Is Your Car Dealer Website Really Getting That Many Visitors?

There are more and more website providers for the car industry popping up than ever before, and it’s important to know how to properly measure the performance of your website.

A few months back, I had a car dealer tell me they were getting 1,200 visitors a day. I knew just by looking at their website that this wasn’t possible. I asked him if I could see the stats, so the next day I stopped by there.

As soon as he logged into his stats program I was suspicious. The program he was using was provided by the company that built and hosts his dealer’s website. Sure enough, he was getting 1,200 visitors a day (according to this program).

I explained to him that there are many stats programs out there that measure spiders as well as actual visitors. The more authority your website has, the more spiders will visit your website on a daily basis.

I explained this to him, and asked him to have his webmaster install Google Analytics. He called him up right away, and the webmaster freaked out. He said if he installed Google Analytics it would crash his website and cause all sorts of other problems. Now I have been using this software for many years, in  many different industries. I never had a problem.

After a bit of demanding, we convinced the webmaster to install Google Analytics. I was excited to see the results, but I had to wait a day to see the actual numbers because this software doesn’t update instantly.

The next day I started watching, and sure enough they were averaging about 300 – 400 visitors a day. That’s a far cry from 1,200!

It is very important to know for sure what kind of traffic you are getting. It’s the very first step before you consider making any changes to your internet presence.

To show you how different each stats program can be, I will demonstrate a website that has 3 different stats programs installed. These stats come from a printing website:

Webalizer

This stats program reports that this website received 35,980 visitors in the month of May, 2009.

Awstats

This program reports that during the same month the website received 17,922 visitors. That’s half less than Webalizer reported.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics reports that this website received 7,239 visitors in May 2009.

So what’s going on? The answer is simple, the top two programs are measuring spiders. If your current provider provides you with Google Analytics then I will consider them an honorable company.

If they don’t you need to start asking questions. When it comes to reporting, always obtain a trusted third party program which is not affiliated in any way with your provider. You have no reason not to trust Google.

If your dealer website provider refuses to install Google Analytics, you should consider shopping around.

It is important to note that we do not build dealer websites, nor are we affiliated with anyone that does. We would have no motive to steer you in the wrong direction. Patrick and I have been doing this for years, so take my advise. Know your stats!

Did you read my Alexa Rank article? I would advise you give it a read, because that is another misunderstood factor in the car business.