I'm certainly not Jeff or Alex, nor would I pretend to have their experience.
All I can tell you is that my team and I have been focusing on this debate for 3 years now and it's a tough sell.
Our Focus:
1. Attractive sites that look modern and don't necessarily look like every other dealership website
2. Lead forms that are readily available and easy to fill out, not cumbersome and not "in your face"
3. A clear focus on what we think the customer wants - great (big) photos, cleaner spec sheets, transparent price (how did this price get built - show incentives, show dealer discounts, show fees) - in some cases we did this well enough that it reduced leads because we got less of the "Does it have ________" style of leads.
What We Track:
1. Pages per visitor - not in the simple sense though; we compare this against their old website to determine how many pages before they view their first vehicle, how many vehicles they view, how many people go back to the VLP before viewing a second VDP (are my related vehicles effective?), what page do they exit on (does it have contact info? How long did they spend on this last page?)
2. Organic Search Acquisition - one of our biggest focuses was making the website code itself cleaner and more readable to Google, along with proper indexing, markup, etc. We started from the ground up trying to make the sites "Google friendly" because we knew that this would result in more free traffic from Google as well as a reduced cost in AdWords (higher authority, lower cost).
3. Interactions / Activity - we use google goals and a few other tools (ie: heatmaps) extensively. How many photos did they view? Did they scroll down on the VDP? Did they even open a lead modal and not fill it out? If they made it to a vehicle, where did they come from? (ie: New vehicle showcase page, homepage slider of featured vehicles, VLP, etc)
At that point it gets more complicated and client specific (ie: at my toyota stores, how effective is truck marketing in Toronto, etc).
The beauty of it is that I haven't run a leads report in over 6 months. We have a dashboard the clients use to see their own leads, but my analytics and summative reports are almost entirely generated by Google Analytics data.
