A Wealth Of Information Is Gathered For My Car Dealership’s Website Using Piwik Live Stats

I have always been a stats guy, and I take the management of Park Auto Mall’s virtual showroom very seriously. Our real showroom is a beautiful

Each Colored Folder Represents A Page View. This happens Live

place, and it takes many vendors to keep it that way. We have a decorating company come out once a month and put balloons and other eye candy around, we have a woman who comes by often to water the flowers. We have a nightly cleaning crew, we have a car detailing department and another company that comes out and power washes our vehicles every so often.

All this time and money spent, yet our virtual showroom was once neglected. It’s unacceptable to launch a website and just throw an inventory feed on there. It’s unacceptable to have an outdated staff page or a bunch of empty pages on your website.

I watch my virtual showroom like a hawk. I watch my visitors behavior patterns live as they browse my website. I watch as customers come from our blog, YouTube and Facebook. I watch as my traffic comes from search engines, and I pay close attention to what keywords convert.

The sales managers up at the tower will have Reynolds & Reynolds desk log loaded, and they will be able to see all appointments for the day and what’s going on with the current deals in progress. It’s their job to do this, but it’s my job to get the leads and appointments.

My virtual showroom version of their desktop manager is Piwik Live Stats. It’s a free, open source traffic analytics program that I installed on our own server. I have a decent hosting account for our self hosted WordPress Blog, so I installed it on that server.

Now I always use Google Analytics to run reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. However, Google does not offer live stats. For this reason, I use Piwik to monitor my website as it happens.

Although it does many things, my favorite is the live stats. If you look at the screenshot to your right you will see what I mean. Each colored folder represents a pageview by the potential customer. I can even hover over each to get the url of the page they viewed.

The best way I utilize this program is by monitoring the phones. We have 6 full time employees in our BDC, and when the phone rings I listen. Most of our calls come from our website, so just by listening I can pinpoint the actual visitor to the phone call. If they are calling about a particular vehicle I can easily find out which one is them.

Now I can properly update my lead to view the actual source. Sure, it came from our website…but where were they before? Did they come from a Google Search? Was it a tower ad on Auto Trader? Was it a PPC click? Direct visitor maybe?

The next image shows my keywords. This snapshot was for a Sunday morning. Not a bad start, and as you can see we get some nice organic traffic. We already had traffic from 54 different keyword phrases.

Piwik Allows Me To Keep An Eye On My Keywords

I also like the instant data for my conversions, bounce rate etc…

These Sunday morning stats are great so far, and I love seeing this.

Most of our traffic comes from organic searches, and to see a bounce rate of only 20.74% for today (so far) makes me content.

I’m also impressed with the 13.1 pageviews per visitor, so for today I don’t have much to be concerned about.

My conversion rate is great so far as well, and I love the way I can look at all of this data live.

As I said before, I will always run reports on Google Analytics for my main research, but Piwik is great for the live action on my website. I particularly like it when I send out an email blast.

Last week I sent out an email to over 10,000 people. About 20 minutes later, the phone rang and a woman asked for me. Her niece was looking for a car, and she was heading down to a Hyundai dealership that day. This woman was a previous lead of ours, who didn’t even buy a car from us. However, she liked the way she was treated here. She told me her source, but if she hadn’t I would of figured it out quickly by looking at the live stats.