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!

To me Google analytics is one of the best tools a dealer can use to understanding his/her traditional or digital marketing efforts.  However to often to many dealers don't know how to read Google analytics.  To me it is almost as important as reading your financial statement!  I bet I have your attention now!

Google analytics is awesome because it can help you analyze a campaigns effectiveness, a websites ability to convert leads and stickiness, where to put marketing dollars, when to spend and so much more.  

When setting up a web site if the vendor using their own back end data you should assist on putting the Google Analytics (GA) code on there too.  GA offers a 3rd party view with no financial interest.  Plus web site vendors can alter code to make things like what counts as a session or how to define a bounce rate different.  Use GA as your baseline always!

If you are just starting with GA let's start with the basic metrics to learn first:

Sessions—A session is the period of time a user is actively engaged with your web site within a date range.  I look at Sessions for two primary reasons.  One I want to see if certain marketing, inventory, campaign, etc. efforts spike my web traffic.  The other is to see where I should spend my money.  For example I typically see web site visits go up the last 15 days for the month so I like to put my marketing there to capitalize on the industries organic increases.

Pageviews—Pageviews means the total number of pages viewed by a user. Note, repeated views of a single page are counted.  I love this tool because I can go into the advance search and type in "NEW" or "USED" and see if users are coming to see my new or used inventory more.  For example, in a dealer I consult for he didn't understand why his web site visits were up but his new car business was flat.  By looking at the metrics of the individual pages we found out that the increase in visits were driven almost completely by users searching on pages geared to used cars.

Avg. Session Duration—The average length of a session.  Typically a car dealer will see about 5 to 6 minutes.  This metric also relates to bounce rate which you will see listed later.  If your TOS or Time on Site is to low it suggests that customers aren't engaging and the site isn't sticky.  A couple of reason for this could be your content isn't relevant or the sources leading customer to your web site are not very targeted.

Bounce Rate—Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e., visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).  I love this metric.  It tells so much about the sites ability to create conversions.  It also shows you how effective your marketing plan is.  Typically organic driven visits will have the lowest bounce rate, while pay per click or display advertising your bounce rate will rise.  That doesn't mean the rise isn't worth it but the lower you can keep the bounce rate the better your site will be in the long run.

Conversions—  Is you web site trying to generate activity like form submissions, leads, or calls?  Then you should set up goals in your GA.  Conversions are the number of times goals have been completed on your website.  For most car dealers you can do this by looking at your CRM or your call source provider.  However, if you want to know what buttons work best or what interlinking is getting clicked on most these goal can be really handy.  

In my next blog I will dive deeper into Acquisition.

Bottom line your dealership is better online when you know what the user experience is doing for you interms of engagement and activity.  You and your vendor should be analyzing Google analytics monthly and setting up your marketing with specific goals in mind.  If you are going to spend money on a web site you should understand what it is currently producing and have a road map on where it can/should go.

I like this video from Google too. 

Beingseen360 did a case study on Zimmerman Honda in the quad cities.  The study provides a look at to how see if the money you are spending on SEO is working and if it isn't.  It also looks at how a dealer ranks against their competition.  Pretty cool regarding what they have achieved.

Click here to see the detail of the case study!