Ok, first of all thank you [USER=5464]@Chris Leslie[/USER] and [USER=9181]@Mark A Hoffman[/USER] for chiming in. I'm gonna try the Events tracking to track the Cross shopping data. Here is how I'm deploying it.
I'm using Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Javascript. Tip: you can deploy your own JS through GTM. For anyone reading this, If your not familiar with either then you should really try and learn some basics of both. It's been quite a while since I went into my GTM account and they have added alot of functionality to the tool. You can send events into GA with the URL in the one of the Event fields and not even have to use JS. I'm using JS to keep my data a little bit cleaner.
I've created seperate tags in GTM to fire for New car VDP's, Used Car VDP's and Certified Car VDP's. Each time a visitor visits a VDP for one of the vehicles, an Event will be pushed into GA like this: eventCategory = (New, Used or Certified) Cross Shopping, eventAction = VDP View and eventLabel = URL vehicle data (ex: 2017 Toyota Camry).
Right now my thoughts are, I should be able to view the Event Flow by Label and then have my starting event with the model that I choose( 2017 Toyota Tacoma) and be able to see all the events that happened after that event and view the labels for those events as well. I think this will work. I may need to include the keyword New, Used or Certified in the eventLabel or I may need to change the eventCategory to the model name / info all together. I don't know yet. As far as the JS and GTM, in GTM, I'm using the JS Global variable as my variable for the eventLabel. I know the code is a little bit messy below but, I like to be able to see what is being grabbed from the URL and print it to the Console.
http://www.beamantoyota.com/new/Toyota/2017-Toyota-Corolla-nashville-bdd8a16f0a0e0adf3843aba0bcc10bfb.htm
This is the code that works for my URL structure:
<script>
var pathArray1 = window.location.pathname.split( '/' );
console.log("number 0.1: " + pathArray1[0]);
console.log("number 1.1: " + pathArray1[1]);
console.log("number 2.1: " + pathArray1[2]);
console.log("number 3.1: " + pathArray1[3]);
var pathArray = pathArray1[3].split('-');
console.log("Array 3.0: " + pathArray[0]);
console.log("Array 3.1: " + pathArray[1]);
console.log("Array 3.2: " + pathArray[2]);
console.log("combined: " + pathArray[0]+' '+pathArray[1]+' '+pathArray[2])
var PathYear = pathArray[0];
var PathMake = pathArray[1];
var PathModel = pathArray[2];
var pathDataCombined = pathArray[0]+' '+pathArray[1]+' '+pathArray[2];
</script>
This code will split the URL path(everything after .com) on the "/". Once the first split happens, I need to split it one more time and I grab the array in position [3] and split it on the "-". Now I have all the model info from the URL in position [0], [1] and [2]. For those of you that are trying this with me, you may need to adjust some of the parameters. Post your URL here on the forums and maybe we can help you get it split correctly. I'm sure there's easier ways to split the URL as well. This just worked for me. Also, GTM has a preview mode, so you can check and make sure your tags are firing correctly and you can view the data as well. I may have to add some tweaks to it. I don't know yet. To early to tell. Next task is setting up GA.
