The easiest way to start is to determine the conversion process for your website. You’re spending money on marketing to get people to come to your site, but what is it that you want them to do there? From a business standpoint, you should be aiming to get users to “convert” by either calling the dealership or filling out a vehicle inquiry form. But how do you track that? Although there are methods to track phone calls down to the keyword level, this post will focus on tracking those users that filled out a vehicle inquiry form on your dealership website.

Goals

Google Analytics provides an easy method for tracking the total number of conversions on your site every month called Goals. First and foremost, you’ll need to make sure that once your users fill out a lead form that they are taken to a unique “thank you” page that cannot be accessed anywhere else on the site. This is how Google Analytics measures conversions.

Once you have that set up, head over to the Analytics Settings page to start configuring your goals. If you have multiple profiles, choose the correct profile for this goal set and click “Edit.”

Settings

Once you’re on the Profile Settings page, make your way down to the Goals section. You’re allowed up to 20 conversion goals for each profile in your Analytics account, but we’ll start with the basic ones here. Since you don’t have any goals set up yet, start with Goal Set 1 by clicking “Add Goal.” I have my vehicle inquiry goal configured like so:

Notice the choices for goal type here, but as I said before, we set this goal up to be a URL destination goal. When a user gets to your “thank you” page (in my case, the vehicle confirmation page), Google Analytics tracks a conversion. I set the match type to “Head Match” to allow for any query string parameters (/vehicle-confirmation/?make=buick&model=lucerne) in case we decide to show the user a more personalized thank you message relating to their vehicle of interest, but the goal will work just fine without them.

Goal Values

As shown in the screenshot, goal values are optional. These are typically used for ecommerce sites that know the direct value of each conversion, but can also be applicable to car dealerships if you know the value of an Internet lead to your organization. Try your best to avoid using arbitrary numbers though, they won’t serve much purpose for measuring results.

Funnels

For more complicated conversion processes, Google Analytics has a section to create funnels. Think of an ecommerce site that you’ve purchased something from in the past — remember all of the pages you had to go through to checkout and receive a confirmation for your order? That’s where funnels really come in handy. They’re a way to figure out where users drop out of your conversion process so that you can optimize pages for higher conversion rates. On dealership websites though, users typically don’t have to jump through too many hoops to convert, so you’re fine leaving the funnels section blank.

Wrap Up

Once you save your goal, it’s a waiting game. Google Analytics isn’t retroactive so the goals that you created for this profile will only apply to future conversions. You can view your conversion data directly in your Google Analytics reports under the Goal section — you’ll just have to give it a few days or so to really gain some actionable insight.

If you have any question please feel free to comment, in an effort to get this information up I am afraid that the information ran together a little.

For those of you that attended my session at Digital Dealer, thank you and I apologize for the delay in getting this posted.

Monitor your traditional marketing with web analytics. While advertising on TV, radio, newspaper, or even direct mail and email. You owe it to yourself and your dealership to measure the results.

There are many analytics tools available to track your website. They all have positives and negatives. No matter which tool you implement it is only as good as the business decision that you can derive from it.

Google Analytics on your car dealership website

I like using GA for a few reasons;
• Used properly the information that is available is more than ample in making important business decisions.
• full transparency – it would be dificult to manipulate the information that you can see in order to highlight strengths or downplay weaknesses. What you see is what you get.
• it is very easy to set up and start using.
• With a little planning you can get metrics on how effective your offline advertising is. This can potentialy give you an ROI swing in the tens of thousands of dollars per month.

Sign up for email updates for more information. Coming soon: How to set up GA and tips and tricks to get the most out of your analytics.

Note: all DealerTrend clients make sure to give us a call whenever you start a marketing campaign. We will consult with you on how to track the traffic that gets generated to your website.

Here is the link to Google’s Conversion University with videos on using Google Analytics.