Have you started to test Twitter promoted tweets for your business?  You should, because there are many opportunities for car dealers and the vendor community on Twitter.  The cost of Twitter promoted tweets is not expensive, but any expense without proper tracking is wasted money.

promoted-gm-tweet

Twitter will provide basic ad reporting on their promoted tweet campaigns based on clicks, replies, re-tweets, and follows.  For car dealers, if you are using Twitter to drive traffic to your website, you will want to consider more advanced conversion tracking.  You want to be able to see if the campaigns are driving “shoppers” to your website.

Google URL Builder For Twitter Ad Campaigns

One way to facilitate conversion measurement is to include tracking parameters in your URL that drives people to your website. The free Google URL Builder tool will allow you to pass the Twitter campaign name and related data along with the click to your website.  This would allow you to see the shopper activity on your website based on your Twitter paid campaigns.

URL-Builder

In the example above, the name of my Twitter advertising campaign was called “GM Digital Certifications” (green arrow) and I was sending clicks to this page on my website: http://www.pcgconsultingservices.com/20140419-digital-marketing-certifications-general-managers/(red arrow)

Instead of using that direct website link in my tweet, I could use the Google URL builder to pass the campaign name through to Google Analytics. You can also use the other fields to describe the term and content of the ads. All of these parameters will be passed to Google Analytics. 

When you click on the “submit” button, Google will provide you with a better URL to use in your promoted tweets.  The new URL is much longer, but Twitter doesn’t care and it doesn’t decrease the amount of text that you can use in your Twitter message.  Here is what the new URL looks like:

longer-tweet

The actual tweet is shown at the top of the page and you can see that all the parameters do not show to the user on Twitter.  You can also use a bit.ly link instead of the naked URL.

twitter-to-analytics

Proper Setup Pays Off For Social Media Advertising

It may seem like a lot of gibberish, or an extra step, but it will payoff when you conduct the ROI analysis of your Twitter advertising campaigns, especially in terms of which campaigns resulted in the most VDP views.

With the Twitter advertising campaign data pushed into Google Analytics, you can see which campaigns are driving “shopper” activity and which campaigns are not.

Take your social media advertising to the next level by tracking results in a more transparent way. I have an entire chapter on automotive social media advertising in my upcoming book “Mastering Automotive Digital Marketing,” so stay tuned for more tips and insights to master online marketing.

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About the Author

Brian Pasch is the founder of PCG companies. PCG provides customized marketing and training solutions for businesses that are committed to dominate their local market.