Jeff:

I have only one regret, that I could not do your interview for DDM before by exit. Maybe I can do a good interview from the new magazine I am working for now.

All the best.

Mark Dubis

Tell it how it is Jeff! That's why I love this site, keeping everyone honest and to stay informed!

Oh yeah, could ya hold me a spot in line behind you at the weightwatchers?!

Jeff

I don't think kindly of you all that infer Jeff is fat. Success adds a few pounds and I for one think he looks brilliant

I saw a commercial for Weight Watchers this morning. If you sign-up now, you can get an extra day of meals for free - what a deal!

Ryan,

You bring up a good point. It reminds me of a Wired Magazine article from a month or two ago about "transparent business". It mainly referenced blogs as being outlets for companies to expose their true business practices. It promoted the linking of competitive entities for the betterment of evolving an industry. Think of this as a blogging "20 Group", but within your own marketplace.

You're absolutely correct on there being too much "old-school" thinking within the car industry. It can be very frustrating when speaking to progressive thinkers, such as the participants on DealerRefresh.

Jeff,

Pretty good read. I think they did a good job demonstrating to readers that emerging media and advertising trends are real. I suspect the fact that they removed reference to DealerRefresh itself is because Roscoe would see it as a threat to his readership. I have run in to this on occasion, with the Ask Patty folk most recently. I think these are examples how business is in this industry. A lot of people are "afraid of the competition" which in this case is just silly because DR is certainly not a competitive threat to DDM. Hopefully soon people will start realizing that. There is too much "old school" thinking in the automotive industry and it really holds things back in my opinion. The Real Estate industry seems a bit more enlightened on these emerging media trends, and definitely other publications and communications companies out there not in automotive.

Congratulations on the interview. Your baby face really came out nicely on the cover, hehe.

Jeff,
I agree with Alex. I would recommend telling your vendors that you want to use your number and they will.

I worked for Who's Calling and as a Internet Director, You need to make sure you are using national numbers especially with Who's Calling, so you do not lose calls and then assign one to each vendor so you can track the call volume. They will use them if you request them to.

I feel that the vendors use their own tracking numbers simple to be able to say "look you have this many calls this month, we are doing our job!!"

Good Luck
Timm

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE...

1st, Here's the Job Summary:
-A Single Web Task
-Done on a Regular Basis
-From Multiple Sites

BEST CASE SOLUTION:
-Open 1 Browser
-Click a Button
-Browser automatically goes to your phone sites
-Keys in passwords to all sites
-Auto-Drills into your selected reports page
Multiple Sites... One Click... Done.

HOW?
FireFox browser and a plug-in.

Plug in:

hope this helps,
Joe

Jeff,

I've never trusted external vendors' numbers because I can't hold them to my own standards. When I'm not the one taking the calls I have to change tracking avenues around. Our ad agency provides us with a call tracking system, so I negotiate with new vendors to have our own phone numbers placed.

"I never thought about forwarding all of my numbers (even if they are a callbight number) to 1 system/vendor like whoscalling."

Just call your vendors and tell them you don't want to use their numbers anymore. Give them your own. I had to tell Autotrader that we would cancel if they wouldn't let us use our own. I also asked them what they were afraid of? If their call tracking was accurate, nothing should change - right? Their reluctance really inspired my confidence in them. I've had no issues with any other companies.

I might be wrong on the cars.com juniper networks... it might be Shortel Inc. As there parent company (Classified Ventures, LLC) signed a deal with Shoretel.

Mitch the ideas is to not replace the 800 number... but just have that 800 number ring at another number... (simply call forwarding) which they allow. AT and Cars.com can still track it... and I think Cars.com uses Juniper Network for their toll free numbers so it is SIP/IAX based and it can defiantly be forwarded to any number.


Jeff, I think the issue you will run into is figuring out where the call originated from but that can be controlled by having multiple numbers under the middle tier service providers. The quality should not go down.

Umer said:

"Hmm... why not have all calls from AutoTrader, Cars.com, Ebay Local go to your number with Whoscalling and have whoscalling send it over to you... that would give you all stats under Whoscalling and then when you have to change the number you just make the change at whoscalling."

- Vendors like Autotrader and Cars.com currently do not allow you to replace their 800 number with yours, save for the vehicle comment area. Maybe they'll come up with a better system in the future, but right now they want to be able to track data on their end, and allowing dealers to use their own 800 number minimizes the amount of data they can collect. Also, if you're not aware, you can't forward an 800 to another 800, so you couldn't ask Autotrader to send their calls to your WhosCalling promo number.

Jeff said:
"For instance; AutoTrader gives you a phone number that displays under your dealer name in the vehicle details page. This is not the same number I use in the body of the description."

- Jeff, are you aware that the 800 numbers WhosCalling provides you are frequently not national numbers? They often work only for your immediate area codes. This means that if someone in Iowa sees your car on Autotrader and calls the Whoscalling# in your description instead of the assigned Autotrader#, they might not get through... or even worse, they'll get a dealer on their side of the country who's on board with WhosCalling. You should check your WhosCalling backend and call your rep to make sure the numbers you use are national... otherwise you may be losing a couple leads.

I would say AutoTrader and Cars.com for sure... may be eBay Local... some do outstanding with eBay and some not that well.

Thanks, Jeff. Makes more sense now.

I agree with Umer--you need to get leads into the call tracking funnel as early as possible.

Of all the 9 different lead providers you use. Which would you recommend and which would not?? I am new to internet managment and kind of got tossed in pretty green. Anyway if you would let me know that would be fantastic. Or anyone else

Hmm... why not have all calls from AutoTrader, Cars.com, Ebay Local go to your number with Whoscalling and have whoscalling send it over to you... that would give you all stats under Whoscalling and then when you have to change the number you just make the change at whoscalling.

Or setup a Asterik@Home or Trixbox at your dealership and track it that way... lot of companies offer this PBX for under 1k.

Jeff, in your Digital Dealer interview (very next blog post), you said..

"I end every vehicle description with our phone number; these same descriptions carry over to my other online marketing ads."

Shouldn't this technique reduce the amount of different phone numbers listed on all the classifieds sites?

The other numbers that these sites keep aren't managed by your data feed. For example, the dealership name, phone number, and contact salesman's name at Autotrader.com need to be changed with your account rep and not the company that feeds your inventory data to Autotrader.

This is likely why there's no piece of software that can manage this number for you--third parties aren't supposed to meddle with your account information.

I'm interested now, though--if you have two different phone numbers on a classified ad, one near the dealership contact information and one at the end of the description, which one gets called more?

What happens when your call tracking numbers don't work?

Your customers become very unhappy, and their business with you comes to a screeching halt.DealerRefresh has...

I am surprised that no one has created a software system for dealers so they can login to all their “numbers”. I’m sure someone reading this could make it happen!

I think the main problem in our industry concerning analytics is the interpretation and implementation of change based on these results. Unless you are authorized to represent your dealership in their online marketing and positioning, taking this information to the powers that be can prove far more difficult than getting accutely accurate analytics.

IMO

The stats varying across different tracking programs is very normal. You will see different numbers between server log analysis tools. But at the end all things can be explained.

Why does GA and your banner ad varies... it might be that GA is not implemented on all pages... or it might be that your banner ad is not implemented on all pages.

Why does JavaScript tracking varies from a log file... missing GA code on all your pages... You are actually counting in PDF, Text, or Jpeg files in your log file analysis tool.

Why do log file analysis tools differ... it might be that one tool has a better record for Search Engine robots and one does not or you do not have the same configurations on both i.e filters.

I personally track everything using four different tools... AwStats and Webtrends for Log Files (both are normally off by 100 visitors) ClickTracks or Hitbox and GA for JavaScript versions. They all differ but not by much.

If you are interested in more Analytics and conversion stuff check out LunaMetric AI Services for Enterprise Transformation | Bounteous who knows we might run into each other at the next EMetrics Summit.

I think there are 3 big factors at play:

1) Laziness vs. Complexity = Complexity Wins. People screw up all the time setting up software, and unfortunately tracking codes don't throw big red error messages! No CEL here.... Everyone's guilty of this at one point or another. Unless you have a very small site, there's probably multiple templates, Ajax or Flash content becomes a black hole, broken links, non-canonical urls, etc. etc. these can all skew things. It is hard work to really keep an up-to-date, complete accounting of everything on your site(s).

Corey (first poster above) is right - you gotta have a few methods going on together to audit and keep things reasonably close, but while, yeah, you need to do server stats - his example shows why you also need to do JS stats. It's great to know you're about to have 30k+ pages show up on google (woohoo!!!) but if your boss thinks you just got 30K eyeballs, well, that's bad news for you next week.

2) Terminology , or "lies, damn lies, and statistics". I still run into clients who are counting hits and not pageviews, not counting unique visitors, etc.

The thing is, even those stats are pretty meaningless unless you look at the whole funnel. For instance, I like to show my SEM clients how I do searches.

I enter a queries, right click to open into tabs on 5-10-15 results, whether organic or PPC, and only then start looking at results. I'm my own worst nightmare (but Google loves me!) - all those sites are going to see me hitting in and then spending a minute, 2 minutes, 15 minutes, who knows how long, on the homepage... half the time I'll find what I'm looking for half way through the stack and close out the rest of the tabs.

Honestly, for me that's become a HUGE bad habit. I'll have upwards of 70 tabs open sometimes. I'm a bad example, but that sort of behavior and other things like it has to be skewing #s.

3) Incentives - This, I think is the biggie. Anyone who gets analytics and tracking, and is pushing it, selling it, or buying it has a vested interest, and it's easy to fall into the trap of reading what you want to read. This may or may not cross over to unethical behavior, but it is difficult for people to stay unbiased when there is big money on the line.

I think the whole clickfraud issue got a bit overblown from this very aspect - even these 3rd parties have a vested interest in finding fraud, whether it's real or not. If they don't find any, how are they going to justify continuing operations?

Unfortunately I don't see a really good way around this without major client-side tracking (read as: horrible invasions of privacy) getting a firm foothold. If someone could develop a truly privacy-protecting, double-blind tracking plugin for firefox/IE, etc and license the info on particular sites to trusted stakeholders, then that'd be fantastic... but I don't see that anywhere in the pipeline.

Personally, and in my business, I think the best answer for the near term is regular open communication between client and vendor. We 're pushing hard on paid SEM for dealers, and we're running into a lot of misinformation, bad websites, and bad internal tracking.

From our POV, the only statistic that matters in the end is the bottom line, and we feel we just need to go beyond what might normally be expected to make sure that this traffic is turning into leads for sales staff, and at the end of the day, that staff knows which leads we provided, and that we want to help them as much as possible. I know that sounds sickeningly warm and fuzzy, but it's really just watching out for ourselves. Yeah, someday we might screw up and our numbers will be wrong, or a competitor could come in strong and try to make us look bad, but no matter what happens with that, it's tough to argue with regular visits, checkups and phonecalls.

Let me preface this comment by saying I've always been one to educate dealers/IM's that stats are extremely important and one of the biggest benefits of internet marketing. With that said, in most cases I don't think minor variances between vendors really matter. Of course a case like Alex mentions with 1000 uniques from one vendor and 5000 from another WOULD matter, but I'm assuming that's an exaggeration used to illustrate his point. For the most part stats give you a general idea of traffic, trends, site paths, and referrers. There is a focus these days on numbers, and that focus is warranted to an extent. I think having exact numbers would be nice but not necessary. As far as impacting overall data, I'm sure if we could see the activity of visitors who are not counted they would be a representative sample of total visitors, meaning they wouldn't change any trends you may identify.

Now, when you're talking about things like banner ads where you sometimes pay per click, that changes things because differences in statistical reporting means a difference in money spent.

Just my $.02 here, and I'm anxious to see the results/implications of the meta analysis done by stonetemple.com.

Server logs are the way to go. There's no replacement for a statistics package installed on the server that processes the log files to produce statistics.

Javascript trackers and other on-page stats programs are only as reliable as the technology they use. Google Analytics can only record data when a browser executes the javascript code on the page.

Even when you are directly processing server logs, stats can be misleading. Page views and unique visitors can only be predicted after removing numbers for page bounces and search engine robots.

My newest classifieds site got about 37,000 "hits" last week. 99% of those were GoogleBot downloading all of the 37,000 pages to be indexed.

As for two instances of Google Analytics reporting different numbers, there's got to be an issue with the deployment of the script. It is likely that not all the pages have the tracker code on them.

There's actually a study going on right now comparing some of the most popular stats programs. A May 2007 interim report is available here...

Cindy at Dealer.com mentioned that when I spoke to her on Friday.
I will be in touch with you shortly. Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge with me.
Not sure which Swope your talking about.....quite a few of them in these parts that dabble in the car business; 22 franchises spread through the state, last time I counted.