This blog entry is written to provide a broad insight to the current status of analytics in the automotive industry. This is based off my agency experience working directly with ~40 accounts.
- Overview
- State of Analytics
- iFrame Apocalypse
- Our Data Studio
- Shout Out to Bing
- Conclusion / Opportunity
Overview:
The Automotive Industry is one heck of an adventure and if it wasn’t done yesterday it’s already too late! Many managers at dealerships want a one-hit-punch approach to marketing but not many people are going to see just one facebook ad and go decide to buy a car! The average buyers’ cycle is 60-90days and much of the journey is offline. This provides a lot of mixed results when it comes to analytics. If your display ads did not convert directly to online leads, that doesn’t mean they weren’t effective. There are also outside influences affecting your metrics, such as the manufactures’ TV ads, web providers switching dataLayer variables (often without warning), and fluctuating market prices. Perhaps, in the future, everyone will be buying their cars online but for now, there is still a little bit of anarchy.
State of Analytics:
Analytics are unpredictable across the entire industry and lack governance. One industry-leading firm, PCG, has recognized this issue and positioned themselves as the thought leader of analytical standardization. Around 60% of our clients have had their site tagged by PCG. Attached is a pdf download of their tagging rubric, the PCG Engagement Project Dictionary. In a nutshell, before PCG’s initiative, if you were to ask a dealership about what they are tagging, many of them would answer “We have our specials tagged on every window!”
Now that analytics are all the rage, one of the biggest challenges is that many dealers/vendors don’t fully understand what is happening and just want to see MORE. This has led to a pollution of pointless and often inaccurate events in an attempt to track everything. As you can see in the screenshot below, a client will typically have various events that have the same goal, but with different naming conventions and large discrepancies.
When onboarding new clients, one of first things I do is perform an isolated IP test to determine which pre-existing events are worth using for our own goals and then filter out the rest. If any important actions were missed, I’ll then add them myself, (Simo’s GTM Cloner is very helpful). For us at Dealer World, we try to keep things simple as possible and track “Conversational Conversions” as our standard goals. Those being walk-ins, phone calls, lead forms, chats, and texts.
iFrame Apocalypse:
If you’ve browsed for cars online you have probably realized that many of the sites look similar. This is due to the fact there about 4 major website providers that run nearly every dealerships websites and all of them are plagued by 3rd party iFrames; Trade Forms, Finance Forms, Service Forms, etc. Our agency has been fortunate enough to foster a relation with VistaDash, a property of PCG, and currently collaborating with iFrame providers such as Edmunds, TradePending, KBB, and others to resolve this issue. The most common solution has been giving the iFrame providers clients’ GA property and having their dev team push events in. One can only hope that these events are accurate! One thing that I am currently trying to figure out is if there is a way to scrape the DOM/viewport and use custom Javascript to fire if certain elements are visible. If anyone has any experience scraping iFrames I would love to hear from you!
Reporting with Data Studio:
At Dealer World, we funnel as much as possible into our Data Studios and then share them with our clients so that they have an excellent 10,000’ overview of their account with us. If there is anything that needs a more comprehensive look, we simply go into the native platform for more details. I have attached a few screenshots of some of the slides we use.
Session Attribution
Session attribution is not rocket science, but our dealers love this as it is easy to understand when paired with pie charts.
Hottest on the Lot
The “Hottest on the Lot” shows the most popular models as well as the “Hottest” car on the lot by pulling URL-based tags using a RegEx table variable. The tags are broken down in a way specifically for this DS report. You’ll see that the brands are in the category level, models in the action level, and specific urls are in the label level. This allows us to toggle specific brands and models on or off for visualization. With this report it is easy to see the impact of our a big Silverado 1500 campaign we did (blue line).
Creative Review
Our Creative Review slide is a simple sheet but makes our jobs much easier! Our creative team simply updates a google sheet with the urls of their monthly masterpieces so that we can easily view and access all the advertising visuals for both online and offline channels.
Data Studio PDF Export is a fantastic chrome extension.
Shout Out to Bing
I will keep this concise as it is more advertising based than analytical, however we have found that many competitors do not use Bing and is a cornucopia of SEM results. We use Bing’s Adwords Auto Sync on a daily basis. It includes a fantastic URL find/replace function to update any tracking codes you are using! We have found over double the ROI compared to Adwords with nearly every client we have. Make sure to check it out! Easily implementation & high return.
Conclusion
The Automotive Industry is a little behind at the moment, but with analytics & attribution being the current rage, I predict things will catch up fast! There is a high demand for Analytical skills and if you do any work as a consultant, you can be assured that nearly any dealership could use your help. Just keep it simple and as @Adam Greco would say, “Talk dollars, not clicks” 😎
If anyone would like additional details or has anything to add, I’d love to hear from you!