A hassle-free experience of buying a used car
- User research
- User interface
- Agile/scrum
- Wireframing
- Stakeholder management
- Customer journey mapping
- SEO
Context
CarNext is a marketplace for used cars. Customers can buy, lease or subscribe to a wide range of high-quality used cars together with extensive ancillary services.
CarNext was spending too much on paid traffic, which wasn't good for the long run. In December 2021, only 6% of the user traffic was organic.
Cost per sale was too expensive, with a high cost per click for SEA.
How did we get here?
CarNext conducted interviews with current and potential customers to understand their car-buying behaviors and this provided a lot of insights.
There are many things that happen before they decide on the brand and car they would like to buy.
Wrong assumptions
We assumed that users already knew which car make and model they wanted and were guiding them through our sales funnel from the homepage to the vehicle details page, and finally to checkout.
Reality check: user research
Our research showed that the process of exploring, shortlisting, and making decisions is not straight-forward.
Most people don't buy a car overnight.
Buying a car takes a lot of time. It's a process where people are always looking at different brands and models, using new information they find, often through Google.
From this, we identified a problem with our flow and also an opportunity.
Two things happening
We realized that there were two key issues: one from the business perspective and one from the user perspective. We identified a problem in our flow and also discovered an opportunity for improvement.
- Business side: High Customer Acquisition Cost (CaC). Low non-brand traffic. Organic traffic was only 6% of the total users.
- User side: Difficulty in finding the right information. Overwhelm due to too many choices. Challenges with comparing different vehicles.
Improve Google performance
To change this situation, we needed to meet the demands of our 'user' Google to improve SEO and SERP rankings.
We knew that we needed quality content pages so that we could help people by providing relevant content at the moment they are seeking knowledge about different cars and models.
That way we can could increase trust in our platform, and gradually increase organic traffic and spend less money on paid advertising.
Template pages design
We worked on the development of 3 template pages and the creation of 1692 content pages across 7 countries (Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy, France and Norway).
For this final result, many design reviews, usability tests, and iterations were needed.
- Cars overview page
- Make page
- Car model page
Content importance
Your design is only as good as the content. When you’re talking about increasing trust and clarity, content is extremely important.
Having content strategists involved from a very early stage allowed us to produce design that suits the content, rather than the opposite.
SEO takes time
We initially estimated that the most significant results would begin to materialize in six months. However, some setbacks related to the migration of some pages/countries from LeasePlan (as CarNext was previously a part of LeasePlan) negatively impacted our implementation, pushing the estimate to one year.
Our strategies were projected to increase user and lead growth by +260%, equivalent to a 2.2M euros SEA spend.
In 3 months non-brand impressions increased by +22% in the Netherlands website.