By George Nenni, Founder & Principal Consultant, Generations Digital
A fascinating number of new digital retail and trade-in-valuation tools are entering the automotive digital marketing space. At the recent 2019 Digital Dealer Conference and Exposition in Las Vegas, several new digital retail solutions fronted a booth and demonstrated their offerings. General Motors dealers have recently been given the choice of several trade-in tools that will qualify for co-op. This is a fast-moving space with many great solutions.
These digital retail and trade tools allow the consumer a better customer experience and also generate additional leads from the dealer’s earned and purchased traffic.
A major challenge for many of the new entrants is that their tools cannot be tracked in Google Analytics (GA). This lack of tracking in GA means the dealer will not be in control of the reporting and will under-report their total number of hard conversions. Perhaps it is because of oversight, or maybe these new companies are rushing to quickly get to market but leaving out this important tracking element makes these companies a poor choice for dealers.
What do I mean by Google Analytics tracking? Out of the box, GA allows you to track pages, visitors, traffic sources, and some basic information on the behavior of the website visitor. However, if a dealership purchases a plug-in website tool, Google Analytics cannot see the activity within the tool. The problem is solved when the tool provider supports “events” in Google Analytics.
What are “events?” They are interactions with content from website visitors that need to be measured differently compared with web-page loading. Examples of events you could track would include video plays, chat engagements, or photo carousel scrolling. A website tool provider would put code on the dealer website that would “fire” these Events for various activities. This allows Google Analytics to track the activity in a very granular way. For instance, a chat tool could fire events whenever the chat tool is engaged, and when the chat is complete. Similarly, a trade-in tool would fire events for the tool being clicked on, when the vehicle is chosen for valuation, and finally, if a lead is submitted.
These events allow tracking at every stage of the process so that dealers can measure critical success metrics for these tools such as lead-to-visitor ratio, tool engagement percentage, and tool abandon ratio. In short, when these tools fire events in GA, their performance is made fully transparent to the dealership.
My strong advice to dealers is not to consider any website plug-in tool that does not support Google Analytics Events tracking. Today there are too many competing solutions that fully support GA Event tracking, tools such as CarNow, TradePending, Dealer Science, Edmunds, and others.
ARTICLE BY GEORGE NENNI
George Nenni is founder and principal consultant with Generations Digital, helping automotive dealers reduce waste and improve the efficiency of their digital marketing and advertising.
Featured Digital Dealer Orlando Session
Ensuring the success of your third party classifieds requires having a framework in place to evaluate your investment and know which providers work best for your market and inventory. During “A Proven Framework for Auditing Third-Party Classifieds” at Digital Dealer Orlando, George Nenni will share insight on how to quickly identify if you’re overspending and also walk through how to aggregate data from classifieds sites into a consolidated dashboard to effectively measure your investment.
Key takeaways
- Gain success metrics and benchmarks for analyzing the performance of third-party classified sites.
- Learn how to consolidate the reporting data from the classifieds sites into a dashboard to compare your effectiveness.
- Learn how to use Google Analytics to not only measure the referral traffic from classifieds sites to your website but also to measure assisted attribution and last-click attribution.
