As the automotive industry continues to increase spending on digital marketing, we should take a closer look at the data we’re inspecting. Instead of looking at how many people visited a page, you should begin to analyze what they did on that page. If the answer is nothing, then that traffic is a waste of your marketing budget.

Dealers must realize that you can’t inspect the quality of your traffic if you’re looking at quantity metrics. Once you change the data on your reports, you will be empowered to allocate your budget more efficiently and stop investing in waste.

This week on Auto Marketing Now, Brian Pasch goes in the lab to discuss the four hard conversions, listed below, that every dealer should have set up to better inspect their marketing data.

Lead Forms

Most website providers will record an event or goal when a visitor completes a lead form. What dealers don’t take into consideration is that service schedulers, finance applications, or any other iframes within your site cannot be seen by Google Analytics. All iframe tools must be tagged and recorded in Google Analytics to understand where consumers are coming from.

Phone Calls

The number one conversion channel in the automotive industry is phone calls. Since call conversions don’t just show up in Google Analytics, you must use Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) to record these events in Analytics. Using a platform such as CallRevu or CarWars, you can record, score, and ultimately help improve your phone call process.

Chat Sessions

Chat is a great way to greet customers on your site—but how do you know which ad lead the consumer to the chat? Dealers must record which traffic sources lead to each chat. Platforms such as CarNow and CarChat24 send events to Google Analytics to record all engagements in chat so that all chat sessions can be associated with the ad campaign that drove the consumer to your site. With chat histories saved, these tools can also help improve your customer service strategies.

Text Messages

Text messaging is on the rise, and for most consumers, it is the most engaging communication channel. All text message sessions must be recorded to inspect which ad is contributing to the consumer’s engagement. Recording text message interactions will also help you better understand your consumers’ behavior and make smarter marketing decisions.

These hard conversions, although very important, only account for approximately 10-15% of your total visitor traffic. Once all of your hard conversions are set up to be recorded in Google Analytics, PCG can help you measure the quality of the 85-90% of traffic that didn’t convert.

In the PCG Engagement Project, we have found that most marketing reports dealers receive provide quantity metrics, and therefore, don’t provide actionable data to help you better invest your marketing budget. As a result, we have begun installing Google Tag Manager scripts to score what users are engaging with on your site and determine the quality of your digital investments.

Our engagement metrics also give you insights to identify the following:

  • Bots: This artificial technology (click fraud) chews up your advertising budget. Some agency partners send bots to your sites to increase quantity metrics and “satisfy” clients for the time being. Almost everyone has an issue with bots at some point.
  • Blunders: Advertising agencies making the wrong decisions on which pages to take consumers increases bounce rates. Test which pages are working best by measuring engagement such as scrolls, clicks on images, etc.
  • Bloat: Dealers have cut their budget down by 30% and have still increased conversions and engagement scores by changing their key terms. Many dealers spend too much money on terms that are not generating engagement. Your agency partners may use branded keywords to lower the cost-per-click and increase conversions, but if visitors don’t scroll, click, or engage in any way, the conversion is not valuable.

You can’t afford to ignore Google Analytics. Ensure your partners are doing the right thing and measure the quality of your traffic by setting up all conversions and engagement metrics.

If you’re heading out to NADA100, join PCG at booth 1261 to learn more about Google Analytics data and engagement tracking—and don’t miss Brian Pasch’s workshop “Google Analytics: The Modern ‘Up Log’ for Your Virtual Showroom” Friday, January 27 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM or Saturday, January 28 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM.

For more information, call PCG at (732)  450-8200 or tune into Auto Marketing Now for the latest and most effective strategies in automotive digital marketing.

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.