SRP buttons convert more shoppers. Here's the data.

Sometimes, conversion rate optimization is complex, incremental, and requires detailed A/B testing. Other times, however, it is as simple as making the buttons bigger, appear with greater frequency, and provide something that the user finds valuable.

We ran a 90-day observational study across our entire portfolio of Motive dealers to answer a question that keeps coming up: do SRP action buttons actually move the needle on conversions?

Short answer: yes. Dealers with SRP buttons enabled show a 66% higher form lead rate and an 89% higher check availability + pre-qualification rate. Both results are statistically significant. And they achieve this without other lead types.

What we measured

We pulled 90 days of Mixpanel data across 215 dealers with SRP buttons enabled and 71 without. For each group, we measured conversion rates on seven action types: check availability, pre-qualification, trade-in, deal builder, phone calls, test drive, and general contact form submissions.

To keep the comparison honest, we had to account for two confounding variables. First, dealers with more traffic tend to have lower aggregate conversion rates. That's just the math of scale: a site with 50,000 monthly visitors will almost always convert at a lower rate than a site with 5,000. Second, higher volume stores, we found, are more likely to have SRP buttons enabled than lower-volume stores (which itself strengthens the findings of this study). Both of these skew the raw numbers, so we weighted each dealer equally regardless of traffic size and used bootstrap confidence intervals with Mann-Whitney U tests to validate significance.

The overall picture

The median conversion rate for dealers with SRP buttons is 4.7%. Without them, it's 3.5%. The distribution tells the story clearly: SRP-enabled dealers cluster higher, and the gap widens at the top end. Dealers converting above 10% are overwhelmingly in the SRP-enabled group.

In Figure 1, on the left chart, notice the density flip at the transition from below-to-above median conversion rate. Below ~4-5%, the orange (without SRP buttons) dominates. Above it, blue (with SRP buttons) dominates. We believe that this should be interpreted as a phase transition. SRP buttons may be a prerequisite to maximizing conversion rate, if this is your goal.

Breaking it down by action type

Not all conversion types respond equally. Two action types reached full statistical significance (marked with **). The rest trend positive but are not statistically significant.

Check availability showed the clearest lift, with a median per-dealer rate of 0.85% vs. 0.55% (n=215+71, p < 0.01). This is the single strongest signal in the dataset. It makes intuitive sense: giving shoppers a direct action on the search results page (SRP) removes a click from the funnel. Instead of navigating to the vehicle detail page (VDP) first, they can act immediately.

Qualify / pre-qual also reached significance, with a median of 0.47% vs. 0.21% (n=166+52, p < 0.01). More than double the rate. Pre-qualification is high-intent: shoppers clicking this are serious. SRP buttons appear to surface that intent earlier.

Trade-in trends positive (0.37% vs. 0.23%) but didn't reach significance at the 95% level. The direction is consistent with everything else, but the sample needs more time.

Phone calls are the most interesting. They show the highest absolute conversion rate of any type (2.6% with SRP vs. 2.1% without) but with wide confidence intervals and no statistical significance. However, we did not, as part of this study, isolate mobile sessions for the phone call conversion rate, which could provide a different result.

Contact form, test drive, and deal builder all have small sample sizes or low adoption rates that make it hard to draw conclusions yet.

What shoppers actually click

Before interpreting the conversion data, it helps to see what SRP buttons shoppers actually use. Over 90 days, VDP click-throughs account for 36.7% of all SRP button clicks. Check availability is second at 21.6%, followed by payment estimate at 14.1%.

The takeaway: shoppers use SRP buttons primarily to navigate deeper (VDP) and to take lead-generating actions (check availability, estimate). The buttons aren't just decorative. They're functioning as a second conversion surface layered on top of your inventory listings.

The phone call question

One early concern was that SRP buttons might cannibalize phone leads by shifting shoppers toward digital forms. The data says otherwise.

When you look at the phone-to-form lead split, dealers with SRP buttons get 60% phone / 40% form. Dealers without get 65% phone / 35% form. The difference is not statistically significant (Mann-Whitney p = 0.063). SRP buttons shift the mix slightly toward forms, but not at the expense of phone volume.

This is the critical finding for any dealer worried about losing phone calls. The non-phone conversion rate (forms only) is 2.00% with SRP buttons vs. 1.20% without, and that gap is statistically significant (p = 0.003). SRP buttons generate net-new form leads. They don't steal from the phone.

Traffic tier breakdown

Conversion rates naturally decline as traffic increases. To control for this, we compared dealers within the same size tier.

The strongest signal comes from medium-traffic dealers (5K-20K monthly page views), where SRP-enabled dealers convert at 5.8% vs. 3.0% for those without. This is the only tier with both statistical significance and adequate sample size (n=91+32).

Small dealers (1K-5K) show a reversal: non-SRP dealers actually convert higher. But sample sizes are small (n=47+21), the non-SRP group falls below the minimum useful threshold of 30, and small dealers have higher variance in general. We wouldn't read into this.

Large (20K-50K) and XL (50K+) dealers both trend positive for SRP buttons, but sample sizes in the non-SRP group are too small to reach significance.

The bottom line

For a typical Motive dealer with 13,776 page views over 90 days, SRP buttons are associated with approximately 37 extra form leads per month (roughly 110 over the 90-day window). This comes without reducing phone leads. Phone conversion rates are 2.6% vs. 2.0%, and the difference is not significant.

The highest-engagement dealers see the biggest returns. Top quartile SRP engagement corresponds to a 10.2% conversion rate: three times the bottom quartile.

Combining check availability and pre-qualification alone, SRP-enabled dealers see an 89% higher median rate (1.32% vs. 0.70%, p = 0.0015). Form leads overall are 66% higher (2.00% vs. 1.20%, p = 0.003).

The funnel

Across all SRP-enabled dealers over 90 days, the raw funnel looks like this: 5 million page views produced 152,097 SRP CTA clicks (3.0% click rate). Of those, 54,656 started a check availability form (35.9% of clicks). Total conversions across all types reached 231,355 (4.6% of page views).

That 3% SRP click rate is the unlock. It creates a parallel conversion path that didn't exist before.

The caveat

This is observational data, not a controlled experiment. We can say dealers with SRP buttons convert more shoppers. We cannot say, with certainty, that SRP buttons caused the increase. It's possible that dealerships tech-savvy enough to enable SRP buttons also have better sites in general: cleaner inventory, faster pages, stronger merchandising.

The sample size is large enough (286 dealers) to dampen most selection bias, and the dealer-weighted methodology controls for traffic volume. But the gold standard would be an A/B test: take a handful of dealers, randomize SRP buttons on and off over 60 days, and measure the difference directly. That's on the roadmap.

The takeaway

If you're a Motive dealer and you haven't turned on SRP buttons, the data says you should. 66% more form leads. 89% more check availability and pre-qual submissions. No reduction in phone calls. The lift is real, it's consistent, and it compounds.