Getting more out of Google Analytics?

[AlecWinters]

Hey everyone,

Long story short; I’m fairly new to this and I’ve been tasked to help setup the online side of the used car department for a new store. Obviously with Google Analytics, I can get high level information about website traffic. But I’d like to dig a bit deeper into the vehicles themselves. For example, I’d like to know things like:


- Break down website traffic by body type. (Or other arbitrary grouping). For example, what percentage of my total VDP traffic is trucks? Or maybe 4x4 trucks? Or whatever way I want to filter my inventory. Ditto for other things like time on VDP, etc.


- Show a heat map of where visitors come from, but again, for either specific vehicles or body type, or other arbitrary grouping of vehicles.


So since I’m fairly new to the game, and I admit I’m too much of a data-nerd, I’d like the get the input from the experienced experts here.


1. Is this data even useful? To me, it would be interesting to see if specific vehicle types are getting a significant chunk of our traffic. Ie, if our inventory is 30% SUV, but SUVs only get 5% of our traffic, that seems like it would be useful in stocking decisions. Also helpful in pricing decisions. Likewise for drilling into other attributes of vehicles. Do 4x4 trucks get a significant boost? Are there colors that people spend more time on the website looking at? Knowing visitors locations could be useful for effective targeting for specific vehicle types. Or am I just nerding out over data that doesn’t really drive useful decisions?


2. Are there tools out there that do this? I know I can get Google Analytics to work with most website vendors, and I can get do some fancy regular expressions to get a look at new versus used, but I need to drill into specific vehicles. I've seen String Automotive, which is very, very cool but it still doesn't seem to drill into vehicle specifics.


I really appreciate any input, advice or opinion anyone has!

 

[Bill Simmons]

First of all, welcome to Dealer Refresh! You will find some of the greatest minds in automotive here willing to help out.

I'm a big time fan of Google Analytics also. But it seems to me that the info you mentioned would be better to come from an inventory management tool. You're really looking to do a deep drill down so that may be a better route in my opinion. You can setup custom groupings and filters in GA to get the info you're looking for but that is going to be a time consuming task. A inventory tool like a vAuto or the new Listing Logic tool in the ATC portal has a lot of this info already figured out for you.

The inventory related items that I have setup in GA are VDP counts, new and used, track traffic sources to VDP's as in organic versus referral etc. You will also want to setup your multi-channel funnels to get a grip on where traffic is coming from. Hope this helps.

 

[craigh]

What Bill said is true. It's going to depend on your vendor though.
If you have a Dealer.com website, you can run inventory reports and try to correlate them with your website reports, etc.
If you have another vendor with a neat URL structure (ie: dealership.com/inventory/TYPE/MAKE/MODEL/TRIM) then you can export everything based on the URL and do it externally.

When it comes to advanced correlations and things like this, I recommend pulling all of the data out of Google Analytics and getting it into Excel or Tableau. Export it all separately and see how it correlates if you can. One of the biggest limitations of Google Analytics is that it doesn't really give you a "user ID" to follow - this is why most vendor websites offer user tracking and clickpaths so you can see the traversal through the website and then correlate that user ID to leads, contact page views, other page views, vehicle types, etc. Then we can take a bulk export of User IDs that you exported (ie: User IDs that saw SUVs) and correlate those to geographical areas.

At any rate, I don't think Google Analytics is what you want (as Bill said), and I would recommend looking at something more advanced or talking to your website vendor to see what data they have.

 

[joe.pistell]

Hey everyone,

Long story short; I’m fairly new to this and I’ve been tasked to help setup the online side of the used car department for a new store. Obviously with Google Analytics, I can get high level information about website traffic. But I’d like to dig a bit deeper into the vehicles themselves. For example, I’d like to know things like:


- Break down website traffic by body type. (Or other arbitrary grouping). For example, what percentage of my total VDP traffic is trucks? Or maybe 4x4 trucks? Or whatever way I want to filter my inventory. Ditto for other things like time on VDP, etc.


- Show a heat map of where visitors come from, but again, for either specific vehicles or body type, or other arbitrary grouping of vehicles.


So since I’m fairly new to the game, and I admit I’m too much of a data-nerd, I’d like the get the input from the experienced experts here.


1. Is this data even useful? To me, it would be interesting to see if specific vehicle types are getting a significant chunk of our traffic. Ie, if our inventory is 30% SUV, but SUVs only get 5% of our traffic, that seems like it would be useful in stocking decisions. Also helpful in pricing decisions. Likewise for drilling into other attributes of vehicles. Do 4x4 trucks get a significant boost? Are there colors that people spend more time on the website looking at? Knowing visitors locations could be useful for effective targeting for specific vehicle types. Or am I just nerding out over data that doesn’t really drive useful decisions?


2. Are there tools out there that do this? I know I can get Google Analytics to work with most website vendors, and I can get do some fancy regular expressions to get a look at new versus used, but I need to drill into specific vehicles. I've seen String Automotive, which is very, very cool but it still doesn't seem to drill into vehicle specifics.


I really appreciate any input, advice or opinion anyone has!

Ahhh... music to my ears Simple, grounded business logic Alec. I love the way you think! Trust your instincts, you're on the right track IMO.

Not sure who your web vendor is, if it's Dealer.com, we do not provide this level of clarity (yet). If you're a client of Dealer.com (aka DDC), reach out to me. PM me your contact info and I'll pass your contact info to our new Director of Analytics, James Grace, and hopefully you two can share ideas. I'll weigh in when possible.

In my prior job, I was Marketing Manager of a busy 3 store operation. I had an Indie site. I used GA's Advanced Segments to create themed buckets like you're referring to. If you haven't done so already, Take a look at your site, see if you have elements like "title contains" or possibly some text the URLs to build segments.

HTH
Joe

 

[ishtiaq]

ong story short; I’m fairly new to this and I’ve been tasked to help setup the online side of the used car department for a new store. Obviously with Google Analytics, I can get high level information about website traffic. But I’d like to dig a bit deeper into the vehicles themselves. For example, I’d like to know things like:


- Break down website traffic by body type. (Or other arbitrary grouping). For example, what percentage of my total VDP traffic is trucks? Or maybe 4x4 trucks? Or whatever way I want to filter my inventory. Ditto for other things like time on VDP, etc.


- Show a heat map of where visitors come from, but again, for either specific vehicles or body type, or other arbitrary grouping of vehicles.


So since I’m fairly new to the game, and I admit I’m too much of a data-nerd, I’d like the get the input from the experienced experts here.


1. Is this data even useful? To me, it would be interesting to see if specific vehicle types are getting a significant chunk of our traffic. Ie, if our inventory is 30% SUV, but SUVs only get 5% of our traffic, that seems like it would be useful in stocking decisions. Also helpful in pricing decisions. Likewise for drilling into other attributes of vehicles. Do 4x4 trucks get a significant boost? Are there colors that people spend more time on the website looking at? Knowing visitors locations could be useful for effective targeting for specific vehicle types. Or am I just nerding out over data that doesn’t really drive useful decisions?


2. Are there tools out there that do this? I know I can get Google Analytics to work with most website vendors, and I can get do some fancy regular expressions to get a look at new versus used, but I need to drill into specific vehicles. I've seen String Automotive, which is very, very cool but it still doesn't seem to drill into vehicle specifics.