see how they measure up against our user testing process.

Why will user experience impact sales?

Do you know how long you have, to make your first impression on site visitors? With research showing that 0.5 seconds is all a user needs to form an opinion of a website, automotive brands must ensure they’re providing an exceptional user experience from the very first touchpoint. In other words, if you don’t convince your visitors that your range of vehicles can meet their needs within just half a second, it might already be too late to engage them with your brand and win a sale.

Plus, users also only spend 2.6s scanning a page so, if you survive past that first half a second, you need to provide compelling content and calls to action in an easily digestible way – and fast.

These two stats come together to form one very powerful point that should underpin every conversion-centric digital strategy – first impressions are essential for driving business.

The benefit of this is that getting insight into user preferences is almost just as fast, enabling us to get high-quality, real-life opinions and feedback from any target audience. And, with 95% of this feedback relating to design, layout, and functionality, it provides clear pathways for improvements.

So, how does Big Motoring World’s website measure up to these standards?

Looking at Big Motoring World’s current product page set up we noted;

• The above the fold viewport is taken up completely by the image carousel,
• The image is too large to fit in the viewport on desktop,
• There are no immediate CTAs or clear next steps included above the fold,
• The overall utilisation of space on the page is suboptimal.

We put Big Motoring World's site to the test with our offline user testing process. We showed UK residents aged 20 and above to compare Big Motoring World, Lookers, and Arnold Clark. We then asked them the simple question;

You are looking to buy a car, which site has the clearest next steps?

58% of our respondents chose Lookers as the clearest site, with 27% choosing Arnold Clark and only 5% selecting Big Motoring World. When asked why they made the choices they did, we gathered feedback such as;

“This one has the most clearly labelled buttons. I didn't even see choices to proceed to the next options on the third choice."

“The buttons and phone number are lined up on the right. You don't have to look around the page for different options.”

“I like the design of important elements, the different options, such as for paying a refundable deposit, are nice and clear and easy to see and understand.”

How can Big Motoring World tackle these challenges?

When creating a proof of concept for a new product page, we made four key changes to improve clarity;

1. Added a banner for a quick quote on part exchanging vehicles,
2. Included details on engine size, transmission, and mileage,
3. Added additional images as a slideshow beneath the primary image,
4. Included pricing details to the right of the image and above the fold, highlighting pay monthly costs & finance options, refund details, and a CTA to book a test drive.

With these new changes in place, we asked the same demographic which product page they felt was clearest.

On this test, 58% of users preferred Big Motoring World, compared to 26% for Lookers and 16% for Arnold Clark.

Using Data-led Design® to win incremental improvements

Our approach is simple. We begin by optimising at the start of the conversion funnel and user journey (ie. home or landing pages), with the intention of funnelling more and more users through to decision-making page, giving us a larger pool of traffic to assess. We then optimise at these key conversion points, for optimal impact and uplift! Basing our strategy on the full primary conversion funnel is absolutely pivotal to our approach’s success.

It’s essential to note that what we’ve shared above would only be the beginning for Big Motoring World. Throughout a CRO project, we’d apply ongoing tests, and continue to refine until we stop getting valuable insight from users. To put it bluntly, we will continue to optimise until no one can identify further opportunities for improvement. We’ve found this is the most effective path to achieving significant growth, securing the biggest impact, and taking the most learnings into future optimisations.

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Learn more about what we can do for your brand, and how we can apply our data-led, fully integrated approach to your digital strategy. Request your demo of our Data-led Design® process.