Article

Discover Boating is sending shoppers to manufacturer brand websites as part of its website referral program, helping to bring new people into boating. During its 2016 campaign, Discover Boating generated more than 3.1 million web visits to brand websites.

A website referral is someone coming to a website, from another website, to shop and/or find more information about a product or brand.

“Referrals are becoming more important as more and more consumers choose to not enter their personal information into a website to be contacted by a sales rep,” notes Carl Blackwell, president of Discover Boating. “Not only has the traditional means of entering personal information into websites become a privacy and security concern for consumers, but consumers want to control their own shopping experience instead of putting it in the hands of a sales rep.”

Of the millions of consumers who come to Discover Boating each year, more of them than ever are opting to click off to manufacturer websites to shop brands on their own than choosing to be contacted by a dealer. In 2016, consumers opted for the direct shopping, referral route, rather than grant permission to be contacted by a dealer, also known as the lead route—a number that has consistently increased year over year.

“We’ve watched the online shopping experience change dramatically over the past ten years since we launched Discover Boating,” said Blackwell. “The consumer is now in the driver seat—they expect to be in the driver seat. Our industry is accommodating that shift and as a result is getting much smarter about how we attract buyers and carry them through the purchase process online.”

What’s more, the referrals coming from Discover Boating are proving to be quality referrals—they’re new potential boat buyers and they’re demonstrating that they’re interested in buying a boat. A study conducted by Discover Boating and their advertising agency, OLSON, consisting of a control group of manufacturers representing approximately 300,000 website referrals, used Google Analytics to analyze total traffic to manufacturer brand websites against referral traffic from Discover Boating. The analysis showed that Discover Boating referral traffic represents a higher percentage of new customer visits than the brands’ overall web traffic (78% vs. 68%). But that’s not all. Discover Boating referrals have a lower bounce rate (33% vs 44%), spend a healthy amount of time on the brands’ websites (an average duration time of 2:35 vs. 3:06 from other traffic), and view just as many pages (4.9 vs. 5.1 from other  traffic).

Discover Boating, and the manufacturers that participated in the referral analysis, are learning a lot about the behavior of consumers who visit Discover Boating websites and then visit brand websites. As part of this continued learning, Discover Boating is seeing its referrals fall into the “top of the purchase funnel” category of consumers—consumers in the shopping mode—vs “bottom of the purchase funnel” consumers who are ready to buy. Discover Boating referrals conducted more dealer searches than the brands’ overall traffic (5.8% vs. 4.8%) and Discover Boating referrals requested more brochures than the brands’ overall traffic (.36% vs .27%). The data are helping the industry better understand the role of Discover Boating and how to guide the campaign moving forward.

“Promoting the boating lifestyle and improving the boating experience is the purpose of Discover Boating. Introducing boating to new customers, getting them excited about getting on the water, and then connecting them with manufacturers and retailers who can get them on the water and in a boat is our strategy. We’re excited about this research because it’s showing us it’s working,” notes Joe Lewis, chairman of Discover Boating and owner of Mount Dora Boating Center. “Our mission now is to communicate these findings to the industry and help manufacturers make the most of these shoppers, converting them to leads and connecting them with dealers who are the only ones who can make them boat owners. As part of this, we’ll need to work in sync with the industry to make the referral hand-off process much more seamless and productive.”

Discover Boating is encouraging all manufacturers participating in the campaign to review their Google Analytics to determine how much referral traffic is coming from Discover Boating and to see how those referrals are behaving on their site. Once a manufacturer understands this process they can target these referrals and help guide them through the purchase process.

Discover Boating’s analysis of the control group of manufacturers’ web traffic showed that Discover Boating delivered a significant portion of the referral traffic to their websites and in many cases was a top three referring site.

As manufacturers see an abundance of referral traffic from Discover Boating, the campaign will be working with manufacturers to help them optimize their website to take full advantage of Discover Boating referrals. In the coming months, Discover Boating will provide insights on how manufacturers can best market to Discover Boating referrals once they’re on their website—from having a simple, easy to navigate and informative website to building a relevant landing page for referrals coming from Discover Boating.

 

To learn more about identifying Discover Boating referrals using Google Analytics, Discover Boating has created a short video tutorial to demonstrate the process. The video can be found on the GrowBoating.org homepage. Manufacturers are also encouraged to contact [email protected] or to contact Blackwell directly at [email protected] with questions.