Franchise Update Magazine Issue IV, 2015 | Page 36

2016 AFDR NEW WEBSITE APPROACH PAYS OFF O ne number that’s extremely important to Josh Wall at Christian Brothers Automotive is unique website visitors to lead conversion. “I watch that one like a hawk. We spend a large portion of our budget on our website,” he says. This wasn’t always the case. Two years ago the company launched a new recruitment website—and unique visitor traffic rose 394 percent year-over-year, he says. “Spending a little bit of money on SEO had a tremendous impact on leads,” he says. His first goal was to drive up the number of people coming to the recruitment website. “If I get enough people in front of that site, and if it’s sticky and interesting enough, it will convert a reasonably high number of those unique visitors,” he says. The next goal was finding a way to make visitors stick around. Having learned about the relationship between the amount of time visitors spent on a website and further activity, especially conversion, he began working to boost the amount of information available online. “I realized we didn’t have enough content, so we beefed it up, including video,” he says. Visitors were spending very little time on the company’s website. “Our average time was less than a minute. That’s when we decided to throw more out there. We needed more content to interest the right people,” he says. Before the change, he says, “Our website had very little T 2016 AFDR NOW AVAILABLE ! he 2016 Annual Franchise Development Report (AFDR) delivers data collected from 134 franchisors representing 51,004 units, with responses organized by industry, unit investment, system-wide sales, and more. The annual report provides franchisors with the ideal tool for studying their development practices, benchmarking their sales and recruitment budgets against their own industry categories, and setting goals and budgets for the year ahead. The report also includes research into online recruitment practices, the growing use of mobile and social tools by prospects, and best practices by franchisors. The AFDR, the only sales and lead generation benchmark report available in franchising, identifies industry sales trends and top lead generation sources for meeting sales goals. For example: • How does your sales budget compare with those of other brands in your segment? • Are your closing ratios in line with your industry and investment level? • What conversion rates should you expect from your website? • Is your