automotive

Edmunds.com Reorganizes Home Page -- With Less

Edmonds-B

As third-party automotive research and shopping sites merge, new players emerge, and established properties launch brand-specific dealer inventories, Edmunds.com staked out the somewhat amorphous mid-purchase-funnel area somewhat above the sales fray.

The site has evinced a catch-all zeitgeist: as a destination for people who may be anywhere from just mulling a new vehicle to getting ready to buy one. Its home page has been like a New Jersey buffet restaurant off of the Garden State Parkway, offering a mile-long counter covered with something-for-everyone cuisine.

No more. The company has relaunched with a new home page that it hopes seems less like a smorgasbord and more like an Apple, or a Google. The new site is the result of a Web page optimization experiment Edmunds did earlier this year, wherein visitors were randomly directed to one of four Edmunds.com beta pages, each based on a different design strategy: one focused on dramatic car photos; another one task-oriented; the third more about simple graphics and fewer choices; and the fourth a new version of the previous home page.

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Jeremy Anwyl, Edmunds.com's CEO, said the simple page won out. "We like the Apple.com model of a simpler site, and it seems to be the new design ethos out there. Elegance is about figuring out what to take out, not what to put in."

While the old site had an old-school newspaper-circular feel and function, the new site has only three major boxes on the splash page: a "Find Your Next Car" scroll sheet of vehicle-type silhouettes, each of which takes visitors to another site offering "browse by price" or "browse by feature" boxes; an "I want to ..." drop down menu; and a separate "browse by make" box.

There's also a "save" function that lets site visitors privately collect their research from any Web site and make notes. It also has dealer ratings and inventory.

"The old site was about publishing lots of stuff, the new one is about organizing content that facilitates tasks; it's about doing things," says Anwyl, adding that the new format is, at its most basic level, meant to get rid of confusion and thus cut bounce rates where people never get beyond the home page.

"Across all web sites the fact that 25% of people don't get beyond the home page is a big failure rate; within the auto category it's upwards of 50%. The default excuse has been that it's the nature of the Internet, but it's really about confusion more than anything."

He says that so far on the new site, page views are up around 20% and home-page bounce rates are improved around 5%. "This is just the start. The goal with the new site was just to match the old site at launch. With the new testing platform, these numbers should continue to improve," he says.

Anwyl says that because Edmunds.com isn't transaction-centered it has staked out a territory somewhat outside the realm of sales focused commerce sites, "So we don't compete with sites like CarsDirect, TrueCar, or AutoNation. We are more about providing guidance in terms of which way to go," he says.

Anwyl says the site will, in fact, evolve toward adding reviews on alternative online sales channels. For consumers to have choices we have to list all retail alternatives. That's our position -- we have no vested interest in a particular outcome."

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