Electric Cars UK

Client: Electric Cars UK

www.electriccarsuk.com

Electric Cars UK came to us with an already existing website built with Autotrader.  Whilst the website was nicely designed and worked well, the monthly fees from Autotrader were very expensive and it wasn’t possible to customise the website without changing the overall template in place for all the Autotrader websites across the country – something Autotrader wouldn’t permit.

What we needed to do was create a website away from the Autotrader portal, but still provide the benefits of being integrated with the Autotrader portal.

The amount of visitors the website was receiving was also quite low and new techniques were needed to boost web traffic.

We needed to create a system that would replicate the best features of Autotrader whilst being independent form them. The benefits would be a system that generates car details form a registration number – speeding up the listing process and pushing the cars out to different advertising platforms such as Autotrader, Ebay, Facebook marketplace etc.

As the primary product of the company is high quality, used Electric Cars, we thought that this niche could do quite well on Social Media as well as have a good presence on paid Google advertising for a relatively cheap cost per click

We decided to create a bespoke system that links a database with the Autotrader API (application programming interface) for ease of use to the client.  This allows the vehicles to still be uploaded on the Autotrader system and advertise on this platform, but also feed into the website.  This means that the benefits of the Autotrader system are still being used, without having the additional fees of renting an Autotrader website.

We decided to create a shop on Facebook. This allows us to upload and tag electric car products to share across the Facebook platform to different related groups, generating interest in affordable electric cars.  Good graphic design to advertise the cars also works well on Instagram. Using a selection of hashtags and location settings we are able to increase the exposure on social media a lot.

We decided on a high impact visual campaign on social media, designing a series of eye-catching graphics and videos to advertise the electric cars on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These graphics were in stark contrast to the posts that had gone out previously, and ended up with far better results!

So, how did we do?

The website still looks familiar to the design that was in place when the site was an Autotrader website, but the ability to customise the design for individual pages, add blog posts and pages is a huge benefit.

Adding new stock is just as simple as it was in the Autotrader system, simply upload the cars to Autotrader the same as before and job done.  The car will be live on the website within 24 hours.  This, again is a benefit to the client as they don’t need to learn a new system and the speed of which new cars can be added is just the same as it was with an integrated Autotrader site.

We have seen a huge increase in Social media engagements and site visits through primarily through the Electric Cars Facebook and  Electric cars Instagram.  Using simple techniques such as creating good infographics, with links to the products, we were able to share these posts to related audiences through differnet Electric car groups on Facebook which generated lots of engagement and drove a spike in new likes and follows.

Instagram followed a similar pattern, but rather than sharing good posts with different related groups, we used related hashtags that exposed the Instagram page to a bigger audience, again, driving the amount of followers to the account.

As you can see from the graph above, the work on the website led to a rise in keyword searches that the website was appearing for. The keywords that were most commonly searches were:

• Used electric cars
• Electric cars UK
• Used electric cars for sale

These are very good searches to appear for in this niche and appearing on page one for these searches helped to drive more good quality traffic to the website.

Traffic from Social media also rose alongside the usual traffic from Google.  As the image above shows, the engagement rate of visitors was very good.  The normal stats from social media traffic is usually pretty low, with a high bounce rate and a small amount of tim on site.

The stat we can see show low ‘bounce rates’ (a bounce is someone coming to the website and leaving pretty quickly without looking or clicking on anything), with the normal range being between 60-70%.  Instagram especially shows very low bounce rates.

The amount of time people are spending on the site from Facebook and Instagram is also really good with above average times.

All these stats mean that the people who are finding the adverts are the correct audience who are engaged with the Electric Cars products and branding.