I have been writing a number of articles on Google Analytics and how dealers can customize their Analytics reports to give the dealership a better view into which marketing investments are working to sell more cars. The auto industry has to start a better discussion on the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that drive more car sales in regards to marketing investments.

At the 2013 Digital Marketing Strategies Conference (DMSC) there will be a number of speakers and case studies that will start to define the new metrics for ROI for car dealers.  

This article is the start of a discussion on In Market Shopper Activity (IMSA) on a dealership website.  The discussion will be enhanced by the speakers and workshops at DMSC in Orlando, Feb 5-7th.

Defining In Market Shopper Activity (IMSA)

The definition is somewhat flexible based on your website provider, but basically it tracks visitor page views that would correlate to a purchasing decision.  Numerous studies have linked an increase in Vehicle Detail Page (VDP) views  to and increase in car sales.   You can also include vehicle specials pages  and/or the "Hours and Directions" page to the formula. 

So, if a dealer wants to see the "trend" of IMSA for their own website, how can they do that? This article will outline how to get started.

More importantly, Google Analytics can be setup to show the IMSA effectiveness of your marketing investments and traffic sources.   Which investments are finding consumers that want to shop for cars? Let's find out!

The purpose of this article is to get dealers thinking about what they can do with their data to make smarter business decisions in 2013.  Are you ready to learn?

What Dealers Normally View

The chart below is what dealers normally see when they go into Google Analytics and look at their website traffic.  My opinion is that there is little actionable data here on the default Analytics screen. 

Dealers who look at this default view have no abilityto see what percentage of the visitors are performing activities that sell more cars.  Are there people just coming to the home page to get a phone number?  What traffic is important to track?

Wouldn't it be nice to just see the New Car, Used Car, and Certified VDP views combined and see if the trend is going up or down?

Setting Up Custom Segments

In order to accomplish this you need to setup a simple filter, called an Advanced Segment.  I have shown two examples how to setup advanced segments for IMSA on Cobalt/ADP and Dealer.com websites below. Advanced Segments can be created for most automotive website providers, it just depends on how they structure their pages.

Here is the Cobalt/ADP Example:

Here is the Dealer.com example:

Each Advanced Segment has to be named, see top red box.  When you are done setting up the rules, you will need to save the segment definition, as shown in the lower red box.

Viewing IMSA Trends

Once the Advanced Segment is defined, you can apply it to ANY Google Analytics reports.  By applying the Dealer.com IMSA segment filter to the "basic" chart above, the new graph looks like this:

The dealer can now see that their marketing efforts have not done much to increase IMSA this month.  

When consumers look at VDP's, they view 8.41 VDP's which is a little lower than average.

30% of the Pageviews on the dealership website are VDP's, which is now something that can be tracked and measured as new marketing initiatives are taken.

The bounce rate on VDP pages for this dealer are higher than normal, based on our data analysis of hundreds of dealer websites.  This could point to a merchandising problem that impacts the attractiveness of the VDP's.

Measures Traffic Based on IMSA

When you start to take this discussion to the next level, you can start to measure your Internet traffic sources based on their ability to generate IMSA.  You can also plot the ratio of ISMA vs car sales to see if the type of car shoppers your marketing budget is generating, is correlating to more sales.  There are many ways you can use this data to hold your marketing channels accountable. 

If you have setup "goals" from previous article I wrote on Google Analytics, you can also plot IMSA sources to leads  form submission.

In the example below, we can look at the chart above and break it down by source:

Notice that the paid search campaign targeting BING, has high quality activity when it comes to IMSA.  The customers that are coming in from paid search on Bing are viewing 13.25 VDP's, which is the highest level of activity of all traffic sources.

This is just the start of how you can start to measure your marketing investments in regards to the consumers that are driven to your website and what they are doing on your website.    Wouldn't it be an interesting discussion to discuss costs associated to generate IMSA on your website compared to the costs of Autotrader.com and Cars.com.

I have done dozens of these types of studies and the dealers I work with are amazed at just how the numbers pan out.   This is why our industry has to have a new discussion on understanding the value of our marketing channels and how to better measure the ROI of our marketing dollars.

Running Your Business With Real Data and Not Gut Feelings

If you want to start measuring your marketing investments and website traffic in a more meaningful way, I encourage you to attend DMSC on Feb 5-7th in Orlando, just prior to NADA.

There will be four workshops on this very topic lead my myself and a number of key thought leaders on measuring consumer behavior on your website!  

I also encourage you to look into data mining tools that simplify vendor data and break it into actionable ideas. A business intelligence and management tool for car dealers that I am working on is called ROI-BOT and you can get a first look at this powerful tool at DMSC.

Is your business ready to use Google Analytics and data mining tools to create a better strategy for 2013?

Brian Pasch, CEO

PCG Consulting

732.672.2356

brian@pcgmailer.com