What is Overfuel?

Overfuel provides the fastest, most reliable mobile-first websites for dealerships. Founded in 2022, Overfuel released automotive’s first no-code website platform with drag-and-drop content management, natively integrated digital retailing, and advanced visitor-level analytics.  

Who is Overfuel intended for?

Overfuel powers automotive websites across the United States, including both franchise (Honda, Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, RAM) dealerships and independent pre-owned lots. They target dealerships with anywhere from 50 vehicles to over 1,000. With a focus on lead generation and digital retailing, Overfuel aims to drive more online car sales by offering direct-to-consumer vehicle reservations like Carvana and Vroom, to dealerships of any size.  

The Challenge

The primary challenge in the automotive industry is the unnecessary complexity and poor user experience caused by third-party plugins. Everyone has a horror story of trying to shop for a car online, with slow websites, pop-ups competing for their attention, and competing calls to action. Third-party plugins not only slow down a website, but they create gaps in reporting because they’re competing against each other for leads, rather than communicating with each other. The conversion funnel ends up broken up across multiple vendors with no connectivity between them.  

Finding a solution

Overfuel added Microsoft Clarity to its highest traffic dealership websites to track user behavior and make improvements to its user experience. Clarity helped make significant improvements to consumer-facing products and also educated dealerships on the best practices for improving conversion rates. Since 80% of car shopping takes place on a mobile device, Overfuel used Clarity to keep a close eye on mobile browsing behaviors and optimize for a mobile-first experience.  

After deploying Clarity for a few weeks to collect data, Overfuel closely monitored the dashboard and email digests to see if any interesting metrics stood out. One thing that immediately grabbed their attention was the JavaScript error tracking. They found that customers using third-party plugins (live chat, iFrame forms) experienced a 10-12x increase in errors. Overfuel hypothesized that these plugins may be hindering user experience, and Clarity’s data proved it. For example, the “Close” button on a third-party live chat product accounted for 20.5% of all clicks on a vehicle listing.  

Second, they noticed a substantial percentage of dead clicks, sometimes exceeding 20% of all interactivity. They were able to use session recordings to identify design elements that confused customers. The issues varied widely: sometimes it was not clear that an element wasn’t intended to be clicked, or it exposed elements that were too small which they fixed by expanding click radiuses.  

The third interesting metric was rage clicks. Clarity’s session recordings showed numerous instances of third-party plugins blocking users from actions they intended to take. In one instance, a broken pop-up widget prevented a customer from completing a lead form. They were stuck rage clicking, unable to convert or close the pop-up. 

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, Overfuel used heatmaps and scroll maps to understand how consumers were interacting with products. When Overfuel realized that 80% of users don’t scroll more than 25% of a page, they were compelled to rethink the placements of the most important calls to action.  

They also found that: 

 ● Freeform inventory search accounts for 24.9% of all homepage activity, so they implemented “Smart Search” improvements to detect common vehicle misspellings, recommend search results, and enabled customers to search by color and body type (“red SUV”) or popular features (Apple CarPlay, heated seats). 

 ● Clicking vehicle tiles (Cars, Trucks, SUVs) accounted for 14% of all homepage clicks, and Overfuel discovered that the most common behavioral pattern is clicking a body type (“SUV”), selecting a color (“Red”), then narrowing down the results by color. 

The Results

Overfuel’s philosophy is to provide customers with exactly what they want as quickly as possible. To achieve this, the company has made the top three consumer intents available above the fold.

The team at Overfuel has been successful in increasing user engagement by implementing Smart Search directly into the hero banner. The company has since expanded the use of Smart Search across its customer base due to its positive results.

Prior to this implementation, search was only available in the hamburger menu, which was the third most-clicked element. Since the implementation of Smart Search, the hamburger menu icon has shifted to the fourth most-clicked element, while Smart Search has taken over as the most-clicked element.

Testimonial

“Microsoft Clarity helps us empirically prove what many have believed in automotive for years: many dealership websites are inundated with plugins and unnecessary complexity that hinders the car shopping experience for consumers. By monitoring our websites with Clarity, we’ve dramatically improved user experience by reducing dead clicks, rage clicks, and using heat maps to inform where we put calls to action throughout a website. Not only has it helped us increase conversion, but it’s helped us identify problematic plugins and third-party widgets that get in the way of a positive shopping experience.”  

Alex Griffis; President & CTO, Overfuel