If you have a website for your dealership, you probably have already heard of Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a tool that is offered for free by Google to help you analyze and understand your website traffic. If you aren’t already taking advantage of this free service, now is the time to get started. Once you learn the basics, it is easy to set up a Google Analytics account for your website and implement the tracking codes.
Google Analytics can track the buying process that customers go through on your website. The buying process for purchases made in person can be hard to measure, but we can track the steps taken online. The buying process is usually like this: acquisition, behavior, conversion. Acquisition is when and how you acquire a new customer or bring a new user to your website. Behavior is broad and can refer to how a user is engaging with your website, such as visiting pages, watching videos, and more. A conversion is when a customer completes an action on your website, which can include when a user completes a purchase. For a dealership, this would look like when someone schedules a service appointment, books a test drive appointment, or calls your dealership.
For more advanced and detailed information on how to use Google Analytics, visit Google’s Analytics academy.
To make things easy, AutoJini has come up with this guide for non-analytical people to understand Google Analytics. Check out our graph below to see how you can use different features of Google Analytics to understand your website traffic better.
Analytics Shown |
Equivalent at a Dealership |
How to Use the Info |
| Audience Data on the number of users, pageviews, sessions, and more on your website. |
How many people visited your dealership today? This week? This past month? | This is a good way to keep track of your web traffic. Pay attention to patterns, trends, increases and decreases in the number of visitors. |
| Demographics & Interests Under the Audience section. It shows you the age, gender, and other categories of your audience. |
What types of people are visiting your dealership? What age groups, gender, and other categorical groups of people visit your dealership more? | You have to enable this feature to access the data. Once you do, you can learn more about the demographics of your audience and use it to tailor your marketing messages and inventory. |
| Mobile Under the Audience section. It will show you which devices were used to access your website and additional data. |
The way that your customers experience your dealership. | If you have visitors from multiple device types , you’ll want to make sure your content is displaying and functioning well. |
| Bounce Rate The rate at which users exit your website without engaging. |
The percentage of people who quickly peek around in your dealership and then leave without talking to anyone. | Check to see what pages have the highest bounce rates. There may be something wrong with the page functionality-wise, or the page may be missing information. |
| Acquisition Overview How a user arrived at your website. Examples: organic search, email campaign, social media, etc. |
“How did you find out about our dealership?” | You can figure out where your web traffic is coming from. If you have a good amount of traffic coming from your social media, you can use this information to shift your marketing campaign. |
| Landing Pages Under Search Console in the Acquisition section. This is the first page a user visited on your website. |
The first impression that you make to your customer. | The pages that people land on first on your website, which is usually the homepage, should include content that grasps the attention of your visitors and keeps them on your website. This will show you which pages to optimize. |
| Conversions Where you create goals, view your goal flows, and measure performance. |
Completion of a sale, service appointment scheduled, or any other sort of goal. | You will need to set up the goals you want to track, but once you do you can use this section to measure your progress and the steps taken by your customers to reach your goal. |
The best way to make sure your website is optimized for all device types, functioning well, and generating leads is to have a responsive website for your dealership. All of AutoJini’s websites are responsive, which means that they will display and work properly on any screen size. We also help you get your Google Analytics account set up and tracking codes implemented, and we send you regular updates on how your website is doing.