As an internet manager, you monitor a number of different metrics on your dealership’s website. These metrics are all to determine the overall engagement and financial health of your dealership’s digital marketing efforts. Some of the most common website metrics internet managers measure are Click-through rate, Click-to-Lead & Completion Rate. While these metrics are certainly important to keep tabs on for more specific components of your website, you can’t only leverage these metrics to measure overall success. You have to dig a little deeper.

Click-through rate, Click-to-lead & completion rate what I consider “vanity metrics.” Why do I call them vanity metrics? Well, because they have the potential to look really impressive. If your website typically gets lots of traffic coming from your social media channels, or they segue into another section through an on-website call-to-action, chances are good that your Click-through-rate might be pretty high. A 2-3% CTR on a social campaign might look good (depending on the number of impressions), but is CTR truly a full measure of success? Absolutely not. Even if you have an optimal CTR, is that traffic converting into a lead? Better yet, are those leads then converting into sales?

If, hypothetically, you’re not getting in-store visits and your leads aren’t converting to sales, you need to investigate further and see what’s going on. Are you perhaps reaching the wrong consumer base or audience? Is the messaging on your website completely clear to your target market? Different types of conversions are relative to your dealership’s goals and environment. In a nutshell, there are other aspects of your campaign that you need to examine to fully determine the overall engagement and financial success of your dealership. Here are 3 example “Vanity Metrics” that your dealership should delve deeper into:

Click-through Rate

Like I discussed before, a 2-3% click-through rate might look solid, but it’s not a completely full measure of success. Are those clicks to different sections of your website converting into leads? To fully understand whether or not your click-through rate is worth breaking out the champagne out for, you should be asking yourself a few crucial questions: How long are these folks on a page before they leave? Are they even attempting to fill out a form or a portion of an online experience (say, a trade appraisal or deal arrangement experience)? Another question you might ask yourself is “were you expecting an even higher click-through rate?”

To gain a better understanding of how good or bad your website’s click-through rate is, it’s important to dive into even more specific metrics that are directly tied to campaign performance. Metrics like: bounce rate and time on page can give insight into just how relevant and useful certain pages were to a particular audience. If you want to go even deeper, you can go into Google Analytics and look at the Navigation Summary for individual pages in order to determine why certain consumers jumped off the page.

Here’s a good example: Let’s say you have a page on your website that gets lots of traffic to it from different clicks, but no one is really converting on that page and the bounce rate is relatively high. The target page consists of a payment calculator — and the pages your consumers are coming from are inventory pages. Even though the calculator is seemingly relevant, the calculator doesn’t provide enough spaces for consumers to get a highly customized, and relatively accurate estimate of how much they might pay each month. If a consumer suspects that they won’t get anything of value from using the calculator, they’re going to leave the page and that will, in turn, increase the bounce rate.

If you’re dealing with offsite marketing (social or display advertising leading to your website), you might consider looking at other metrics like “Impressions” in comparison to link clicks — which would hopefully give you a better idea of just how relevant your ads are to your audience. If you find that people simply aren’t clicking, a potential fix would be to fix the actual ad copy or creatives.

Click-to-Lead Ratio

The next vanity metric I’ll be discussing is “Click-to-Lead Ratio” — with “Click to Lead” being the metric that represents a basic lead that’s generated after someone clicks a CTA. It’s information that stems from a consumer going through some of a website experience. Suppose you’ve captured a total of 45 leads during the 1st month and a half of the quarter and you still have that 2-3% click-through rate. Again, that CTR ain't shabby — but there’s more to that number than what meets the eye.

That click-through rate and even that number of leads might appear sound, but if you dig a little deeper, you might discover that they’re not the leads you want after all — which makes many of those unique conversions useless. Why? Well, it appears that some of those leads (let’s say 20 out of 45 of them) simply don’t meet your dealership’s specific qualifications. For example: 20 of the leads captured aren’t ready to purchase anytime soon. If there’s one thing you can learn from this, it’s that not all conversions or leads are “good.” So if your click-to-lead ratio is seemingly high, you might want to delve deeper and see what that number actually is.

In addition to determining whether or not a lead is qualified, it’s very possible that of those 45 leads, only a handful actually completed an experience. They might have filled out some of their information in an experience (and that information happened to be saved), but they dropped off midway and that left you with only some vital information.  

So what’s an internet manager to do? Well, for starters, altering the messaging and imagery on your website will help provide clarity to your consumers on what it is they’re signing up for. If consumers feel unsure about what it is they’re filling out, or they discover midway through an experience that it isn’t relevant, that lead would be considered incomplete.

All that being said, what sorts of things can you do to ensure they’re staying on the page? Taking a look at more specific metrics that might be able to improve the chances of consumers converting — metrics like “Time on Page” or “Bounce Rate.” At this point, you should ask yourself "How do you improve the Time on Page as well as Decrease Bounce Rate?"

Completion Rate

The last vanity metric I’ll be going over is “Completion rate,” which is essentially someone who has gone beyond a basic lead. I touched on this lightly in the last section. They’re not a customer just yet, but they’ve at least completed an experience and you have a good portion of useful information.While the completion rate is most definitely a worth-while metric to look at, the reason why I call it a “Vanity metric” is because, once again, it shows the big picture and only the big picture. It’s a potentially nice metric to look at, but we don’t necessarily know what it means.

For example: Let’s say your current completion rate is around 60% — meaning about 60% of the consumers who initiated the experience or clicked onto your website went through a trade appraisal, a dealer arrangement and so on. Honestly, I’d call 60% a pretty big win. However, you might be curious about a few things. For example, you might ask yourself: why wasn’t my completion rate higher? Or better yet, “what do my completion rates look like on average? Are these results better or worse?” Essentially, it’s important for dealers and internet managers like yourself to be curious about the why and how of these numbers — especially for completion rates.

Unlike “Click-to-Lead Ratio,” where you’re essentially trying to figure out why certain experiences were NOT completed, you should (with Completion Rate) figure out why the consumers you’ve captured did complete your dealership website experience. For example: How did they answer specific questions around the end of the experience? But a really great question would be “How long did it take for them to complete the experience?” By looking at the “time on page,” you’ll possess better insight into your consumer’s patience level — and the bounce rate of an experience will tell you where they lost interest.

Another thing you might consider is keeping track of navigation patterns (notably in Google Analytics), so you can gain a better understanding of how certain decisions were made within a particular experience.

What are specific metrics that your dealership pays attention to for lead conversion? Let us know in the comments!