Time and time again, dealers hire online digital marketing agencies to handle their email marketing. These digital marketing experts promise dealers optimal results, and impress them with the increased ‘traffic’ they have driven to their sites. As a result, the dealer feels as if their email marketing investment was put to good use.
But what if I told you that the rise traffic to your websites, generated from your digital marketing agency’s emails, could be spam. Digital marketing agencies have found a way to use robots, or spam, to create traffic as if they were customers in the market. This superficial rise in website clicks and traffic allows agencies to target dealers, and essentially rob them of their email marketing investment.
PCG has grown weary of this endless cycle – so we’ve taken matters into our own hands. We’ve investigated 10 email marketing companies, ranging in size and location, to put an end to dealer exploitation. Through our extensive research, we found several patterns consistent with opaque online marketing agencies. Using Google Analytics, dealers can inspect many aspects of their websites’ traffic to determine if the traffic generated is normal or is created from spam. We encourage dealers educate themselves in order to avoid victimization from email marketing agencies. Using the following tools in Google Analytics, dealers can inspect the validity of their traffic results.
Visitor’s device type
The device from which the email is opened is one way to determine if your website traffic is coming from abnormal sources. Based on a study of 10 million emails, email open rates are as follows: 58% on mobile devices, 21% on desktop devices, and 21% on webmail clients. Therefore, if 90+% of your website traffic is coming from consumers on desktops, something isn’t right.
Network Domain
The network domain dimension of Google Analytics shows the Internet Service Providers used by visitors. Common ISPs include names such as Comcast, Cox, Frontier, Verizon, and Quest. When inspecting the ISPs of visitors in Google Analytics, names such as “unknown.unknown” and “(not set)” could be related to ghost spam.
Location of traffic
The relative location of visitors creating traffic to your sites can also be found in Google Analytics. As a dealer, you can expect engagement to be from local cities. In-market buyers are not going to come from hundreds or thousands of miles away to shop at your dealership. Therefore, if most of your website traffic is not from nearby cities, you could be receiving inaccurate results due to spam.
Time of day
Research based on 6 million emails showed that the highest email open rates are between 12-2:00 pm. This makes sense, right? If Google Analytics shows that your peak open rate is in the middle of the night, let’s say 3 am, this could be a big red flag.
Footer link clicks
When visiting a website, consumers rarely click on links located in the footer of the web page. If the visits to the dealership website triggered a great deal of clicks to the privacy or sitemap pages, your website might be experiencing a great deal of spam traffic.
Lead form submissions
If thousands visitors opened a lead form, but not a single one filled out the form with useable consumer data, the traffic is abnormal and should be further inspected.
Odd visitor engagement
Most consumers open an email within the first 3 days of receiving it, then activity trickles down over the next week or two. If your are experiencing abnormal activity, you will see high levels of engagement in the first few days, then activity will abruptly end.
Each month millions of dollars are handed over to email marketing companies producing ineffective marketing campaigns. They’ve profited at the dealerships expense – targeting dealers who do not know how to detect abnormal website traffic results and taking advantage of dealers’ online marketing ignorance. If dealers were better informed, and knew how to inspect their website traffic with Google Analytics, they would be able protect themselves and avoid investing their hard-earned dollars in faulty agencies. It is vital that key management figures educate themselves in online marketing in order to lead their business in the digital age.
Dealers can find further information on how to use the tools in Google Analytics to inspect their email marketing campaign by reading our full Conquest Email Marketing research report, or by educating themselves in online marketing using the PCG training workshops.
Don’t be a target for opaque online marketing agencies to prey upon – Fully optimize your marketing budget and take control of your dealership’s campaigns!
About the Author
PCG Digital Marketing is an award winning digital agency headquartered in Eatontown, NJ. We help our clients get found online through innovative search, social and online advertising campaigns.