Just because a website looks nice doesn’t mean it’s effectively helping the shop find business. For CS Automotive shop owner Kim Auernheimer and her husband and co-owner, Rob, their website was user friendly and informative for the customer, but on the back end, lacked specific background information, such as how a customer landed on the shop’s webpage. In order to better understand what locations the shop is reaching out to, customers were approached during their in-person visit, but even that was difficult to track for Auernheimer.
“Anytime the customer made a new appointment, we always asked the source, ‘How did you hear about us,’ and we always got, ‘Oh, my friend told me,’ or, ‘Oh, I heard about you online,” Kim Auernheimer says. “Well, online could be so many different avenues.”
Without knowing what platform was used to find the shop, marketing for a certain audience was rather difficult.
A few years down the road, Auernheimer attended a marketing session held during a WORLDPAC SMART GROUP quarterly meeting where she discovered Kukui, a company that created the “Kukui Dashboard.”
The Kukui Dashboard is a system that monitors all aspects of data from a shop and allows owners to view what the shop’s revenue is, how effective specific marketing tools are, as well as shop specifics such as how often phone calls are answered in the shop, which Auernheimer wasn’t able to do before. By just logging into the dashboard, she is able to see what advertisements are working and how to finance marketing programs accordingly.
“They had everything to let us know how effective our website was [and] who we were reaching out to through SEO,” Auernheimer says. “Without hesitation, we went with Kukui because we knew that they had what we needed in order of tracking and marketing tools.”
The Kukui Dashboard enables a shop to gain perspective on what processes are working. With the ability to track a certain demographic, determine what marketing tool helps gain the most customers and let shop owners know the fallout of an unanswered phone line, the Kukui Dashboard is a one-stop shop for all users.
UTILIZING THE TOOL
Through the Kukui Dashboard, CS Automotive has been able to discover where customers come from and how to better understand the back end of their website. With the ability to focus on different elements of a business—ranging from how many customers are coming into a shop based off of a Facebook ad to how often phones are answered on a daily basis—the Kukui Dashboard allows shop owners to evaluate which processes are worthwhile in a shop.
CS Automotive LLC began using the Kukui Dashboard in 2013 and hoped to understand how their website was bringing in customers and work to continue the shop’s overall progress.
“We were at a point in our company to change how we were doing things and Kukui was part of that pivot to take our business to the next level,” Auernheimer says.
Once familiar with the program, the business began to pick through and maximize the dashboard’s data.
“The Dashboard is basically a one-stop view of the health of our business; it even shows us our lead to actual conversions for AdWords and organic SEOs,” Auernheimer says.
According to Auernheimer, up to 42 percent of those who use the shop’s AdWords and organic SEO have become new customers. The Dashboard also reveals that CS Automotive LLC is ranked in Kukui’s top 20 on the lead to customer metrics.
“We know that what we’re doing is working with the SEO and the AdWords and that our page is working,” Auernheimer says.
INVESTING IN SUCCESSFUL MARKETING METHODS
Future marketing methods are now easier to capture for the shop using the Kukui Dashboard. The device measures the amount of leads from different sources such as Yelp, Bing, Facebook, and then determines where online advertisement lacks or has development potential.
“I love the performance metrics,” Auernheimer gushes. Auernheimer has been able to monitor the lead conversion rate for Google AdWords and look into why a conversion is dropping or rising.
“The AdWords has been our focus more recently,” Auernheimer says. “We are a Yelp subscriber, so I’m constantly looking at how many leads we have and how many new customers we have from the lead conversion—at a glance, we can decide if Yelp is the way we need to be spending our money.
“It definitely helped us at a glance know that the pivots that we were making when we brought Kukui in were right. When we did make a wrong [decision], it was very easy for us to correct that part of it and then change it.”
REFINING THE ROUTINE
The dashboard measures what occurs inside the office, too. According to Auernheimer, small details such as a customer email addresses and reminders, rate of answered phone calls, leads developed from organic searches, new customer count and customers who came from leads, are all calculated. Utilizing the Dashboard to determine results has provided a more accurate and faster route for Auernheimer, she explains.
“It’s pulling information from our point-of-sales system and with one glance, those numbers are available to me. I think it makes it much more accurate and then you can immediately see the results,” Auernheimer says. “That’s what’s surprising to me: how easy it is.
“It gives me an overall health check of how we’re doing.”
If you would like to learn more about the programs Kukui has to offer, visit their website at www.kukui.com/rw, or call 877.695.6008.
