In the midst of managing customer service, the finance process, service departments, and overall dealership operations, it is easy for marketing to fall by the wayside. After creating and updating a website, it may seem like an ineffective use of time to focus on any other digital marketing initiatives. However, dealers would be making a mistake by not having at least one individual utilizing digital marketing, and taking note of essential metrics that could impact sales. When it comes to creating digital marketing campaigns, there are so many options that it is easy for dealers to become overwhelmed. This is why we are going to outline five digital marketing metrics dealers, and their marketing teams can monitor. Each hyperlink below leads to additional resources and tips for monitoring the below metrics.
Dealership Website Views
This is one of the most straightforward metrics to capture. Dealers and marketing teams should be aware of how many people are visiting their website. To do this, marketing teams can use applications like Google Analytics or DealerSocket to gain insight into total views. Keeping track of this metric can reveal a lot of valuable information such as times of the day or week when page views significantly increase or decrease. In addition to website views, it would be an excellent idea also to capture the bounce rate which reveals how many people leave after only viewing one page. If there is a significantly high bounce rate, then there could be a technical issue driving people away.
Traffic Sources
While is it important to know how many views a website has, it is even more insightful to understand where those visits are coming from. Are ten percent of views to a specific vehicle coming from social media, while 40 percent is coming from a link sent out in a newsletter? Knowing this can help marketers decide where to put their energy. It can reveal how effective a social media, newsletter, or paid advertising campaign is. The point of any campaign is to direct viewers to where they need to go. An acquisition stat will show how effective a dealership’s digital marketing strategy is in doing this.
Vehicle Page Views
This is a significant statistic that can reveal which vehicles encourage the most interest out of viewers, and those that may not be as popular. If there are particular deals and incentives expressed on a detail page, then this can also show how useful the wording is in attracting consumers and keeping them engaged. Pairing this statistic with the amount of time visitors spent on the page will reveal how user-friendly the website is.
Lead Form Completion
Are people finding their way to your lead forms? Are they filling them out entirely or abandoning the process halfway through? The amount of time spent on these pages, as well as the overall completion rate, will show how useful the website and vehicle detail page verbiage is in engaging visitors to reach the step of filling out a lead form. If these completions are low, dealers need to figure out where the breakdown is occurring. It could be something as simple as not having the lead form on every vehicle detail page or failing to make it easily accessible on the main menu.
Complete Conversions
How many people are visiting the dealership after they complete the lead form? This is the ultimate method of seeing if the main page, chat functions, and vehicle detail pages are carrying visitors through the car buying process. It is crucial to correctly measure and monitor this statistic. Can sales be traced from website visitation to a car purchase? If the other metrics on this list are favorable, it will eventually lead to success with this one.
Again, there are a lot of digital marketing metrics dealer and marketing teams can monitor. However, these metrics can be used to gain big-picture insights that can turn websites and social media accounts into a reliable tool to increase sales.
