DEALER WEBSITE TRAFFIC RECOVERY

GETTING BACK ON TRACK
Not All Change Is Good

A Case Study: McClains RV

In 2018 McClain's wanted to try a new marketing agency (Agency “X”). After being courted by agency sales staff, that included visits to their dealership, our client was convinced that this new high price agency would improve their website and their leads.

It was quickly apparent that the sales pitch didn’t match reality.

Not only did the client suffer a significant drop in organic web traffic and associated sales. They also suffered in the costs and time of making the changes. There was also lost time due to diminishing results that had to be recovered from.

NetSource Media always accommodates clients! We have enough experience to know that our total offering exceeds all competitors (price-point, people, processes, quality, integrity, customer support, products, technical expertise, and solutions).

Unfortunately, sometimes clients have to test the waters and experience this out for themselves. The lesson can be very painful for their bottom-line.

THE PROBLEM

2018 Agency "X" YoY Organic Traffic Results

-37.5%
JUNE

-44%
JULY

-33%
AUGUST

1 Year Engagement with Agency X

52.18% loss of traffic
62.55% loss of direct traffic
60% decline in relative click-thru rate over the previous year
In 1 year with Agency X the dealership lost over 500 keywords and associated organic traffic. For one major keyword (travel trailers) our client had ranked 8th but this was lost completely. Other keywords fell off first page placements.
The initial boost in ranking was followed by a steep decline. This indicates spam, black hat, or dead/fake back linking strategy. Google frowns on this and it causes long-term damage.

Big Implications

Lead Shortfall

In order to make up for the lead shortfall, Agency X recommended that the client sign-up for their PPC services. Having little choice, the client now had to incur both PPC paid service fees, plus PPC advertising costs.

Ripple Cost Implications

The necessity of advertising costs to make up for the lead gaps required the client to make budgetary cuts. Marketing expenses put a squeeze on other departments and ultimately impacted customer support staffing.

It didn’t take long for our client to realize that the move away from NetSource Media was not the best decision. However, they were under contract with their new agency. Also, knowing whether performance improvements were just around the corner was hard to know. After all, they kept being told that the issues were short term aberrations.

NetSource Media staff was delighted to hear that our client wanted to resolve the issues and get their traffic and performance back on track by moving back to us.

McClain’s has 5 locations across Texas and Oklahoma. They sell a complete line-up of all types of RVs.

REPAIR & RECOVERY

During, and even after leaving NetSource Media, our client maintained a good rapport with our team. This made the process of coming back to NetSource much simpler. There were no hard feelings for anyone. NetSource’s goal, as always, was to improve our client's digital marketing performance and results.

Website Technology Matters

The technology and methods used for dealership websites matter a lot. There is both an art and a science to database design, performance, and search engine optimization. A failing in the technology platform and methodologies utilized by Agency X are clear. This is illustrated in what happened when all existing content and inventory was moved from NetSource Media to Agency X.

THE RESULTS? Content and search result (inventory) pages were no longer found nor ranked well by Google.

RE-Engagement with NetSource Media

Within 6 Month Period

+13%
Recovery growth in Organic Visits

+60.14%
Increase in Total Impressions

+8.11%
Increase in Total Clicks

Recovering from a loss of over 85% of organic keywords!

Before leaving NetSource Media in April 2018, the client had over 2,144 keywords ranking in the top 20 positions. Within a couple of months Agency X had totally collapsed keywords with only 232 being ranked. Agency X only recovered slightly but was never fully able to recover. By March 2019, Agency X reached a pinnacle of 1667 keywords ranking. Thus, in their time of running the client's site Agency X lost over 22% of ranked keywords.

Continued Growth & Recovery

Since returning to NetSource Media, we've been able to go beyond recovering losses. We now have the client's website ranking for over 2,500 keywords. NetSource Media has improved over our results from back in April 2018 by 16.6% (prior to Agency X's involvement).