Five Ways Google Analytics 4 Can Improve Your Dealership’s Website
As a dealership in 2024, you’ve no doubt run into any number of tips, tricks and products that claim to “boost your SEO!”. While some of these tricks can have merit, the reality is that they’re made without context. A change to one website might have little to no effect on another - without solid data, any big change is little more than a shot in the dark. If you want to take your website’s organic growth into your own hands, the first step is to install Google Analytics. With a wide range of available data and tools, Google Analytics offers five extremely valuable benefits to you and your dealership.
Identify Your Market
The simplest, and yet arguably the most important benefit of using Google Analytics with your website is the ability to see who is visiting your website. In particular, the ability to see where in the world your visitors are from offers a great opportunity to capitalize on your local market. If you’re pulling traffic from further away than you normally do business, maybe it’s time to branch out and start marketing in the next state over!
Integrate with Advertising
You can truly maximize the value of your Google Analytics installation if your dealership utilizes Google Ads to promote the business. With both platforms being made by Google, the two integrate seamlessly. You can get specific breakdowns of how many visitors hit your pages directly from your ads, and how they interact with your website from there. These kinds of insights, along with the demographic information allow you to refine your advertisements to find customers who are more likely to commit to a purchase.
Build Custom Reports
Of course, all of these integrations and metrics don’t mean anything if you have no way to parse the data. Fortunately, Google Analytics is incredibly flexible. Their customizable reporting system allows you to build a report for exactly the data that’s important to you. Do you want to know how your current sale is performing? Automate a weekly report for all paid vs organic traffic that lands on that product’s page! Looking to see how many people out of state look for contact information? Pull a monthly report for out-of-state visitors who hit the Contact page!
Create Event-Driven Conversions
Of course, site traffic is only the beginning of the story for a dealership. What matters in the long run are direct sales. You can determine what the most important interactions on your website are and assign each of them conversion values, which will reveal the most valuable pages on your website. From there it’s just a matter of prioritizing the most profitable parts of your site, using them as landing pages and promoting those product types.
Identify Strong Pages on Your Site
All of these metrics come together to reveal some very interesting information - what are your strongest pages? How about the weakest? Now that you have concrete data about how each of the pages on your website are performing, you can adapt the site to reflect this. Find the pages that pull the most organic traffic and highest engagement rates, and use those as a template for your lower-performing pages. The data you pull from Google Analytics is extremely useful, but in the end it’s only information. What is going to really refine your website is how you actually act on the information you gather. If you want to truly take steps towards maximizing the performance of your dealership’s website, it all starts with the Analytics.
