Utilizing the features in Google Analytics can ensure you are spending your marketing dollars in the most effective and efficient ways possible. This week on Auto Marketing Now, Brian Pasch covered the 5 Google Analytics techniques to inspect your automotive advertising investments and put those hard earned dollars to good use.

First you must log in, then set your date range to at least 1-3 whole months. This will allow you to line up your advertising reports and ensure they match up with the reports given to you by your advertising agency. Make sure your goals are set up (if not, contact your advertising agency to set them up) and begin inspecting your goals. First, click within the upper menu on “Admin”, then click on “Goal” to be brought to the goal page. From here, you can click on “Reporting” and view campaign results and engagement patterns as shown below.
You should then limit the analysis to paid traffic by creating a paid traffic segment. To do this, click “Add segment” then click “System” from the menu on the left of the dashboard. Scroll down and click on “Paid traffic” (a predefined filter on Google Analytics), click “Apply”, then you can view how your automotive paid search efforts stack up against the rest of your traffic sources. You can also inspect your paid traffic alone (as shown below), analyze user flow, view the most popular page for paid advertising, etc.

After you’ve inspected the quality of your paid traffic, analyzed the user flow, and determined the most popular pages for paid advertising, you can inspect the choices your ad agency is using for landing pages. Begin to ask yourself if sending a majority of people to the home page is the most efficient technique? Many times, it is not for branded keywords. So inspect if the landing page resources are being engaged with by consumers, or have high bounce rates like the example below.

The most important thing to inspect is if your AdWords and Analytics are connected. To do this, click on “Acquisition”, and ensure your AdWords and Analytics data appears. You must inspect your campaigns to determine which are generating the most engagement, and which are a waste of time and money. To determine the value of a campaign, look at page views per session and inspect the VDP activity.

To view just VDP activity, create a new segment and set conditions (new, used, and certified) and you will be able to see what percent of traffic was looking at a VDP.

To spend your online marketing dollars most efficiently, inspect the user flow, pages per session, goals, VDP activity, and the all campaigns tab.

This Week’s Email Grab Bag Question:

“I tried to inspect the quality of my AdWords campaigns in analytics but I can’t see all the detailed campaign data, what is wrong?”

Not all agencies take the extra step to connect AdWords to Analytics, yet Google recommends that they are connected so you can see the quality of your paid traffic. Connecting them will not cause any harm to your advertising agency, therefore, you should insist that they are connected.

Watch the full episode here for step by step guidance to inspect your paid traffic campaigns. If you’re not happy with the results of your investigation, check out our Paid Search Advertising Services to increase your ROI and eliminate missed opportunities in your paid search efforts.

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About the Author

PCG Digital Marketing is an award winning digital agency headquartered in Eatontown, NJ. We help our clients get found online through innovative search, social and online advertising campaigns.