Google Analytics. When used correctly, it’s one of the most powerful analytics tools out there. When set up properly, it can be used as the virtual yardstick to judge all your digital activity. The thing about Google Analytics is that it needs to be collecting data in order for you to judge anything. I’ve lost count of the amount of dealer’s Google Analytics only to see no data. Just like the dog with homework, there’s always an excuse to why it happened but it means dealers are missing data.

Rather than having to log into GA every day, there’s a way you can have Google tell you any time your code stops tracking. To do that, first log into your Google Analytics account and click on the “admin” gear in the bottom left hand side of the screen. From there, click on “custom alerts” and click “new alert.”

There’s three parts to fill out. First is an impactful name that will make it easy to remember when it shows up in your email. Second, set the period for the day. If the email account you access Google Analytics with is not your main email address, add your main email address to the alert here. Finally, set the alert conditions you want. For this, setting it to be when the sessions are less than 1 in a day is all you need. Click “Save” and you are all done. 

Google Analytics. It's one of the most important tools for a dealership in this digital age, but still there are many dealers out there who aren't taking advantage of the data because they can't access it. If a 3rd party, agency or previous employee was the one to install GA there's a good chance the dealer is locked out.

One of the most common questions I get asked is "how can I get access to the Google Analytics account on my site?" This is meant to be the directions on how to go about reclaiming Google Analytics.

1. Finding out what Google Analytics is installed on your site

First is finding out which account is installed on your site. If you have read only access to Google Analytics, click into the admin menu in the bottom left hand side, and then click into properties. It will list out a code that starts with UA and 9 numbers after, such as UA-8675309-1. If you don't have access to an account at all, you will have to use Tag Assistant for Chrome which is an extension that will allow you to see which Google Analytics properties are installed on your site.

2. Create the ownership file for your website

Create the txt file with the following information on it. The name of the file should be "analytics".

GooGhywoiu9839t543j0s7543uw1 - pls add {INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS} to GA account {INSERT UA-ID} with ‘Manage Users and Edit’ permissions - date {INSERT DATE}

{INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS} - the email you want to give "Manage Users and Edit" permissions

{INSERT DATE} - the date you create the file

{INSERT UA-ID} - your tracking code number we got from step one.

Once you have that file created, you will need to request to have your website provider upload this file to the root domain of your website. Every provider should be able to do this.

3. Reach out to Google

Once the file is uploaded, fill out the “Troubleshooter Reclaiming Form” with Google. For the Ad Words account information, fill in N/A, since you are only reclaiming a Google Analytics account.

Make sure that Google can contact you at resolution. If you select to have them contact you over email, someone needs to be checking that email. If it is over phone, someone needs to be answering that phone.

According the 2016 NADA dealer study, fixed ops makes up almost half of a dealer’s gross profit. Given how much potential revenue is out there in search, it’s more important than ever to know how people are searching so your website content connects with the actual searches happening.

In the automotive industry, we are great about using words to describe a product that no one actually searches for. Think about it for a second. If you want to find a deal for shopping, will you search for a coupon or an offer? The same applies in automotive. A dealer thinks about the oil change as their “special” or “offer” but your customer is looking for the “oil change coupon”.

There is a great out there to help you understand how your customers are searching. First is Google Search Console. Search Console is an amazing tool to understand how people are searching in your area. Even more, in the queries section, you can filter out for everything that contains a certain word.

Once you log into search console, filter your queries to everything that contains “service”. As you see from this example, the keywords with high impressions and high clicks don’t contain “offers” or “specials”. One of the highest performing keywords is “service coupons”. These phrases and keywords should be the starting point for the content strategy on your site.  Once you understand how people search for service, filter your keywords for “oil”, “battery” and “tire” to get an idea of some of those major offerings. If you don’t see a lot of keywords show for that term, or none of them have a high impression, it means your website isn’t visible at all for those related terms. It is a sign you need to be focusing more on content for each offering.

Want to know more about how to build a service strategy that drives customers into your service department? Make sure to attend my session at DSES “Driving Service Customers from Your Website to Your Service Bay” and get all your information about the DSES speakers here.  

Your dealerships’ Google My Business Listing is the first impression each customer sees when they search for you. Since it’s a Google product, they keep adding new features every dealership should be taking advantage of! First they rolled out different types of Google posts, then it was all about enhanced insights in GMB.

Google’s newest enhancement is the product carousel. Google is organizing the “product” posts as their own tab on a GMB listing. You can now showcase product photos, prices, descriptions and links to product information for any model you carry at your dealership.

To start posting, log into Google My Business, click to the posts section and select the “product” type for the post. Add in your new model photo and description, plus a link to your model details page or other page. After that, click post and your first entry into your new product catalogue is complete!

Voice search. It's that part of digital marketing at everyone talks about, but do you really know how to manage that information for your dealership? Current stat says that mobile voice-related searches are 3X more likely to be local-based than text-related searches. Those voice searches are the same customers who are likely to convert, and you need to be aware of what Alexa says when people ask.

At CDK, the new partnership between Amazon and Yext gave us a chance to test how fast we could get Alexa to give the correct information about a dealer. Head over to read the results and learn how your dealership can get a handle on this new part of local search.

Ever since Google stood up the business listings on their own, that dashboard continues to be a great source of information about your customers, how they search for your business listing, and what they do after they find you.

The GMB dashboard can be overwhelming at first, so I've outlined the 3  important parts of insights you should be looking at and using as part of your digital strategy.

Search Queries: This is a new feature Google has rolled out this last month. This section will show you the most popular search terms used to find your Google My Business listing, sorted by the number of users who completed the search. This is the first time Google has released this level of information about searches and a business listing. This list of queries can be used to help develop your website content strategy. Do customers write Chevy more than Chevrolet? Are they still using an old dealership name to find you? Now you can know the answers.

Direction Requests: Did you know that Google will tell you, down to the city or zip code, where people are when they request driving directions? Slice this data by the last 7 days, last month or last 90 days. This is a great piece of information you should be sharing with your advertising partner. Have a zip code where most of the driving directions are coming from? Why not switch up add copy to give reasons why they should come to your dealership.  

Photo Views: With the changes Google made to image search in February, optimization of your business listing photos is more important than ever for local SEO. Google is moving to customizing the photos it shows customers based on a search, so your photos should be engaging and representative of your dealership. Not only will Google tell you how many people are looking and clicking on your photos, it will tell you how you compare to other dealerships in the area. Don't know where to start with your photos? Try adding in some product photos of new models. 

Hopefully, this serves as a good starting point for Googly My Business Insights. We all know it's a matter of time before Google rolls out something new that we can talk about! As I always say, it's Google's world and we are just living in it.

Last year at this time, Google brought back posts to the business listing. This is a chance for a business to share a piece of information, photo or news that will be seen by every customer searching for that business. This was a great win for businesses, who now had the chance to brand and customize even more what they look like on Google.

Fast forward a year with Google announcing 4 new types of posts on GMB; what’s new, events, offers and product posts. There are two new types of posts, offers and products, that dealers should be aware of and start taking advantage of today.

Offer posts are just that, a post that provide a promotional offer or sale for customers. For a dealership, this is a chance to push out your offers to a whole new set of customers. These types of post also allow you to put in any terms and conditions for that particular offer. Research has shown that posts with numbers or offering a sale price have the most engagement.

Product posts are ones that highlight a specific product that a business sells. This is a type of post that every dealership should take advantage of. As we move into new model year season, this is a chance for your dealership to highlight every time you get a new model on the lot. Talk about the upgrades, changes or new features for each model while providing customers with the link to your vehicle search results.

There are few chances Google really gives a business to customize the search results, and you should be taking advantage of everyone opportunity you get. Happy Posting!  

Backlinko just released a new study looking at ranking factors for voice search. There are a couple of factors that dealers should be looking at!

Site Speed: the speed of your site was one of the biggest factors to ranking. For a dealer, have you gone through and made sure your images are compressed and sized properly? Your images should be around 150 kb. One of the biggest factors to site speed slowdown is large image size. 

One of the other major factors for ranking in voice search is the idea of " Simple, easy-to-read content may help with voice search SEO". You need to be presenting content on your website that provides simple answers to the shoppers questions. If you want to increase traffic for your service department, you don't want content around certified service, but content that answers the 5 most important reasons someone should get their oil changed at a dealership.

Be sure to take a look at the entire study and how you can convert those into part of your digital strategy!

A lot changed in 2017 and dealerships are having to make increasingly quick adjustments to their strategies to stay on top. With the continued rise of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media, businesses are finding new ways to leverage their capabilities to help them reach their goals. While there were too many updates across all of the channels to count, here are the three most significant changes that marked 2017 (and can have a major impact on your dealership).

Social as a Selling Tool

It’s no secret that Facebook is a giant – but it’s power goes beyond likes and shares. In the US, one in every five internet page views occur on Facebook. The social media giant is leveraging their powerful position by adding continued ways to monetize their business – and empower other businesses as well. Facebook advertising continues to grow.

They’ve also expanded their ability to sell by launching Facebook Marketplace. Though the marketplace itself was released in 2016, Facebook recently announced its extension into the automotive space. Now customers have the ability to browse inventories from Edmunds, Cars.com, Auction123, Social Dealer and CDK Global. Customers can see KBB prices for cars and even start messages with a dealership right from Facebook messenger. While others may make such claims, CDK Global is the only provider that integrates Facebook marketplace, inventory and chat functionality for dealerships. We’ve found that 42 percent of chats from Facebook Marketplace convert to leads, making the ability to leverage Marketplace a key differentiator for your dealership.1

Google My Business is Sharing

When Google Plus was first rolled out, they connected every Google business listing to a Google Plus page, which allowed a dealership to share relevant and local information right in their knowledge graph. But Google Plus never took off, so Google removed that sharing capability for businesses back in 2015. The function was gone but never forgotten, and this July, Google made posts available again to any business with a verified Google My Business listing. Now done through the listing dashboard, this allows a business to share timely information visible to any potential customers. In a CDK Study on Google posts this year, we saw the average dealer saw an increase of 222 views to the post by just posting once a week!

Questions Not Keywords

The biggest change to search in 2017 relates to how people are searching. With over half of all search happening on mobile, the intent behind a search is changing. Of all mobile search, 20 percent is voice search, and it’s thought that by 2020 over half of mobile search will be voice search. Given that nearly 50 percent of people are now using voice search when researching products, it’s not a stretch to consider customers are using Siri and Alexa as research tools in the car shopping process. Your content focus should shift from focusing on a single keyword to the types of questions people may have about models. If you build questions into your SEO strategy, it will establish your website as the local authority when that search happens.

These three changes had a major impact on the SEO and social world – and if you incorporate them into your 2018 strategy – they could have a major impact for your business.

1ActivEngage, 2017.

The only thing you can really count on in SEO is that it’s always going to change. As Google moved towards personalized search, the focus of SEO has necessarily changed. Rankings for a particular keyword or set of keywords don’t matter as much as the ability for your website to appear at the top of the search rankings page. As you start to switch your website content focus, there is a simple plan to help move your digital focus from keywords to search phrases.

Start with Search Type

Traditionally, organic searches fit into 3 categories; transactional, informational and navigational. Transactional searchers are searching for a website that allows them to complete a particular action, like buying or downloading something. As you can infer, informational searches constitute searches looking to learn more information. Navigational search includes searches where the user is looking for a particular site. For instance, a navigational search might occur when someone uses a search engine to look for “Freedom Honda” instead of simply “honda dealerships.” When you’re crafting the content for your website, think about which bucket it fits into.

Find Questions to Answer

Once you identify which type of search applies to you, the next step is to think about what type of questions the searcher may have. Answerthepublic.com is a tool that takes general keywords, like tires, and creates a series of questions and phrases around that keyword. After identifying those questions, create your content to answer those questions. For example, you might create an FAQ page, provide “best practice” content on your parts and service page, or create articles that address the top 10 ways to keep your car running great.

Link it Back

In order to make sure the content is found, you have to make sure the content is linked properly within your website. When I say that, don’t think “this needs to be in my navigation.” Rather, think of it as a chance to build out text links within your homepage. Take advantage of anchor text links: this is when existing words on a main website page, such as the homepage, link out to an internal website page. Those links serve as a strong signal to Google about page content, and can make the page more visible when someone searches.

While SEO algorithms are always changing, you also have the ability to change your website to match current search trends. By taking SEO by the reigns, you can ensure your website is appearing to your customers exactly when they need it to.  

Want to see more tips like this? Check out my recent webinar "Converting Your Dealership Goals to a Social and SEO Strategy".