Making Sense of Medusa with Automotive Analytics
Auto internet marketing has so many moving parts that it can start to look like Medusa, slowly swallowing up your marketing budget. Instead of feeling like your internet marketing is out of control, put data to use for your dealership using automotive analytics.
Google Analytics itself can seem like a behemoth, so let’s walk through which metrics you should measure and how often you should make changes based upon that data.
What Metrics To Measure
1. Vanity Metrics
Vanity metrics are your volume-centric measurements, like the total number of sessions in the last 30 days or the length of the average session.
Vanity metrics have a time and place, but they should not influence key decisions. While they are worth a quick glance, they do not show whether or not your website is attracting valuable users.
Examples of vanity metrics include:
- Sessions, users, or page views
- Pages per session
- Average session duration
- Bounce rate
2. Actionable Metrics
Actionable metrics are not about sheer volume. Instead, they measure the quality of the traffic on your website. Are visitors viewing cars and filling out forms? Or are they just reaching the specials page and jumping off?
Search results page (SRP) views, vehicle detail page (VDP) views, and form submissions are about as close as someone can get to buying a car online, so these actions need to be measured.
Examples of actionable metrics include:
- Percentage of users of who filled out a form
- Percentage of visits that viewed an SRP
- Percentage of visits that viewed a VDP
When to Measure Your Analytics
1. Weekly
The only performance metric you need to measure every week is your ad budget.
Google AdWords and other advertising platforms run on a daily budget and can fluctuate quickly, so be sure to check your budgets — just your budgets — on a weekly basis. Allow other ad performance indicators (click-through rate, search impression share, etc.) to run longer before you start gauging their success.
2. Monthly
Report your vanity and actionable metrics monthly along with any other key performance indicators (KPIs) to make sure your website traffic and digital campaigns ran successfully and to determine what needs to be changed for the following month. We recommend keeping track of progress in a spreadsheet.
3. Quarterly
Search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword rankings are not short-term measurements. SEO takes time, and it should be reported and adjusted on a quarterly basis to avoid making any premature changes.
4. Yearly
Looking back over an entire year’s worth of analytics is exhilarating! Right?
Unless you are a digital marketer like us, reporting KPIs from an entire year can seem overwhelming — but it is absolutely necessary to plan your marketing efforts for the upcoming year.
If you were diligent about tracking data every month and quarter, your yearly report should be a breeze. Take the time to aggregate your metrics and SEO so that you can see what worked (and what did not).
Google Analytics Webinar
Learn more about how to leverage your automotive analytics with our Google Analytics webinar series. It’s free, and even if you cannot attend, we will send you the recordings afterward.
There is so much to learn about analytics that we can’t possibly stuff everything into a single blog post. Sign up for the webinar series to get in-depth information about automotive analytics for your dealership.