April 2011 Website Conversions (Click To Enlarge)

I’m still surprised at the amount of car dealers who use Google Analytics but don’t set it up to track conversions. Any average Joe can see where their website traffic is coming from, but how do they know what is actually converting into a website lead?

Anyone who attended Patrick’s session at the Digital Dealer Convention in Orlando  got the goods for free, and I hope they are seeing a clearer report this month than they were before. I can buy traffic from many different sources, but how do I know which ones are paying off? Dealers are doing a good job tracking phone calls, and some do good at walk-ins. I still wonder why they don’t track their email leads.

Before I go on, it’s important to note that people don’t just find your website and submit a form or call you. These people are finding you from various sources days or weeks before they act. We’ve been tracking sessions of every user, and we are learning a lot about search and car shopping habits.

I’ll use AutoTrader as an example. Obviously you will get leads from their website where you have your inventory listed. But what happens when you purchase banner ads that send traffic to your website? If someone clicks from AutoTrader to your website, your website providor will get the credit for a lead that actually came from AutoTrader.

Another scenario. What happens if someone finds you from an AutoTrader banner 30 days ago, and they browsed your site and left. Only to come back today and Google your company name? You surely can’t give SEO the credit because it’s not a term that you shouldn’t already rank on. For this reason you have to give the credit to AutoTrader. You can read more of that here, but for now I’ll stick to the basics.

Just to give you an example of what you can learn by setting up conversions, this is the kind of data you will get (from a dealer in Tampa Bay):

Top 10 Lead Generators For April 2011

Top 10 Dealer Website Lead Generators

1. Google

Everyone knows that Google reigns as far as traffic goes, and they’re still not good at separating pay per click and organic results. Even if  it was all organic, you can’t credit your SEO efforts for this. Why? Look at your top keywords, you will see that it’s the name of your dealership. These are people that found you before, but they can’t remember the url of your website.

Google did supply 42% of the leads, but the conversion rate was only just over 5%. That just tells me that Google still has some work to do cleaning up their serps. Go ahead and look at your lowest keyword phrase report and you will see some visits you never should of got.

2. Direct Visitors

A direct visit is when a user types your website directly into their browser and comes to your website, without using any form of search. This can be a combination of TV, newspaper and other traditional advertising methods. It could also be people who found you on third party websites like AutoTrader and Cars.com and they’re returning because they remembered your domain name. 28% of April’s conversions came from direct visitors, and the total conversion rate was 6.89%.

3. Yahoo Search

Yahoo has always been criticized when it comes to website traffic, yet the quality of the traffic they bring is pretty good. Yahoo sent 8.23% of my email leads this month. Their conversion rate was 11.5 percent.

4. Bing

Bing is becoming more popular, but their still about tied with Yahoo. Bing accounted for 6.64% of my website leads for the month of April, with an overall conversion rate of 28.57%.

5. AutoTrader

We get many leads from AutoTrader, but thanks to setting up conversions in Google Analtyics I found 17 additional leads that even AutoTrader didn’t know about. If you’re buying banner ads, you need to track them. If I dig deeper there was even more than that because AutoTrader has different sources like edmunds.autotrader.com. Their conversion rate was a whopping 18.68%. Another words, of the traffic sent to my website from AutoTrader, 18% submitted a website form.

6. Facebook

I was surprised this even made the list, but numbers don’t lie. Our Facebook Fanpage generated only 13 leads, yet the conversion rate was 25.49%. The app we use sends traffic directly to our dealer website. Other apps force you to use a microsite, which I’m not a big fan of.

The rest of this list is self explanatory, but here is a list of the top 10 sources who had the best conversion rates (total traffic divided by leads generated)

1) Edmunds/AutoTrader: 50%

2) Bing: 28.57%

3) Facebook 25.49%

4) AutoTrader 18.68%

5) Yahoo Autos (cars.com) 16.67%

6) YouTube 16.67%

7) Ask.com 12.96%

Yahoo 11.5%

9) Superpages 11.43%

10) AOL 9.45%

Remember, these are leads that ONLY came from the website. Third party lead sources aren’t included.

Those that attended were given our secret url with 5 free goal tracking reports created by Patrick himself. Each script had a clickable link that would automatically add each to your existing Google Analytics account from just 2 clicks.

Screenshot Of The Digital Dealer Page

My 2 Favorite Goal Tracking Reports:

1) Campaign Source Performance

This Report Shows A Nice Snapshot Of Lead Conversion Data

This data shows a weekly report of anything we consider a conversion, including actual email leads and even directions to dealership. This is just the top 10, and there were many others.

This particular dealer purchases banners from AutoTrader, and I’m excited to see the conversions we got from people clicking to our website from AutoTrader. Normally when a user clicks from AutoTrader to your dealer website you would have no idea where the lead really came from. If a user clicks from AutoTrader to your website and submits a lead, your website provider will get credit for the lead. This has always been a problem, but I’m happy to see number 5 and 8. They were both from AutoTrader and totaled an additional 19 conversion that even AutoTrader doesn’t know about. There were even more further down, but there were just too many sources to list.

2) Visitor Acquisition Efficiency Report

Visitor Acquisition Efficiency Report

I sorted this report by conversion rate (Sorry, I had to hide the top 2). I was actually pretty amazed with number 11. A 22% conversion rate from Facebook? This particular dealer doesn’t post links to their website from updates, so all these clicks came from their Facebook inventory app that sends traffic to their main website.

How Do We Know Not Just What, But Who?

As cool as these reports are to track conversions, you have no way of matching any of these to an actual sale or appointment. Especially if you get a lot of leads.

Even with Google’s new Analytics Funnels it won’t tell you who. It’s still a good practice to gather and watch this data, but I want to know the source of every prospect without having to ask him for it.

Here is a screen shot from our CRM of an actual lead that just came in. The source usually would have been my dealer website, but now I have the data to change the source:

We Now Send The Source To Your CRM

Showroom Logic’s new live analytics dashboard can either change the lead source automatically or place it in the notes so you can observe and change yourself. If this lead had come from AutoTrader or Cars.com it would of said so.

At the end of this month I will have the best, most accurate ROI report I’ve ever had. I’m very excited to see it so I can shift some of my advertising dollars around next month. I’m tired of paying vendors that don’t perform.

Our live dashboard is still beta, but here are a few widgets we are using now:

This Widget Shows Latest Conversions Live As They Happen, With Source

An interesting note before you jump into any conclusions. At first glance I first thought “wow, my TV ads are really paying off”. If you look, many of the conversions were direct visitors and people who searched for this company’s name.

Patrick and I have been monitoring the session of every one of these leads, and we found some interesting data. We’re finding that these visitors will first find this site on a Google PPC ad, an AutoTrader Ad or other sources. What they’re doing is looking at a vehicle, then bouncing. About 3 days later they come back by Googling or Yahooing “Park Auto Mall”. We’ve even discovered that these people come back 4 or 5 times before they even convert. The data we are collecting is amazing.

I think it proves that most people aren’t as dumb as we think they are, and they’re probably price shopping.

More Widgets:

This Top 10 Keword Report Updates Every 10 Seconds, And Resets At Midnight

Referring Websites Live

Live Google Adwords Clicks

This tool compliments our AdLogic Tool so you know what websites your ads our showing up on, and what searches people are doing live.

If you are serious about analytics you can apply to become a beta tester (car dealers only) here.

Google Analytics Now Has Industry Relared Benchmarking

Good news from the Googleplex. If you are a Google Analytics user you can now compare important statistics of your website traffic to similar websites in your industry. This is ground breaking because we never had this data available to us. Many people relied on unreliable data sites like Alexa.

My niche is the car industry, and I’ve always wanted to know how my site compares to other. Follow these easy instructions on how to analyze your data:

1) Login To Your Google Analytics Account:

Click “visitors”, then “benchmarking”. Now click “open Category list” to the right below the word “benchmarking”. Select your industry – I am selecting “autos and vehicles”.

Now all the data below changes to your selection, and I was excited to see my results.

Here is a brief explanation of each metric:

1) Visits

Amount of Visitors Last 30 Days

This report included the last 30 days of traffic. I received 9,621 visits, and according to Google the auto industry averages only 4,327 visitors a month. This is obviously great news for me getting more than twice the traffic of others.

2) Pageviews

Pageviews Per Vistor (Average)

According to Google, the car industry averages 17,538 page views per month on their website. I obtained 55,749 pageviews, over 200% more than my industry average. Some conversion experts may say my website is noisy, but I cater to the Attention Deficit Disorder Community and it seems to work. (They have great beacon scores).

3) Average Page Per Visit

Average Page View per Visit

The industry average is 4.05 pageviews per visitor. My site gets 5.79 pages a visitor, which is 42.96% more. Don’t sweat it if you’re in a different industry because car dealers will have a better pageview count because people are looking at cars, and they usually have 50 or more listed on their site.

4) Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate Is Often Misunderstood

According to Google, the car industry has an average bounce rate of 40.91%. My bounce rate is 29.70% over the past 30 days. This is Google’s definition of a bounce rate:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

I have to disagree with this statement, and I will use my website as an example. I use a dominant Google Pay Per Click program. If anybody in the Tampa Florida area searches Google for any vehicle I have in inventory, my add will show up. For an example, if someone searches “2008 Chrysler Sebring” (and variations of others) my ad will show. When clicked, the visitor will be brought to the vehicle detail page. I gave them what they were looking for, so why would they look any further?

While I’m on the topic, I’ve heard many people insist that Google uses it’s analytics to decide who shows up on searches. It is not true, and here is my proof:

5) Average Time On Site

Average Time On Site

The industry average is only 2 minutes and 46 seconds (that’s awful). My users stayed on my website for an average just under 5 minutes. I make sure to have plenty of pictures, videos and other information to keep them on as long as possible. I’ll take the 79% more than average! If you don’t think 5 minutes is a long time, try holding your breath for that long.

6) New Visitors

New Visitors

The auto industry average is 66.17%, and I rated at 66.11%, which is a tad lower than the industry average. I like to think positive about this metric, and it’s nice to see people returning to my website. So, 44% of my 9,600 visitors returned to my website in the past 30 days? That’s great news because these are car shoppers!

I would love to see some educated responses below, and maybe see how you rated in your industry.

]]> http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/google-analytics-now-compares-your-internet-traffic-data-to-industry-related-websites.html/feed 2 http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/is-your-car-dealer-website-really-getting-that-many-visitors.html http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/is-your-car-dealer-website-really-getting-that-many-visitors.html#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:44:05 +0000 Mike http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/?p=364 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.

Webalizer Reports 35,980 Visitors for May, 2009

Awstats

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

Awstats reports 17,922 visitors for May, 2009

Google Analytics

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

Google Analytics Reports 7,239 Visitors for 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.