Excuse Me, Your Pop-Up Is Showing

Car dealers battle online to capture customers in any way they can, which can make their websites a breeding ground for the use of pop-up calls to action. 

However, Google has delivered a message: Don’t put intrusive pop-ups on a website, or it will not rank as high on search results pages.

Here’s what Google said recently: “Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller.

“To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.”

In other words, a site will not rank as well if anything detracts from a user’s ability to immediately access the content they hope to discover when clicking on a link from a search result. This includes having to click an “x” to close an ad. 

Why does this matter to dealerships?

Search local dealer websites, and you’ll bombarded with pop-ups displaying an offer, a coupon, live-chat invitations and an automatic launch of new tabs or windows. Those include sales-lead forms, trade-appraisal calculators, credit applications and more.

Most of these website elements don’t come pre-installed out-of-the-box. Instead, third-party plugins and lead providers use these interstitials in an attempt to increase engagement and conversion metrics. If pop-ups are bringing in more leads than a contact page, it’s hard to argue pop-ups aren’t working. The truth is, it’s usually hard to ignore them.

Understandably, third-party vendors want to deliver value to dealership clientele. To accomplish this, they must show that potential car buyers are interacting with their website utilities. How do you ensure a website widget will be noticed? Simple: Make your call to action scream “click me and all your wildest dreams will come true!” to every visitor. This translates into blinking buttons, overlays that slide across the screen, pop-ups, pop-unders, bright colors and styles that stand out.

When a dealer installs several third-party plugins (which is common), a website becomes the digital version of Las Vegas Blvd. at night, a confusing sensory overload of blinking lights and invitations.

Not only does the layering of these third-party utilities often diminish the quality of the user experience and potentially hurt a website’s ability to achieve rank in search results, it almost always increases page-load time, itself  a Google ranking signal.

Although Google and other search engines use many ways to rank a web page or site, best practices (and Google) have made it obvious that if dealers don’t believe they’re already shooting themselves in the foot by diminishing user experience with intrusive plug-ins, they’ll certainly be reducing user website visits based on  search-engine results.

Disclaimer: Many third-party vendors out there serve dealerships with integrity and provide value to both their clients and car buyers.

My attempt is not to berate any technology provider that offers plug-in utilities for dealership websites. Rather, my hope is that we – both dealerships and technology vendors supporting the automotive industry – act prudently.

It’s too easy for car buyers to dismiss dealership websites as cluttered, confusing and slow. Don’t contribute to that notion. Instead, help reshape the general perception of automotive retail websites for the better.

Eric Giroux is product manager at DealerSocket, a customer-relationship management software provider.