Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Selecting a Shop We asked people who had trans-
mission repairs done how they found the shop. The results were not much of a surprise (figure 3). The most common answer was recommendations from friends followed by recommendations from other shops. The “other” cat- egory offered a write-in answer and the majority was a familiar shop. That is they went to a shop they’d used before. What is different from earlier sur-
veys are the results for the phone book and Internet. In 2008, we found phone books slightly above the Internet, and then in 2009, the Internet was slightly above the phone book. In the 2011 survey, the Internet has clearly taken a lead, with no women reporting as using the phone book. If you’re still not convinced that a
strong Internet presence is important, consider the following: We asked the survey group if they use the phone book or Internet to research for a transmis- sion shop. The results are shown in figure four. This chart is broken down by age and gender. Along the bottom you’ll see an F1-F5 and an M1-M5 representing Female/Male and their age groups: 1 being 18-25, 2 being 26-35 and so on. You’ll notice that the older
GEARS January/February 2012
group uses the phone book and they’re also the group that represents much of the dealer clientele. With that, we don’t want to completely discount the phone book. Incidentally, ATRA has just exceeded 250,000 unique individu- als who have visited the
atra.com con- sumer website. The number of people visiting the site has far exceeded our expectations.
The Internet Ok, so more people are using the
Internet to find a transmission shop. Not much of a surprise. But how are they using it? What are their habits and how does that affect you? Back in 2008, we learned that the majority of consum- ers used the Internet to find out more about a shop they were already familiar with. They wanted to know things like their phone number, address and hours of operation. Today that’s changed. In our recent
study we found that people are doing more research; they’re looking for information (figure 5). There’s about a 2 to 1 ratio of people doing research over those that are looking for infor- mation on a shop they already know (63.9% vs. 36.1%). The chart is broken down based on gender and age, just like
Figure 6
figure four. If we look strictly at gender, we find a slight increase in men using the Internet for research but for all intent and purpose, they were an equal audience. (figure 6). This brings about another question.
Do you use your website mostly for advertising or do you share information with your visitors, too? We’re find- ing more people interested in learning something and finding answers about their automotive questions, so make sure your website isn’t simply a series of billboards and service specials. In addition, search engines love meaning- ful content, so you’re likely to rank bet- ter if you have good content that people are interested in. Another question we had was how
many pages people would go through once they received their search results. We were a bit surprised in that we thought one page would be the most common, followed by two, and so on. Not true. Figure seven shows the results, and the most common response was two pages. We were equally sur- prised to learn that over 20 percent of the group surveyed would go beyond page three. We also asked if people paid more attention to listings on the top of the
49
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71