Your website should be a revenue-generating tool, not just a product catalog. Are you using yours to its greatest potential?

This week on Auto Marketing Now, Dealer.com Director of Analytics James Grace joined Brian to discuss the gap between the quantity and quality of site traffic.

With the overwhelming amount of bots and incentivized traffic, dealers are often unable to analyze their true ROI. Dealer.com has shifted the focus from the quantity of traffic, to the quality of those visitors. They have integrated better tagging solutions to measure conversions across devices, and have recently developed a bench marking product that looks at all of the dealers across the platform. This new tool allows users to benchmark any source of traffic and see how their efforts stack up against their competition.

These insights allow dealers to determine which channels are most valuable to them so that they can make smarter marketing decisions. Every visitor to the website is scored through data science to help prioritize leads. These engagement scores can then be compared directly to sales using the VinSolutions overlay; sales data from your VinSolutions CRM can be overlaid on top of your analytics reporting to validate the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

The latest from Dealer.com is a remarketing strategy, utilizing the traffic from Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader to double the reach of the ads. Dealer.com has continuously provided the auto industry with countless products to inspect their campaigns and optimize their investments.

For more information, visit www.dealer.com.

Don’t have a Dealer.com website? Here are some tips to boost your organic traffic:

Establish Real SEO Value

Too often, dealers are publishing mediocre content to their website. Dealer’s websites should be used to accomplish meaningful tasks. Each and every one of you should ask yourself, “what am I doing to service this local shopper?” Creating quality content and resources not only captivates an audience, but also serves to boost your SEO value. Worthy publications can also be shared across social platforms to further your reach!

Ditch Your Current KPIs

Dealers must move away from traditional KPIs and move towards new methods. Find out what message triggered engagement, and give shoppers what they want. Giving consumers the information they want is the key to success in rankings.

As digital marketing takes over, we must shift towards a seamless ecommerce transaction. Therefore, dealers should use their website as a place to provide shoppers with all of the information they may need to continue through the path to purchase.

Marketing Tip of the Day:

More and more dealers are advertising on Facebook, but paid Facebook campaigns can be difficult to view in analytics. When Facebook asks for the URL of the page you want to take people do, don’t just input the page URL. First, go to Google URL builder and place the URL here. Then fill in the campaign, medium, and source fields to create a proper UTM tag. Then, place this in the Facebook Ad builder to see all of your campaigns clearly in analytics.

Email Grab Bag Question:

“My vendor recently informed me that Google Analytics was not properly set up on my website and I lost important data, what do  I do?”

When Google Analytics is installed, someone must check to make sure that each page is properly tagged. Many dealers have tags missing on pages of their site, and they are unable to go back and recovery that information. To prevent that from happening:

• Make sure your Google Analytics account is owned by the dealership, not an individual employee.
• Third party tools can help you check that Google Analytics tags are correctly implemented on all of your pages.

Follow these tips to not only track your traffic, but to create a traffic-worthy site. For more ways to improve your website, tune in weekly to Auto Marketing Now with Brian Pasch.

Need more help? Check out our custom SEO content writing services to get your site seen!

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.