WRONG!  As I wrote in my last post I would like to introduce you to the Acquisition part of Google Analytics.  In your analytics Google provides an overview of your visitor acquisition, or how your web site acquired them. 

It is important for car dealers to understand where their visits are coming from because you can then dig deeper into the health, effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing budget.  Google categorizes visitors into five main channels: Organic, Referral, Direct, Social, Paid Search, Email and Other.  Click here to see a more in depth definition of each channel. 

Many vendors will tell you how your visits should be distributed among the channels but the reality is that most dealers will differ from one another.  For example, in a smaller market where there are only two FORD dealerships within a 40 mile radius a dealership may not be spending any money on email marketing or paid search so therefore, their organic visits may represent more of a pie than the other channels.  While another dealership may be spending a lot of money in paid search which is forcing organic and direct to represent a smaller part of the pie.  The take away here is not that one distribution channel is better than another because markets, brands, spend, consumer activity can all vary so dramatically make to make and city to city.  What you need to understand is how you can spend money to acquire customers in the most cost effective manner.

Although all markets can be different there are some general guidelines I have learned over the years when analyzing dealers web site traffic.  The first is that organic visits are the most effective in terms of conversion to sale, cost per visit and cost per lead.  Organic visits typically make a web site more healthy providing more time on site and a better bounce rate.   The cost also doesn't have to drain your budget.

Direct visits are also very high quality visits.  If you are spending money in direct mail, radio, televisions, etc. many times dealers will see an increase in direct visits during the times they are advertising.  This data can help dealers decide how much to spend and when.

Paid search definitely has its place in a marketing budget, but make sure you understand how paid search works.  Paid search will typically increase a sites bounce rate and lower the time on site.  The more targeted the paid search campaign the better.  The leads from paid search also tend to not be as effective interms of units sold but owning the page also has intangible benefits. 

My advice to dealers is to start with organic.  Make sure you are ranking well vs. the competition.  If you have the rankings owned then it is time to move on and drive different types of traffic to your site.  By understanding where your traffic is coming from and what happens once it is on your site you can begin to tweak your marketing and in the long run end of saving money. Don't be afraid to mix it up and test different form of advertising.  Take those test and look at them through the analytics of your web site and see what you can see!