Category Archives: analytics

Google recently released their Vehicle Dealer vertical report for the Q4 of 2015. The data yielded some interesting data that shed some new light on the vertical and reinforced past trends. According to the report search queries in the Vehicle Dealers Category grew by 13%. Interestingly, Desktop searches declined by 3 percent and Tablet queries declined by 5 percent, while Mobile queries grew by 33%. This is not groundbreaking news, but it does reinforce the fact that mobile traffic is increasingly becoming a larger part of the pie.

The report also shed some light on interesting trends in regards to the paid search auctions on Google search results.

Queries, Impression and Clicks saw huge increases for Mobile on the Adwords search auction. On the contrary, those same metrics saw a decrease on desktop – no surprise there. An interesting trend that I wasn’t aware of was that Ad Depth decreased quite significantly for desktop queries, a drop of 8.79%. The Ad Depth refers to the number of ad placement spots for a particular search query. A near 10% drop in Ad Depth means that a search term that used to yield 10 search ad spots may only be showing 9 ad spots now. One less ad spot on the search results page means a decrease in impressions and a rise in CPC as the same number of advertisers competes for even less ad space. If your dealership Adwords campaign saw a rise in CPC in the past 3 months then this may be a contributing factor.

The big takeaway from Google’s report is that mobile traffic and desktop traffic is trending in opposite directions. In fact 62% of all searches in the Vehicle Dealers vertical are made on mobile or tablet devices. So what does this mean for car dealerships? Well, it means having a mobile responsive website and a digital advertising strategy to reach mobile users is even more important and increasing by the day.

Terrestrial radio ad spots have long been a foundation of many car dealerships marketing efforts. In the past couple of years digital radio, on platforms such as Pandora and Spotify, has increased in popularity and taken listeners away from terrestrial radio. With that shift comes a shift in ad dollars as dealerships look to reach their target audience on the new frontier of digital radio. Before dealers sign up for a digital radio campaign they need to be aware of the returns that they’ll most likely get from the campaign.

In the past, a couple of dealerships have reached out to us to investigate a rise in bounce rate on their site. In more than a few occasions I’ve poked into their analytics account to find that the culprit of the rise in bounce rate was a digital radio campaign that the dealership was running. In one case, I saw a site’s bounce rate nearly double on the days that their digital radio campaign ran.

In the analytics accounts that I’ve seen, the engagement metrics for digital radio advertising leaves a lot to be desired. You may expect to see these kinds of results:
• Bounce rate in the low 90’s
• Time on site less than 40 seconds
• Pages/Session less than 1.5

Also, you’ll see very little goal conversions, if any. With these dismal engagement metrics you’ve got to really question the quality of traffic that these campaigns are bringing to your site.

The majority of digital radio users are on mobile devices. With mobile banner ads comes the peril of the accidental clicks from fat finger syndrome. The accidental click rate on mobile banner ads is typically 65%. For digital radio campaigns I expect the accidental click rate to be much higher when you consider that oftentimes the banner ad placement is typically above the radio navigation buttons. A person who accidentally clicked on your ad when they intended to ‘Skip’ that One Direction song on their Taylor Swift Pandora station is not a likely car shopper and will most likely bounce from your site faster than Taylor Swift goes through boyfriends.

Digital radio campaigns aren’t without its benefits. The campaigns will yield lots of impressions at a pretty decent CPM (cost per thousand impressions), which has its benefits when it comes to branding. As a dealership you’ll have to weigh on whether this benefits outweighs the bounce rate hit that your site will take.

Some of you astute, detail-orientated types may have noticed a while back that Google Analytics has changed the way that their data is displayed. Don’t panic, this isn’t a major algorithm that will alter the landscape of search marketing — they didn’t even give the update an animal code name such as Penguin or Panda. Here’s a rundown of what changes were made in Google Analytics:

• Visits are now Sessions
• Unique Visitors are now Users

Aside from a slight learning curve of adjusting to the new terminology, this shouldn’t affect Analytics users too much. A post-it it note on your computer would probably suffice in helping you adjust to the change while you get adjusted to this new terminology.

Some people have speculated that the change was made because the mobile industry doesn’t user terms like “visits” or “unique visitors”. This slight change in terminology could definitely be a sign of a sea change where analyzing data from mobile users is becoming more important.

Further Reading:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2731565?hl=en

Whether you manage a small, yet burgeoning, blog with a few dozen readers or an immensely popular blog with a profitable Adsense account; you can utilize Google Analytics to gain insightful measurements on your blog’s performance. The myriad of data and graphs may seem daunting at first glance. However, if you know what data to look for; you can cut through the clutter and make sense of all that information. In this article we’ll point out some statistics you should consider monitoring to understand how well your blog is performing.

When it comes to blogging, content is king. Great content on your blog will get visitors returning to it repeatedly. Google Analytics allows you to see how many people came to your website once, twice, thrice, etc over a period of time. In the navigation panel go to Audience > Behavior > Frequency & Recency to see this information. Checking the number of return visitors to your blog is worth monitoring on a monthly basis to see if this figure gets better as you continue to develop loyal readers.

The Audience Overview report in Google Analytics has some valuable statistics you should monitor. In the navigation panel go to Audience > Overview to access this report. The metrics that you should monitor on this report includes:

Average Pages per visit: This statistic tells you how many pages your average visitor goes to during a session. Your blog should entice readers to explore other content within the site.

Time on site: The amount of time a visitor spends on our blog can give you valuable insights on the user experience. If your visitors are spending lots of time on your page then it may be an indication that they’re reading your content. That is great! On the other hand, if they are not spending significant time in your site then it may be a red flag for issues with your blog. Issues such as offensive content or long page load times – a likely cause for graphic heavy pages – might be some possible causes for visitors to retreat from your blog prematurely.

Bounce rate: The bounce rate is the percentage of users that visit your site, but leave without engaging with other pages. A high bounce rate can be addressed by implementing an internal linking strategy to relevant posts within your blog.

These are just a few metrics that you should consider. There are many other ways to measure blog performance. What analytics do you use to measure your blog performance?

Are you looking for an automotive blog with transparent results?  Content Motive uses professional writers who specialize in SEO in the automotive industry.

DealerLab websites back end Google analytics integration has been updated to also include referral sources indicating the source/medium.

Our goal is to offer as much information about your digital presence as possible in one place to lower the time you spend managing systems and access.

For more detail information about SEO/SEM please contact:

Kevin Drongowski
Senior Account Manager
Integrated PPC
Questions? 425-780-2774 Call or text

What Universal Analytics offers to developers is the ability to collect data from multiple devices and platforms.

Old Google Analytics would only report website traffic, with Universal Analytics you can track actions in mobile apps, game consoles, and information kiosks. For the automotive industry, the extra device tracking is not a huge perk. However, when an account has Universal Analytics enabled, you can see details about which search engine was used arriving on the site, user behavior details like session timeouts, referral exclusions, and search term exclusions.

Referral exclusions can be useful for providing more accurate data about user behavior. For example, if your site has a sister site at a different domain, and users could bounce back and forth between the 2, you would want to exclude each of the urls so that this behavior is reported as the same session instead of referral traffic.

Excluded search terms allow you to mark organic search traffic from specific terms as direct traffic instead. If you would prefer that when people search for your company name to get to your website, they are considered direct traffic instead of organic search traffic, you could add the company name as an excluded search term.

All behaviors from these exclusions are still recorded, but the user’s intention and process becomes more clear.

Hopefully, this clears up some of the changes in Universal Analytics.

For more detail information about SEO/SEM please contact:

Kevin Drongowski
Senior Account Manager
Integrated PPC
Questions? 425-780-2774 Call or text

You can see Kevin’s SEO/SEM entries @PGI Facebook

NOTE: Universal Analitys is being integrated with DealerLab Websites as we speak and it will be available Q1 2014 on your DealerLab back end.

What Universal Analytics offers to developers is the ability to collect data from multiple devices and platforms.

Old Google Analytics would only report website traffic, with Universal Analytics you can track actions in mobile apps, game consoles, and information kiosks. For the automotive industry, the extra device tracking is not a huge perk. However, when an account has Universal Analytics enabled, you can see details about which search engine was used arriving on the site, user behavior details like session timeouts, referral exclusions, and search term exclusions.

Referral exclusions can be useful for providing more accurate data about user behavior. For example, if your site has a sister site at a different domain, and users could bounce back and forth between the 2, you would want to exclude each of the urls so that this behavior is reported as the same session instead of referral traffic.

Excluded search terms allow you to mark organic search traffic from specific terms as direct traffic instead. If you would prefer that when people search for your company name to get to your website, they are considered direct traffic instead of organic search traffic, you could add the company name as an excluded search term.

All behaviors from these exclusions are still recorded, but the user’s intention and process becomes more clear.

Hopefully, this clears up some of the changes in Universal Analytics.

For more detail information about SEO/SEM please contact:

Kevin Drongowski
Senior Account Manager
Integrated PPC
Questions? 425-780-2774 Call or text

You can see Kevin’s SEO/SEM entries @PGI Facebook

NOTE: Universal Analitys is being integrated with DealerLab Websites as we speak and it will be available Q1 2014 on your DealerLab back end.