17 Jan Dealers/Agencies – How to Inspect your Paid Traffic Providers in Google Analytics
It has come to my attention through years of working with dealers and walking them through their own individual Google Analytics accounts, as well as following Brian Pasch and the industry as a whole, most dealerships are not able to inspect their own Google Analytics. In fact most General Manager’s I have had the pleasure of working with did not know if they had Google Analytics, or what the log-in was. It had to be tracked down, or we had to set up a new account for the dealership.
Throughout the years, I have learned the average GM wants to see the lowest cost-per-click possible, and their first instinct in judging a campaign is by volume of traffic. The mentality that more is better, is what allows so many vendors to take advantage of the average GM. As an employee of CityTwist, I have fought this notion for several years, knowing that our campaigns do not generate thousands of new visitors, in a 2-3 day time-frame. There are just not that many new people that want to shop a dealers website in such a short time frame. My goal is to help educate dealers so they can log into GA on their own and inspect their traffic. Below are the steps to follow so you can identify irregular or opaque traffic in your analytics account.
Step 1 – Log into your Google Analytics account, and once you are on the audience overview page, on the left side-bar scroll down to Acquisition – All Traffic – Source/Medium. You should now see your top #10 traffic providers in volume.
Step 2 – On the top right you will see a date range, click that area and make sure to expand the date range so you can capture all the data from the campaign you are looking to inspect. If the campaign started 3 months ago, go back to October 1st – today.
Step 3 – Find the tag you are looking to inspect, for example google/organic, and click on it. This will isolate just the data from that traffic source. Then directly above the tag, you will see a drop down bar for secondary dimension. Click that and type device, and click on “device category”. You will now see a breakdown by what % of their traffic was from a desktop device, mobile device, or tablet. If over 90% of the traffic is coming from a desktop, you should question that traffic source. Roughly 50% of clicks to dealers websites come from mobile devices. Then click secondary dimension again, type device again, but this time click on “mobile device model.” If iPhone or iPad are not the #1 source, or towards the top, you should question that traffic source. Apple devices are the most owned and operated, and should be the top used devices to click to your website. Not a windows tablet, or a samsung.
Step 4 – Click secondary dimension again, type city, and click city. Just make sure the majority of the traffic is in your PMA. There will be out of bound clicks from testing, and consumers that are traveling, etc, but for the mot part the clicks should be local.
Step 5 – This gets tricky. Go back to the left side-bar, scroll down to Behavior – Site Content – All pages. This will list the top 10 pages that were viewed in that date range. On the bottom right you will see a little drop down box that says “show rows.” Click that and expand to 5,000. Now hit “control f,” and search for privacy or sitemap, or any footer link, or odd website page that consumer traffic does not typically go to. Click on the privacy policy page. This will isolate just the consumers who visited your privacy policy page in that time frame. Now go to secondary dimension and type source and click “source.” This will show you which sources are sending traffic to your privacy page. If 90% of the traffic to your Privacy page is coming from a paid traffic source, such as an email or display campaign, you should question that traffic.
These are some tips and tricks to better understanding your visitors in GA. Remember everyone more is not better. A $15 burger tastes better, and has higher quality beef then a $1 cheeseburger. A $5-$10 click is much more likely to buy a car from you, then a .50 cent click. It is time to focus less on quantity, and more on quality.
I hope this helps.
– Leo