DEALERS ARE BOMBARDED WITH PEOPLE OFFERING COMPLEX ANSWERS TO SIMPLE QUESTIONS
I had the privilege of presenting at CADEX 2015, the Nova Scotia Automobile Dealers Association (NSADA) event in Halifax last month on the topic of digital measurement for dealers.
The goal of my presentation was to try to cut through some of the clutter, tone down the hype and present dealers with some simple measurement tools that experts recommend they track to help measure their digital performance and website activity.
I attend a lot of digital events here in Canada and in the U.S., and have met and interviewed lots of digital gurus over the years — Jared Hamilton from DrivingSales, Paul Potratz from Potratz Advertising, David Kain from Kain Automotive and Brian Pasch, founder of PCG, just to name a few. All super bright people with industry leading ideas.
I’ve also met people running firms that specialize in helping dealers with their digital strategies, lead tracking and conversions, including people such as Canadian auto dealer columnist Alan Bird, President and Chief Executive Leader of SCI MarketView, Glen Demetrioff, President of DMT Development Systems Group, Ryan Thompson from Kijiji Autos, Brent Wees, Partner at GloveBox, and John Marshall, President of Inoventiv.
For my presentation I reached out to a few of these experts for their ideas which I shared during the presentation, and I drew on the experience with many of the others to help shape my presentation.
What have I learned? Well, in doing some research on the latest digital marketing trends and best practices, I developed a great deal of sympathy for dealership teams trying to make sense of it all. The people marketing these types of services to dealers need to dial it down.
There seems to be a cottage industry growing of “expert consultants” (not the ones I’ve mentioned above incidentally) whose stock in trade is making digital measurement and marketing seem so complex, that dealers shouldn’t consider taking a single step without their help.
Other vendors overhype their products to make it seem as though measuring digital performance is something that can only be done by paying them loads of cash to use secret algorithms that their expert developers have generated in an IT lab.
Many of the most important website metrics you need to track are available to you free of charge, and can be set up to email you automatically with daily, weekly, or monthly dashboard snapshots, using tools like Google Analytics.
Of course I will be offending legions of experts with this next sentence, but here’s the deal: You can set up a simple Google Analytics reporting dashboard yourself in about 10 minutes and can track some of the most important metrics you need. It’s not much more complex than clicking a few options and determining how often you want the report sent to you.
It’s time to ask for the keys to your Google Analytics account and track the digital footprints your customers and prospects are leaving on your site.
