Well... all this anger and all this angst.Ed, third party sites are some of the worst offenders when it comes to providing transparency and tracking. They're right up there with OEMs and their vendor agencies for preventing dealers from seeing the truth and how bad they are really performing. And being one of the largest sources of referral traffic means absolutely nothing when referral traffic is such a small percentage of a dealers total traffic. Typically a dealer will only see 5% or less of their traffic coming from Referral sites. And in the case of OEM mandated sites, that includes traffic from the OEM. Which means that any one third party site is only going to be responsible for maybe 1% of a dealer's total traffic. That's nothing, and certainly not enough to justify their expense.
As to your assertion that Google Analytics is a vendor dashboard, you blew that out of your backside just like the majority of crap that you post. You have no idea how Google Analytics works, and no idea that there are so many competitors that force Google Analytics to be accurate. Yes, Google is a vendor, but to say that Google Analytics "generally tilts" in favor of Google is complete and utter bullshit, even for you.
Quite honestly Ed, your posts are a perfect example of what's wrong with vendors in automotive today. You're trying to sound like you know what you're talking about in a weak attempt to justify to your dealers that they should still be spending money with you. You make stuff up, take stuff out of context and try to reduce complex topics down to a sophomoric meme. You're not trying to help anybody but yourself and only serve to confuse dealers and waste everybody's time.
I'm sorry if you don't like the "majority of crap" that I post. The "sophomoric meme" you disparage was designed to point out that attribution is complex and can't be accomplished by looking simply at the last click. I'm sorry you don't put any value on referral traffic (even when combined with multi-channel funnels, conversion paths, and goals?) Most of all I'm sorry I ever engaged in this conversation. I honestly wish you all the best, but I'm done with this engagement.
If @Jeff Kershner and @Alex Snyder think that I've never tried to help anyone on this forum, I apologize to them.