BETH POWELL

  In my experience, most dealership GMs, Customer Experience Managers and Marketing Managers don’t hang out much with Google Analytics. It’s not surprising – what part of all that data are you going to look at and what does it all mean anyway? It’s confusing and too time consuming.

Four Google Analytics Tips for Auto Dealers

In my experience, most dealership GMs, Customer Experience Managers and Marketing Managers don’t hang out much with Google Analytics. It’s not surprising – what part of all that data are you going to look at and what does it all mean anyway?  It’s confusing and too time consuming. Here are some Google Analytics tips that will give you an indication of how many cars you will sell and how your campaigns are driving the right traffic to your site.

1. Don’t spend time in the default visit view

There is not much point in spending much time in the default visit view – it doesn’t give you quality information. What you get instead is a total number of visits to your site  - some of these visits may be actual people searching on your site and some of these will be bots, up to 20% in some cases.

2. Lead forms tell only part of the story

Lead forms give a more accurate representation of the number of people interested in purchasing a car but not all those who are looking will fill out a lead form – the percentage of people who visit your site and fill out a lead form will vary from 5% to 20%.

3. How to identify an in market shopper

The way to tell if a website visitor is in the market or indeed is in love with a car on your site, is to inspect the vehicle detail page. The number of views and the amount of time spent on the page is the best way to predict sales.

4. Bring traffic to your vehicle detail pages

It’s not only important to look at volume and times spent on vehicle detail pages, but also what sites are delivering you that traffic. A site may bring a large volume of traffic but if that traffic has a high bounce rate or doesn’t visit the pages that indicate it is quality traffic or ‘in market’ traffic then, as a referrer, it is not as valuable as one that does. Look at your referrers. Which is bringing you traffic to your vehicle detail pages? These are the referrers to prioritise with your time and budget resources.

Here are 4 Google Analytics Tips for car dealerships. If you have some tips to add, please get in contact.