Web Analytics

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.

No matter how sophisticated or rudimentary your website provider‘s reporting platform is, having Google Analytics on your website is a “no-brainer”.  You want to “trust, but verify” your website provider’s analytics by making sure they are similar to those in Google Analytics.  At DealerOn, we have made it a standard part of our process to create a Google Analytics account for each of our customers’ websites.

Luckily, if your auto dealership website provider doesn’t already provide Google Analytics tracking code (which I believe they should), it is fairly simple to add to your own website.  Here are the 5 steps to implement Google Analytics on your dealership websites:

1. After logging into your Google account, visit https://www.google.com/analytics/provision/.  Click “Sign Up”.

2. Enter the information about your dealership website, and click “Continue”.

3. Enter your contact information.

4. Read and approve the User Agreements.  Make sure you set your Data Sharing Settings before clicking “Create New Account”.

5. You will have to choose whether  you are tracking a single domain, one domain with multiple subdomains, or multiple top-level domains.  For most dealerships, you will be tracking a single domain.  Choose which best fits your needs, and Google will provide you with a code snippet to put on each page you’d like to track.  Send this code to your dealership website provider, and they should be able to take care of this for you.

That’s it.  5 simple steps to creating your own Google Analytics tracking code and reporting system.

While it is not reasonable to expect the data you see from your website provider and Google Analytics to match exactly, (your provider should have filters and visit/session rules that may not be precisely the same as those in Google Analytics), they should be fairly close and they should trend in the same directions.

Having Google Analytics reporting on your site is also important in case you switch providers at some point.  You will have a complete history of YOUR website’s performance from an unbiased 3rd party.  Also, Google Analytics is a flexible platform that allows you to create reports and track key metrics that your website provider may not provide.

If you have any questions, or would like more information about getting Google Analytics on your website, just drop us an email at clientresults@dealeron.com.