Web Analytics

We all know that one of the most important traffic sources for the typical car dealer website is Google’s organic search listings.  Google has made it very clear that one of the most important factors in determining where your dealership’s website content ranks on Google is the speed at which that page loads for their users.  Google has stressed that the page load time is an EVEN bigger factor for mobile rankings than for traditional desktop search results.  Did you know that Google Analytics has a Site Speed Page Timings report that shows you the speed for EVERY page on your site in one easy report?

Over the last few weeks, we have written about Google’s site speed insight tool that can show you or your website provider how to lower the load time of a particular page on your site.  But how can you get information about which pages you should check?  The Google Analytics Site Speed Page Timings report shows you Google’s calculated load time for EVERY page on your site, along with the amount of traffic each page receives, and what the Bounce Rate is for that page!

Page Timings Report:

Here is an example of the Google Analytics Page Timings report.  To access the report in your Google Analytics account, just click through on “Behavior>Behavior Flow>Site Speed>Page Timings”.  You will get a report that looks like this:

For every page on your site, the report shows:

1. The time it take to load the page in Seconds
2. The # of page views during the time period for which you’ve run the report
3. The Bounce Rate for the page
4. The Exit Rate

If you use the sort functionality within the report, you can focus on the pages with the highest Load times, the Most Traffic, or the highest Bounce Rates.  You can easily identify the highest trafficked pages on your site that also have high Bounce Rates, and see if the load times for those pages are part of the Bounce Rate problem.

You can even filter this report to just show Organic Search traffic and use “Landing Page” as the Primary Dimension, which will then show you the actual load time for consumers coming to your website from Google or Bing.  Because you also have the Page Views, you can easily focus on the pages with High Load Times, High Bounce Rates and High Traffic volumes, helping you to get the most return from your time investment.

Because page speed is an even more critical SEO factor for mobile, this report REALLY becomes valuable if you filter the traffic to show only Mobile Visitors.  When you create a report that shows pages that have lots of traffic, high bounce rates, and high load times for Mobile traffic, you can use the Google PageSpeed Insights Tool to get actionable information on how to speed up the pages that will provide the most value to your dealership if you optimize them (because they have the most inbound traffic).

If you are investing a material amount of money in paid search advertising, you should run this same report, filtered on your paid search traffic.  You can then isolate any landing pages that are problematic from a Speed/Bounce Rate view.  Once you’ve isolated the problem landing pages you could send the traffic to a similar, but faster landing page with a lower bounce rate, invest some time in fixing the current landing page, or pause the campaign until you have time to improve your results.

Speed Suggestions Report:

If you just want to see a list of pages with their accompanying Google Page Speed scores, you can click on the “Speed Suggestions” report just below the “Page Timings” report and get a list of all the pages in your site, sorted by Page views, with the accompanying Google Page Speed score (0-100) and a link to the Google Insight suggestions for improving the page speed.

Google is continuously improving Google Analytics to provide insight into how Google evaluates your site’s content for its organic search rankings and paid search traffic.  Make sure that you aren’t overlooking this free tool that can help you, your website provider, your SEO guru, or your paid search vendor maximize your dealership’s return on their time and efforts.

By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the new Google Webmaster Tools report that tells your dealership how many pages have indexed on your website over the last year.  Unfortunately the information on its own is a little vague, and can be difficult to fully use when taken on its own.  For example, a big segment of the data revolves around how many website pages are not selected for indexing.  What does that mean?  Google says that:

“A URL can be not selected for indexing for many reasons including:

• It redirects to another page
• It has a rel=”canonical” to another page
• Our algorithms have detected that its contents are substantially similar to another URL and picked the other URL to represent the content.”

The information in this report can be used in many ways, but a couple that really stand out to me are:

1) When your dealership changes providers, hires an SEO company, or hires a content creation company–you can use the tool to watch how many more pages Google indexes over time

2) When you are writing content (or having content written on your behalf), like on a blog, you can see whether Google is indexing it (which content does get indexed, what doesn’t, etc)

I think what is really important for dealerships to understand is that this report gives a lot of relevant, important information, but taken alone, can be overwhelming and misinterpreted.  Discuss this with your dealership’s website provider to help fully understand what it all means.

After writing my post on QR Codes Best Practices, I wanted to make sure those dealerships interested in starting a QR code marketing campaign knew to create QR codes in a way that will allow your dealership to track them through the Google Analytics on your car dealership website.

Here’s how to create a QR code that is trackable by Google Analytics:

First, make sure you are signed into Google (in the account that houses your dealership’s analytics).

Next, go to the Google URL Builder.  Enter the URL that you would like the QR Code to link to.  Choose “QR Code” for campaign source, and then choose your campaign medium and name.  For example, if you’re going to put the QR Code on window stickers for a Chevy Cruze, your Campaign Medium could be “Window Stickers” and the Campaign Name could be “2011 Chevy Cruze”.  Once you’ve entered these fields, click Generate URL.

Copy the URL you’ve just created and go to goo.gl.  Here, you’ll shorten your newly created QR Code tracking URL, and click “Details” to generate the QR Code. By shortening the URL before generating the QR Code, you will make the QR code less dense, and therefore easier for your customers to scan.

Now that you’ve created the QR Code, you can use the link that Google provides to put your QR Code graphic onto your site, or you can right click on the generated QR Code and click “Save Image As” to save it to your machine or servers.  You are now ready to start tracking your QR code campaigns!  Let me know if you’ve found other ways to effectively track your QR campaigns.

In addition to rolling out Google+ and the Google +1 button, Google has also recently rolled out a new version of Google Analytics.  Google Analytics 5 includes a complete user interface re-design which allows users to create multiple dashboards, more easily search across multiple accounts, create custom reports (and goals), and Analytics Intelligence, a tool that allows for automatic alerts.

One of the more exciting new features of Google Analytics 5 is the ability to track Google +1 clicks.  To get this functionality on your site, you need to make sure you are using the updated tracking code.  If you’ve recently added Google Analytics to your site, you should have the right code.  If not, make sure when you sign into your Google Analytics account, you’re using the “New Version”.  If your page looks like this:

you aren’t.  So click “New Version” and you’re set.

Now, click the Gear icon in the orange toolbar.  Click “Tracking Code” and you’ll have the latest version of the code for your site.

Make sure that when you put the code on your site you get it before the closing of the </head> tag of your HTML file.

It’s important to make sure your dealership website has this updated Google Analytics code on your site, so check with your dealer site provider to make sure they’ve added them.  If you have any questions beyond that, feel free to contact DealerOn at clientresults@dealeron.com and check out our post from last week on how to get Google Analytics on your dealership website.