- Jul 15, 2026
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- Jake
I do a lot of data analysis on the daily both manually and using your run of the mill marketing tools but one thing I tend to dive in on is building out cohorts.
Sometimes its a bit of a pain in GA4 and doesn't always model in a way I want if I am doing some crazy things so I tend to just export GA4 data and use SQL to query it and build the answers to my questions
Anyone can DIY that stuff now with AI so I won't walk you through that but I at least wanted to share the data and best practices I typically see for higher engagement or better engagement on these special pages. They are often very ignored in our industry but yield some of the highest engaged users on your website
TLDR; What do I need to do?
Not all website providers are created equal so some vendors you can actually hop into the backend to dynamically build these and then you can basically fire and forget until its time for another change out, I typically set a reminder every 2-3 months to check in on them and see if they need some tweaking
Service specials: Pure seasonality play here and a mix of just raw price or dollar off amount.
An example would be like Wiper blades for fall and winter show the "MSRP" and then what the sale price is. Keep it easy to manage, we don't need to overthink it
Parts can basically be the same but toss in generic tiered percent or dollar off discount: buy $500 in parts get $20 off
But on to the why for vehicle specials at the very least:
Not sure how this will appear inline - but if you can see the numbers the cohort we are tracking is measuring the engagement of users who view the new car specials page.
The engagement these users have is great and we can see these are real people coming from organic and paid marketing sources BUT the conversion rate is basically even with all other traffic that did not engage with a new vehicle specials page.
What we found was this specific dealer had iFramed in the OEM specials page, so leads were leaking into there and getting distributed to other dealers at the same time in the surrounding area.
No bueno, but an easy fix. So double check your specials pages to make sure they aren't
Sometimes its a bit of a pain in GA4 and doesn't always model in a way I want if I am doing some crazy things so I tend to just export GA4 data and use SQL to query it and build the answers to my questions
Anyone can DIY that stuff now with AI so I won't walk you through that but I at least wanted to share the data and best practices I typically see for higher engagement or better engagement on these special pages. They are often very ignored in our industry but yield some of the highest engaged users on your website
TLDR; What do I need to do?
- New, Used, Service and Parts Specials
- Inventory specials SHOULD NOT go to an SRP - these pages are a landing page for not only organic users but your marketing as well
- New car specials, mirror T1 if its too much work, otherwise custom payments for finance and lease, with OEM APR offers, and then the standard customer cash and rebates. Fallback is old age inventory, cap to 10(ish) cars
- Used we can be more fun here but I typically run old age specials - again 10 oldest units, or set a dynamic threshold at 45 days or whatever my hard turn is - from there I segment to the season
- Spring: Tax savings, spring into a new to you car, sports cars, convertibles
- Summer: Summer savings, more sports cars and special units if you have any, segment cars to SUVs, trucks, certified, model year older than x, backlot special, whatever
- Fall: Fall into savings, prep for winter (if you live where you have a winter), AWD vehicles, more sports cars if you have any that need to get gone
- Winter: Don't slide away, more seasonal segment specials
Not all website providers are created equal so some vendors you can actually hop into the backend to dynamically build these and then you can basically fire and forget until its time for another change out, I typically set a reminder every 2-3 months to check in on them and see if they need some tweaking
Service specials: Pure seasonality play here and a mix of just raw price or dollar off amount.
An example would be like Wiper blades for fall and winter show the "MSRP" and then what the sale price is. Keep it easy to manage, we don't need to overthink it
Parts can basically be the same but toss in generic tiered percent or dollar off discount: buy $500 in parts get $20 off
But on to the why for vehicle specials at the very least:
Not sure how this will appear inline - but if you can see the numbers the cohort we are tracking is measuring the engagement of users who view the new car specials page.
The engagement these users have is great and we can see these are real people coming from organic and paid marketing sources BUT the conversion rate is basically even with all other traffic that did not engage with a new vehicle specials page.
What we found was this specific dealer had iFramed in the OEM specials page, so leads were leaking into there and getting distributed to other dealers at the same time in the surrounding area.
No bueno, but an easy fix. So double check your specials pages to make sure they aren't
