Setting Up Google Analytics to Measure Your Dealership s Website Performance VDPs A Digital Marketer s Guide Guide to setting up Google Analytics to measure what s really important. VDP Efficiency and VDP per Session
Each year, dealerships spend thousands, if not millions of dollars on digital advertising. It s important to be able to measure the effects of this advertising in relation to the amount of buyers it attracts. Google Analytics, while powerful, is not designed to for the automotive industry out of the box. As a result, generic metrics like Time on Site, Page Views and Sessions may hide information for dealers to make important decisions on advertising and marketing spend. In this guide, we focus on setting up Two important metrics that is not immediately available out of the box from Google Analytics: VDP Efficiency and VDP per Session. VDP Efficiency VDP Efficiency allows you to see how efficiently your different digital advertising sources drive traffic to your VDP. You can use this as a dollar for dollar comparison when evaluating advertising channels. The higher the VDP efficiency, the better value per dollar when driving buyers to your dealership s site. It measures: VDP Efficiency VDP per Session allows you to measure average amount of cars a shopper looks at per visit. This indicates the level of interest your market has in the cars on your lot. The more cars they look at per visit, the more likely buyers are going to find the cars they want to buy. It measures: The amount of traffic an advertising source generates that end up looking at least one VDP The total amount of traffic the advertising generates In the real world, this would equate to: The amount of people that came into your lot and looked at least one car The total amount of traffic that came into your lot Usage: Suppose your VDP Efficiency is 50% for a traffic source. This would mean that for every two Sessions this source brought in, only 1 of those sessions viewed a car. This means that if that traffic source costs $1 per click, it took on average $2 to get someone to look at least one of your cars. The amount of VDP viewsb brought by an advertising source The total amount of sessions brought by an advertising source. In the real world, this would equate to: The total number of cars everyone visited in your lot The amount of people that came into your lot. Usage: Suppose your VDP per session is 2.0. This would mean that, on average, for every session that the advertising source generated, that user looked at two cars. The amount of traffic an advertising source generates that end up looking at least one VDP The total amount of traffic the advertising generates
Prerequisite: Segmenting traffic sources To analyze VDP traffic quality, we need to set up a segment that isolates traffic that has viewed or seen a VDP. A segment is essentially a subset of data with conditions you ve set. Directions to set up a segment: 1. Click on +Add Segment at the top of the page 2. Click on +New Segment in the top left corner. 3. Name your segment (e.g. Google CPC Traffic). Do not click Save yet. 4. In the Advanced section, click on Conditions. 5. Click on Ad Content, the default dimension, and change it to Source/Medium. This will allow us to filter out traffic by source. 6. In the text field to the right, put in the name of the source/medium you want to filter out (e.g. Google / CPC). 7. Click Save Once you ve completed this, you ve created a segment that will tell you exactly how many sessions came from Google CPC. Repeat this step for all the different sources you would like to measure.
VDP Efficiency Step 1: Creating the VDP segment Once we have segmented our traffic sources, we are ready to see the quality of the traffic that these sources drive. VDP Quality from a traffic source is derived from the equation: Amount of sessions that visited at least 1 VDP Total Amount of sessions Previously, we created a segment that counted all sessions from a traffic source. Now, we will create another segment that only counts sessions that have at least 1 VDP view from a source. Directions 1. Create another segment with the same settings and name it: Google CPC Traffic w/ VDPs - Refer to Prerequisite: Segmenting traffic sources 2. In the filters section, Click on the AND button. 3. Change your dimension to Page and change the filter type Contains to Matching RegExp 4. Type in the differentiating page paths that define your dealer s VDP. For example, most dealer. com websites utilize a new, used and certified page path to represent their VDPs. Other dealers might have paths such as vehicle-details for example. If your dealer site uses a VDP page structure that differentiates between new, used or certified, use an OR statement in your RegExp. To do so, you must use a pipe (Shift + \). Depending on your page structure, you may have to close your expression. Once you apply this filter, you will see data that satisfies the statement: Show me data for sessions that came from Google CPC and viewed a new, used or certified VDP. Note If your website has one common variable for your pages (such as / vehicle-details/), use only /vehicle-details/. You do not need the pipe.
VDP Efficiency Step 2: VDP Efficiency - Calculating the Actual Number Since Google Analytics isn t specialized to calculate VDP metrics, we re going to have to do a bit of manual work. Directions 1. Go to: Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium 2. Load the two segments you have created just now by clicking on +Add Segment at the top. Load your Google CPC Traffic and Google CPC Traffic w/ VDPs segment and apply. The report should show you two sets of session data for each segment. 3. Divide the CPC w/ VDP segment from the CPC Traffic segment and you ll have a percentage figure. In the example above, the number is calculated by: 781 Sessions that viewed a VDP 2216 Total Sessions = 35.2% VDP Efficiency This tells us that 35.2% of the CPC traffic has viewed a VDP during a visit. This also means that 64.8% of CPC traffic has never viewed a VDP during their visit.
VDP s Per Session Step 1: Finding Total Page Views VDP s per session measures the average quantity of VDPs viewed during a session. To do this, we will need the VDP traffic segment. Directions 1. Click on Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages on the left hand side of the page. Google Analytics now displays the total number of page views generated by the segment you have loaded in. In this All Pages report, you will see all the pages viewed by the people who have visited your site from Google CPC. Which means, we are including pages such as Hours & Directions, Servicing, SRPs and Homepage. Since the All Pages report skews our VDPs/Session data, we need to add a filter that removes all pages except VDPs. 2. Removing Non VDP Pages (Important) Click on Advanced in the middle-right of the page to open up your Advanced Filtering settings. 3. From here, you ll want to do (the same thing you had done when creating the Google CPC Traffic w/ VDP segment in VDP Efficiency - Step 2.3). 4. Apply the filter and now you ll see the total # of VDP page views attributed to Google CPC traffic.
VDP s Per Session Step 2: VDPs per Session - Calculating the Actual Number Now that you have the total number of VDP page view, you can now divide this number with the total sessions from CPC number. Directions Divide the Total Number of VDP page views by Total number of Total Sessions for a certain traffic source 1348 VDP views 2216 Total Sessions = 0.61 VDPs per Session In this example, for every session driven to your site, there will be 0.61 VDP viewed. Alternatively, if we inverse the calculation: 2216 Total Sessions 1348 VDP views = 1.64 Sessions per VDP In this example, for every VDP view, an average of 1.64 sessions driven needs to be driven to your website. Bonus: Time on VDP - Automatically Calculated One advantage with generating a VDPs per Session report is that it also calculates another important metric: Time on VDP. In this example, we see that across all 1,315 VDP views generated by Google CPC, the average time on a VDP is 2:19.
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