For those of us in automotive web design and marketing, we sometimes struggle to fill space. We want to grab attention on our home pages, in the hopes that whatever we put in front of someone (as long as it is big) will stand out and get a response.

We also want to please people who are not our end customers. We want to fill space making our employers or clients like us. They want to feel important. They want their sale or article to get great “above the fold” placement.

This is why we made carousels on our home pages. We wanted to provide prime real estate and please more than one master by adding more elements in our carousels. We wanted green horses, blue horses, red horses, ride elements in which you sit down and stand up. We kept building these rides with more and more positions. Sometimes we would number them, sometimes we put dots, and sometimes we let you control the ride.

We expected you to watch the carousel in case you missed something like you were watching your child ride an actual carousel. Every time your ad makes it all the way around again, you would notice it and get excited.

We thought you would click and do what we wanted you to online. We wanted to guide your journey by placing the most ineffective form of advertising in front of you for direct response, a banner ad. We stacked the banner ads over and over, figuring you would find one you would like and click.

But a strange thing happened, you never clicked. Even though we took up over 50% of the screen real estate with our carousels, you only click 1% of the time. You also never click on anything past the first 2 horses on the ride.

We still haven’t given up. If you are an automotive dealership, the carousel is the element on our websites management focuses on the most and our customers focus on the least.

Our web site vendors keep placing these carousels in our templates. Fearful if they do not, the uneducated masses will think there is something missing and not choose them.

The important thing is what our web visitors choose to do on our websites. They choose to complete their tasks as quickly as possible. They want fast loading websites that work well on their phones. They want a web site amusement park of roller coasters and water slides without waiting in line. They want a “fast pass” at our automotive theme park and will reward us for it. They do not want the lonely carousel ride that their kids go on because the other lines are too long.

It is easy to get nostalgic about the rides we grew up with. It is fun to get back on a carousel every once in a while, remembering how things used to be. This isn’t the hot new attraction at the park anymore. We need to move on, our web templates need to get faster and improve.

We need one compelling reason in this space for our customers to click in place of our carousels. Please let the new attraction help our visitors get what they want, the right car or service in the quickest amount of time.

So please stop the ride, our customers need to get off.