Not in the showroom but on the website!

Michał Karpiński, VW Poland, Piotr Ulacha, Artegence

Around the world, 10 manufacturers can take advantage of such an opportunity. One of the first brands to implement online sales of its new cars in Poland was Skoda.

This shows that dealerships are not going to become a thing of the past. However, they will change their function somewhat. As envisioned by Volkswagen, dealerships will become experience and test drive centers and, respectively, places from which customers pick up vehicles purchased online.

To understand the behavior of a user buying a new car through the Digital channel, it is necessary to take care of tracking. With analytical solutions and full data integration, VW analyzes customer behavior. The customer ID helps to find out whether a user who is on the website purchased the car in which he was interested. Whether he made the purchase online or in a showroom. The ID even allows the algorithm to find out at which stage from idea to purchase the customer is. Of course, with all the strictures of RODO. Identifying customer behavior online and in real life allows you to continuously optimize the car buying process.

From Volkswagen’s research covering the first seven months of 2020. shows that 83.6 percent. Among all online car buyers are men. Thus, there is a strong overrepresentation of men in this user group. It is also known that customers in 75% of cases are limited to looking at a maximum of 3 different car models on the website. These are mostly models with similar parameters (size/price). 1. at 3. users are so sure of their choice that they limit themselves to reading only a specific car model on the website before buying. Users starting their path in the Digital channel mostly know what they want. 70% of them make a purchase of this model, which they selected first on the website. Interestingly, also, the decision as to the car model chosen on the website after contacting the dealer changes only 4% of customers.

We can also see that the user’s path requires more than 1 so-called “user’s path”. touch points and is not limited to a single marketing channel. The majority, 92%, of the sales in the Digital channel took place with the cooperation of up to 3 marketing channels, and more than half of the user paths involved at least 1 paid channel. Interesting conclusions can also be drawn from the analysis of path length, i.e. the time between the first visit to the site and the sending of a conversion lead to a sale. The research shows that it usually takes a maximum of 30 days, 5 visits and 70 page views on the site for a user to send a sales lead.

It is worth noting that the user’s path in the vast majority of cases does not end there. 77 percent. users return to the site at least once more. Most often, the customer wants to make sure he or she has made the right decision or review the available options once again. The user also returns to the site after the order has already been placed as well as after receiving it, to check configuration or service information.