Automotive Alchemy
Welcome to 'Automotive Alchemy', a podcast that dwells in the cavernous depths of data, unearthing precious gems of wisdom to illuminate your path to digital marketing success. As alchemists, we understand that each nugget of information is a vital ingredient in our elixir of knowledge. So ready yourselves as we embark on an enlightening journey through the arcane world of data-driven automotive marketing.
Automotive Alchemy
Navigating the GA4 Maze: Essential Insights for Car Dealerships on Analytics and Conversion Tracking
Embark on a journey through the GA4 maze as Shean Kirin, the dealer alchemist himself, sheds light on the transformative power of Google Analytics 4 for car dealerships. This episode dives into the intricacies of GA4, from setting up to dissecting conversion tracking, ensuring your dealership harnesses the true potential of data-driven decisions. As the automotive industry faces the seismic shift from Universal Analytics to GA4, we provide a compass to help you focus on the conversions that truly matter, from phone calls to form fills, and explain why the partnership and transparency in advertising are more critical than ever.
The auto world has been buzzing with talk of Google Analytics 4, but what does it really mean for your dealership? Shean Kirin dissects the common pitfalls in the GA4 conversion setup and offers solutions that will keep your analytics engine running smoothly. He emphasizes the importance of simplicity in analytics to make your data actionable, and the critical role of regular maintenance to avoid tracking inaccuracies. Understanding the impact of each conversion on your bottom line has never been more essential, and we're here to help you navigate these changes with clarity and confidence.
In the dynamic arena of automotive sales, the power of data is undeniable. This episode not only explores the foundational conversions within GA4 but also peers into the vital engagement metrics that inform your marketing strategies. Learn how to analyze user behavior beyond the superficial, and understand why a social media 'like' may have less impact on your sales than a completed trade-in tool form. With our expert guidance, you'll be equipped to make informed decisions that drive your business forward, leveraging the potent combination of GA4 setup and management for success in the digital age.
www.dealeralchemist.com
Welcome to Automotive Alchemy, a podcast that dwells in the cavernous depths of data, unearthing precious gems of wisdom to illuminate your path to digital marketing success. As alchemists, we understand that each nugget of information is a vital ingredient in our elixir of knowledge. So ready yourselves as we embark on an enlightening journey through the arcane world of data-driven automotive marketing.
Speaker 2:Welcome. Welcome back to Automotive Alchemy, the podcast where we transform automotive challenges into opportunities. I'm your host, sean Reigns. Today we're jumping into the GA4 maze. It's been going on for months, people, we all know it. There's a lot of pain points. Many car dealers out there have been struggling with GA4, but we're here to help you. We're here to help navigate through this, so stay tuned.
Speaker 2:On this episode, we're going to break down some things in GA4 just to make it a little bit more understandable for all of us, car guys and gals. It is very important and it's important for you to learn how to use it, and some of you probably were a little behind the curve, even on universal analytics, so this would be a good time for us to jump in on some things relative to roll out how that's impacting you. Basic understanding setup has been a real issue for a lot of dealers. The transparency of getting good reporting, though, is essential, and just having the ability to kind of look ahead. As you wrestle through all this, of course, I'm joined by the premier dealer alchemist himself, sean Kiran. How's the weather out there in Colorado, kiran?
Speaker 3:It's been snowing a lot lately, so it seems that we've been the center for snowfall, but it's nice to see that Anytime you have snow in December in Colorado, it's a nice place to be.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Just make sure it's skiing. That's right.
Speaker 2:Yep, I haven't been snow skiing in quite some time. I was in Colorado, broomfield, colorado last year mid-December and there wasn't snow on the ground, but it was very cold. I was there for a concert.
Speaker 3:Now you have to let me know when you come out here, because I'll take you skiing, no problem, it's going to be difficult. It's more about the experience the blue skies, white snow, maybe a couple of cocktails on the mountainside, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that all sounds fantastic. Fantastic for sure. Well, listen, I can't wait to.
Speaker 2:I can't wait to kind of crack open your knowledge here on this one. You and I both know we've had conversations outside of the podcast about GA4 being such a hot topic. I know for some people like, ah, more GA4, but the reality is Google's been trying to prep various industries, but certainly automotive, for a long time, like the year leading up to the switchover. I just kind of wanted to get into a little bit of how that happened. But now that it's out, what are some of the things that dealers are struggling through? I figured that you could probably help break down some of those things. There are differences, there are changes, and so maybe let's start there, kind of at the beginning. What's changed? What does a car guy need to know too, because they don't always need to be in the weeds?
Speaker 3:So I think one of the biggest differences is that, when they rolled out GA4, google was very specific about how important the changes were. However, they changed all the time between rollout, and so, right about that time, the automotive standards council and good old Brian Pash decided to type of standardize a lot of that. And the challenge in trying to standardize something for an entire industry is that you really have to overkill. And so, if I look at what occurred, essentially you've got a scenario now where every dealer is reliant upon their website vendor as a general rule of thumb to build out GA4 for them, and then they're reliant upon the conversions from the automotive standards council. Now, really, what is the automotive standards council? It is a group of people that got together and said, ok, let's standardize that. So we participated in all of that. We were part of the founding members. However, when we started to listen to what was happening rather than voice our firm disagreement, we just let it go on and we listened and we decided that we would do things differently ourselves. And so let's think about looking at a GA4 account as a dealer versus what a universal analytics account would look like, because, as a dealer, we had just learned how to use Google Analytics, which is UA4, or Universal Analytics, is the Google Analytics view that we got used to looking at, and so we're just getting used to that. We're getting digitally savvy.
Speaker 3:Now you've got COVID. All of a sudden it got a lot easier, and what's happening now? It's not getting easier anymore, and so I know a lot of dealers who haven't cracked open that puppy in quite some time, and now they're looking at it's a lot different. And then you go to look at all the conversions and when you log in, it usually has all conversions aligned. Well, if you've got 17 different conversions, how much of that do you think matters to the average dealer? Sean, I'm going to say most of it doesn't. And so I don't want to point a finger at ASC, because in reality, they're trying to be all things to all people and really you've got what the dealer needs and you've got what the advertiser needs, and so my opinion today is let's just break down both.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about what we think is most important, why it's most important, and then from there, what should an advertiser do from best practice in order to make sure that we're using all this correctly? Because I think that kind of it's like sifting through the BS, so I'm kind of a geek, right. I like the Matrix when I was a kid, so anybody remember the Matrix. When he's looking at the screen with all of the computer language on it and the guy's talking about the blonde walking by and everybody's like it's computer language, we don't see the blonde walking by. Well, that's what it's like when you look at GA4. We look at it. We see this mess with all of this junk we've never looked at before and somebody that knows what they're doing or looks at it a lot, looks at it and says, oh, I see the hot whatever blonde, brunette, whatever is your fancy walking across. It's catching my eyeball. So let's make it easier to find the things that matter to you. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, significant changes. Right, I'll let you know. I wanted to mention you.
Speaker 2:Well, you made me jogged a thought that I think is important. Well, I know it's important. Google Analytics in the UA version and now in the GA4 version. It's a tool that has significant value on both sides of the coin, and in this case, it's for the dealer. If you're the dealer listening and or watching the podcast, it's very important for you. We'll get into some of that.
Speaker 2:But for businesses like yours, kiran, it's also really important for you because you won. You're a company that's not afraid of accountability and transparency. You want it, you desire it. That tool helps with that, because then you truly get to show the results of your effort and then your dealer clients get to see well, here's the truth. So it really is for a dealer.
Speaker 2:It's one way for them to be able to, like I want to be able to inspect and understand what's going on in my business and, at the same time, a vendor who's really worth anything, or a provider of services who's really worth anything. They're also going to want that to be not only implemented, but correctly, so that it tells the truth when their services deserve praise and deserve. You know you should be retained because you can prove all of this, and I think that's an important thing for both the dealers and service providers. But in the case of the dealers, yeah, it's a great tool for you. But if you have a service provider who's like, nah, they don't really care, they're kind of flipping or they don't even want you involved with it, that's kind of a red flag. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it. Not only is it a red flag, but let's talk about why. So I think GA4 serves two real purposes. The first purpose is from the advertiser's side. It allows us to understand any of the paid, any of the traffic that hits that website what's really happening, what are the users doing, are they engaged or are they not engaged, and what is the outcome of that visit? Now, from the advertiser perspective, there's a second part that I would say is not really utilized enough, and that is when you properly build an AdWords account. You are a paid search account. You allow the AdWords account to have better conversions utilizing conversion data from GA4, which means that if I build that GA4 correctly, then my advertising account is going to perform better, which, from the vendor side, I think matters a lot. So our claim to fame. So we all sell the latest and greatest widget, and I'm no different, except I just am not as good as a salesperson as a lot of these other people. I just am excited about this stuff. So, that being said, the latest and greatest widget.
Speaker 3:The challenge is that if my widget and the latest and greatest thing is simple data connections that anyone can get anywhere that just plug in, well, you're going to see in Google Analytics that it doesn't work. You cannot hide non-performance in GA4. That's the difference, and so of all the things that matter. Now, under the hood there's a lot of things that are different, but let's talk about the things that matter. From the advertising side, you can identify poor performance immediately, and so I think from the advertiser side, there's a series of best practices.
Speaker 3:Best practice number one is make sure the conversions are set up and make sure that they work right, and then from there, let's make sure we're utilizing those in Google Analytics. So, if I think about these changes and how it identifies with the agency or the AdTech company or whomever it is, the vendor utilizing GA4 should be looking at it on a regular basis to improve performance, because that's what its purpose is. And then, on the dealer side, the sole purpose of GA4 is to be a single source of truth for what's happening on the website, so that we can hold vendors accountable. And so 22 years is a dealer, eight years now with this company that I guess I can't believe it. It's been that long now, right, I'm about to have my 30th anniversary in the car business. To figure that one out, right? On the dealer side.
Speaker 3:Holding vendors accountable has always been difficult, and so the biggest change in GA4 is it is now easier to hold the vendors accountable, because you can't hide things as easily. So I'd say what's different? The measurement tools that were created sort out bad actors in an easier fashion so that you can look at them, inspect them and kick them out, because, ultimately, the car business is not getting any easier right now. I just saw an article today, I think Profit down 20%, 26%, something like that. I was just looking at the headline right as we logged into this, so of course I don't have any evidence all out of context, but what I did see was it's all down a lot, right, so advertising dollars matter. Now again, all of a sudden I gotta think about every penny and if I've got a non-performer I gotta kick them out because I don't have time to play friends. It's not show friends that show business. Right Time to show business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's a great point, and you also said something I just want to reemphasize for the listeners and I used to be still a little bit cynical when the biggest search engine in the world is also the biggest analytics provider.
Speaker 3:You and me both. There's something wrong with that picture.
Speaker 2:But that's the world we have, unless you have so much money to spend on analytics tools outside of a free one, but the free one that you get from the same search engine that everyone uses. I have to say that I think it's also important, and it's a good thing, that they are building these technology platforms with the intention of them being able to have synergistic value in relationship to each other. Right and so it's and you said this and I'm just butchering it and not saying it quite as eloquently but the fact that GA4, more so now than ever integrates with and has a synergistic relationship with what's going on with all of these things and you referenced Google Ads and the complexity that resides just within the Ads platform those are really important things for dealers to be in consideration of, because there isn't going to be some other search engine and adjacent analytics platform that's going to come along in our lifetimes. That will be better, and so, knowing some of those things that might come across as a minor detail or it's minutia, it's important minutia. So I'm glad to hear you reference things like that, because in conversations like this, where we want to make these challenges present themselves as opportunities to dealers, that's kind of how you have to do it. You have to get into the precious metals to figure out.
Speaker 2:Oh, there are some things that not a lot of other people are talking about that need to be talked about so that you're aware of it. Would you say that there's the more common issues? I mean, since the rollout, it seems like it's just a lather rinse repeat of man. There's still some common issues that dealers are having trouble with. I'd love to hear you speak to that a little bit. Do you think some of that is who they've chosen to do the setups you referenced a little bit? A lot of times, website providers are doing that. Are we still having people that are putting two duplicate instances up, or is that happening? Is there some of that that could be spoken to? That might be helpful for the dealers if they're having some of these common problems?
Speaker 3:So one of the big changes in GA4 is that you don't get different views the way you had in old analytics. So, whereas before you had one analytics account and then you assign different views to different vendors to build the way that they want it, now you've just got GA4. And the challenge in having just GA4 is that conversions are generally broken. So when I look at an analytics account for most providers I find that there's all these analytics goals and most of them don't matter. So we've all heard that phrase paralysis by analysis and card dealers. We're guilty. We sure do use that phrase when we sell a car, right? But have we ever looked in the mirror and say what am I doing when I'm looking at my own reporting? So if I look at the way that the setups come and again, right, it's so easy to throw stones at the guys from the ASC, which is just a group of people trying their best. So I sure, right, everyone's paying money towards those guys, whether you like it or not. That's your own bone to pick.
Speaker 3:But I think the reality of it is, if you try to standardize something, you can't be all things to all people. It just doesn't work. What you have to do is you have to choose your path and get specialized in what you apply. So, if I look at common issues, we've got 17 different conversions, where maybe seven or eight of them matter, and all of the rest of these things. So much time on site clicked on this, clicked on that. There's all of these things that just don't matter. Well, when you build an analytics account properly, you assign value right, you assign conversion value, and so let me ask you a question Is a search results page view or a vehicle page view more important? A VDP more important? Vehicle details page more important?
Speaker 2:Which one converted.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna say probably the VDP is a little bit more important, but along those lines you're right. It does depend on where they convert. So when I look at assigning value, you've got to have a system that says is an SRP view and a VDP view worth the same amount of money? What about a click to call or a chat or a text? Is that worth more than an SRP view or a VDP view? Well, I sure hope so, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what about a?
Speaker 3:form fill. I mean, now we're getting into the right to the right to the rule of dumb questions, right? Of course that's worth more. Well, most GA4 accounts that I find aren't set up so that the actual conversions that matter to the dealership are assigned of greater value, and so if anyone has that AdWords account connected all of a sudden it's not going to work. That's a big problem.
Speaker 3:So, I would say the largest issues that we find are the dealer was used to looking at a small amount of conversions. In the old setup you had seven, eight, nine, 10 conversions in most, in most UA accounts. But now they've jumped into GA4 and they've got 17 and the dealer's saying what do you mean? I have 32,000 conversions, I don't have 32,000 leads. And I'm sure it's a conversation. Every dealer's thinking the same thing I don't have 32,000 leads. Every vendor's saying the same thing. Well, of course you didn't have 32,000 leads.
Speaker 3:So what is the better way? The better way is to simplify something so that it's usable by all of us. So I think, how do you fix this issue? Number one understand what's important. I would say as a dealer. There's a dealer conversion and it's not that difficult. There's a call, there's a chat, there's a text, there's a form fill, which is all of my native forms and my trade tool forms and my finance application forms, right Service forms.
Speaker 3:But for the purpose of this, really most of us are interested in sales conversion, right Overservice conversion. So if I think about it on that vein, I get to this part where I've got to make sure that those work first. Well, guess what? They break, it just happens. As much as I wish it was perfect, they break. And so, as an advertiser, I would say our company is, you know, deeply in bed with GA4, because it is the center point of all management, and even though we have our own reporting dashboard, you know, website, whatever you want to call it all we do is API the data over there and make it easier to look at. In reality, every dealer should know how to look at GA4, because you can't hide things there. Well, if it was my own dashboard and I wanted to hide a couple of dollars here and a couple of dollars there, well, I could do that because I wrote it right In GA4, you can't do that.
Speaker 3:So fixing that first is identifying the dealership conversions and understanding that sales conversions are sales conversions and then making sure that they work. And you have to check them every single month because they break period and guess what, Even though you can set up an alerting system when things don't work, the alerting system doesn't work very well and it over errors you because GA4 is not perfect and so, along those lines, you just have to check it two, three, four times a month and look to see if it's working and then you're gonna find that you're fixing it. On that second piece, I would argue that there are only a couple of conversions that really matter from an advertising perspective. Number one is gonna be an SRP view and number two is gonna be a VDP view. And the reason I would argue that is that if I'm paying attention to engagement time combined with SRP views and VDP views, that tells me the entire story of what I need. Let me give you a couple of examples. I'm a random agency. I put my standard 50, 60% of your ad budget towards your dealer name and your regional terms in your area.
Speaker 3:That person clicks on there. They land on your homepage. It takes them three minutes to find a car. Congratulations. Your AdWords account is broken. If you see that you're looking at your AdWords account and your engagement time is two minutes, three minutes, your Ad account is set up wrong. It is like the largest red flag, right. It is a bigger red flag than a 20 second time on site engagement, believe it or not? Well, why is that so different? It's because we were never taught to think like that. What were we taught as dealers? Any engagement is good, engagement, right. I went all the engagement. The longer they're there, the better.
Speaker 3:That's exactly oh you were three minutes time on site. Amazing. I think I lost on my website. Well, the problem is that I'm not going to be able to get lost on my website. Well, the problem with getting lost on your website is they actually did get lost. They couldn't find what they wanted. Well, think about it when you right. If you're looking on your cell phone at something, how much time do you really spend looking over that website for what you want to find? Are you on there for two minutes, three minutes, or is it 30 seconds to maybe one minute, and at the end of that you've probably lost interest and you've probably gone to shop a different brand. Sounds a little bit more real, right?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:So I'm going to give you this exercise, right? My favorite exercise on the planet. Right? I want to show you what 15 seconds feels like, because it looks different on Google Analytics, right? So I'm going to do this. I should be grabbing a cell phone in the middle of this, because now I just made everybody grab their cell phone, because people are ridiculous like that. You're going to stop watch ready.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Okay, we're going to not say anything. Three, two, one. Well, that was 15 seconds.
Speaker 2:I was waiting for the Jeopardy theme.
Speaker 3:It was faster for you and I because we're actually having the conversation. So let's say that I watched this for the first time and I'm like what the hell just happened? That 15 seconds was an eternity, right. So GA4 is wonderful because it allows you to think of the. It's already thought about these things.
Speaker 3:Google GA4 understands how people engage today and that is really what matters. So I would say the first thing that needs that dealers are struggling with is understanding those conversions, also understanding where to look. But I can fix that in a couple of seconds, right, because you go, you look at a screen that looks completely different and you're like what the hell is this? I'm sure a ton of us have had that problem. But once you get the screens figured out because the data is just in a different place once you know where to look, that part goes away. After that it's how is this information? How does it help me make a better decision? So, number one rule of thumb in my opinion and I'll tell you our company's opinion is this dealership conversions are leads and, by the way, as the directions, visit a lead, sean.
Speaker 2:No, I'm just gonna.
Speaker 3:I'm just gonna answer that for everybody. No, the directions. Click the directions. Visit on your. Yes, they clicked on directions. That is not a lead. Yeah, would you desperate to? Justify yourself, then it is yeah right, I saw this reporting platform and it was like 3996 leads and I thought this is the best vendor I have ever seen on the face of the planet. And and then it was clicked on the contact dust page, clicked on the directions, and I'm just like really, and then I was like a hundred there was a hundred total leads and phone calls and I was thinking to myself a hundred leads and phone calls.
Speaker 3:I wonder if this dealer is profitable right now. Probably not. I Mean, if they were, then you know, they may not have been searching, so anyways use the game long enough.
Speaker 2:Good, and I agree, and I view of course you're like a overly generous Santa Claus and you drop Extra gifts and a couple of them I have to address because I think there's good stuff in there. So and so one of those things that you were mentioning kind of actually sets up kind of the next thing I want to ask you a little bit and see if it's accurate. I'm not.
Speaker 2:I've never Approached the industry as I could. I'm an analytics expert. I've always known my way, especially around universal analytics, with a great deal of comfort, you know, like setting up somebody's analytics back in the day. I haven't set up anybody's GA for and I have a guy on my team that that knows it pretty well. But that said, I do understand enough that GA for it would be an environment that if I wanted to establish Some goal tracking kind of like the old school way of goal tracking around, my SRP hits an engagement, my VDP engagement, my trade tool, my engagement with Social media channels, all that kind of stuff that I can set those things up, is that, would that be accurate, that I could do that?
Speaker 3:Technically it's accurate. However, the second you go to try to set those things up yourself. It is very different.
Speaker 3:So my advice is Someone needs to set it up for you. If if you are the analytics person, right, I mean no problem. I can print you a manual that we had our analytics team make up on how to do that yourself, and I was looking at how to simplify it in order to have this and I realized that that's, that's not a thing, right? There are people that live in code and there are people that talk for a living, and if you talk for a living, chances are you don't live in code and it looks a lot like code, right? Like we all worked at home net, like most of us in the car business have been to home net and built a pricing tool In inventory where you put the puzzle pieces next to each other. That's literally what it's like when you're kind of building that out, right? So if you know what, if this, then that statements are fantastic.
Speaker 3:You're gonna have a good time. And if you don't look at those things on a regular basis, get someone to build it out for you and I'll tell you so I I definitely.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say I definitely agree with Advocating dealer for dealers to get in touch with an expert on anything, whether you I mean, hopefully you are set up and maybe just struggling and you need some help. But the reason why I asked specifically about setting things up to track the results of, you know, our SRP relative metrics. Vdp relative metrics is and I may have referenced this book on this podcast before, but several years ago when the book you should test that by Chris Gower came out, it just changed my realm of thinking around conversion rate optimization and a whole bunch of things, and I included this in Some presentations that I built. This these are now several years back, but I think it applies To how dealers should be thinking about GA4 and that is, and you were asking some of these questions. This is why it sparked it, because you're asking specifically what's more valuable, srp or VDP. My answer would be well, what's what one's converting better? The only reason why I ask that is because I've been in the game for so long. I know that there are very few website providers that index more heavily on their SRP and they want to drive more conversion there before they even get them to the detail page, and if that's your, if that's your methodology, then you know more to power to you. There is a website provider out there that does really well with that strategy, actually, but what I would advocate to dealers would be doing a test, and the only way you'd be able to do this is by setting it up properly in analytics, and that would be Take the top five or the top ten most what you think are the most valuable Conversion events that could happen on your beloved dealership website.
Speaker 2:And so what's that going to be? Somebody calls you, somebody fills out a form. Which page did they fill it out on? Do you have forms in different places? Did they chat with you? Did they fill out a form on your trade tool? You know there's a lot of different things. Was it a service appointment? Is somebody come through your parts department page? A lot of different things. Social media engagement that used to be such a rage many years ago. Like we need to drive more likes to our Facebook page from our dealership website. Are you kidding me? But we used to think those things and you've said this a lot.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes, it's the vendors or the partners that are teaching dealers how to think and it's wrong. And so I would tell dealers that you should test that concept would be you? You need to test those notions, those preconceived notions of what the most valuable conversion events are on your website, because one you're gonna be wrong, probably by at least 50%. Likely you'll be right on the things that you probably should be right on, but then you'll be surprised and Then you have to go about and this is where you know the hey, hire somebody, get an expert to set this up in a way in perpetuity that your site is telling you the truth about those most important conversion Areas of your site, because that's the information that you're going to utilize. You're not gonna do it yourself at the dealer level, but you are gonna be able to look at that, especially if somebody isn't already coaching you in that direction. You're gonna be able to look at that and say, oh, we need to make this adjustment or we need to make this change or we need to like that needs to not even be on that part of our website, right, because it's cannibalizing a much higher Valuable conversion event.
Speaker 2:And I would tell dealers you need to think about this all the way down the path. Somebody converted at the VDP page. Okay, if they converted off of your VDP page, what's the likelihood that they bought a car from Right? So now, what's the value of that conversion event versus somebody liked you, like, they clicked and went to your Facebook page and liked you. What's the value of that five cents and two cents in comparison to? Oh well, this person went down your trade-in tool, they filled that out, they traded in your vehicle. So not only did you sell them it doesn't matter if it's newer used but you took their trade and either wholesaled it, hopefully made a couple bucks, or it was prime inventory that you kept on your lot and you made money in that manner as well.
Speaker 2:Operationally, with inside the dealership and you know this is better than me because I sold cars Just for the experience for a couple of years while I was working, you know, at at Reynolds, at their website division, years and years ago. But you know operationally around every single role in the dealership, that having this set up today, making GA for not just a priority but getting beyond the struggle and setting it up for just win, win, win, win, win it affects almost every part of the dealership, for the good or for the bad. So having a working knowledge is great, but having people that know how to calibrate it to be successful for you, it's not even Something that is up for debate. There's, no, there's. There's no conversation to be had other than where do we go find the right people? And and?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean happen, and I think there's a. There's a few thoughts there. The first is as a dealer it used to be the universal analytics. Well, that's my internet person's job, that's my marketing person's job. The standard marketer Never spent time learning how to build out the back end of a GA for account, and Just because they don't know how to build that out doesn't make them a bad marketer. As a matter of fact, some of the best marketing minds that I know have no idea how to build out a GA for account. One of these things is like writing code. One of these things is the creative Backbone of your dealership. These are two entirely different functions, right, and so you know.
Speaker 3:Going back to your example, I think there's a few things there, One being it's easy to get confused by saying that like has value, this page has value the specials page oh my God, don't get me started. Your specials page doesn't convert. If you look at GA4 and you build out a conversion for your specials page, no matter how much money you dump on that page, you do not get leads or engagement time enough to make that map. So let me just say that one more time, because I think it's super important. Your specials page does not convert Right.
Speaker 3:We used to, a long time ago, spend all this money driving to the specials page because we were excited about it. I've got this big fancy widget. It tells you what the payment is going to be and the price is going to be in the discounted. It's so awesome, except that the data shows that it doesn't work. Now, what do we want to trust? We want to trust me as a magic sales person that can sell ice to an Eskimo? Or do we want to trust the data that says you spent $7,000 driving business to the specials page and you got zero leads and you had three seconds time on site?
Speaker 3:Engagement time sorry, three seconds engagement time, so I would say that $7,000 was just wasted.
Speaker 3:So, why do we want to do this correctly is because it lets me figure that out. So, in the interest of keeping it simple, a website provider might do some of that for you. Your advertising provider might do some of that for you. They might charge you for it. Frankly, they should, because you have to manage it. We don't do it for free. If I need to manage somebody's GA4 account for them, I charge them a small fee because inevitably every other month I'm going to fix something or I'm going to find out that they made a big change on their website and they never told anybody. And, by the way, some of those trade forms that they want to use, they don't even fire your events for Google Analytics to read and build conversions off of. You could have a trade tool on your website. You could have an iframed in thing on your website and that thing doesn't send events to GA4, which means nobody can build conversions on it. So you ought to have a company that gets that, and the standard set of conversions is form fill call, which is click to call. Yeah, text Trade tool, finance tool that's your standard.
Speaker 3:Seven. Right there, my next one's new VDP views use VDP views. New SRP views used SRP views. I would say that the rest are unimportant and they are the exact definition of paralysis by analysis. Let's not overcomplicate something. Let's get to the things that matter most and allow us to make decisions, and that's what setting that up correctly does. So if we're struggling with how to set up GA4, understand it. Rule number one is that, right there, build out your seven proper conversions, build out SRP views for new SRP views for used, vdp views for new VDP views for used, and once you have that set up, then you have everything you need to hold people accountable, because the other tools were made, really built into GA4. So I would say, if we want to look at setup, let's simplify it, let's do that, and there are very few instances where you need more than that.
Speaker 2:I love that you emphasize the importance of working with people that see the value in providing a GA4 type of service, whether they're doing setup or they're just doing ongoing management. It's too critical of a piece. It's almost unfortunate. I mean, it's a double-edged sword.
Speaker 3:Google Analytics GA4 is free and yet it contains extreme value for a business owner, right, it's like how many dealer groups have a 20 group or a consultant that goes in and teaches them how to read and understand and analyze a financial statement. That financial statement gets the health of your business. So, as a dealer, I know how to read a financial statement and I got to tell you. Learning to read that was not easy. I'll never forget I worked for this guy named Darrell Schuck. God bless the man. He was incredible, so unfortunately he's not around anymore. But what he did is he said, sean, I'm going to teach you how to understand the expenses in a dealership. And he gives me the stack of papers that's like this high and says I want you to, I want to introduce you to the general ledger. And he goes your job is to understand every line item on this. And he goes I'll just give you a tip.
Speaker 3:I normally read it on the toilet is what he told me. And so I sit there and I start reading this thing and of course, you read it in the beginning and it's like reading Chinese, right. And so as I'm going and I'm reading this thing, I'm starting to understand it. You get about six months into reading the general ledger for the first time when you've never even looked at anything in an accounting world before and all of a sudden you start to identify sections, you start to identify things, you start to realize that there's a method to the madness, right?
Speaker 3:So most good GMs not all like, because you know you can be a good GM and not fully understand that, like I know a couple of guys that can't read a statement to save their lives, but they are spectacular leaders and people, people. But most of us we look at a statement, right? So if reading a statement is that much work and it's the health of your business, then your GA4 account is your advertising general ledger, it's your advertising statement, and learning how to read that is equally important. Because what?
Speaker 3:it does is it teaches us where the holes are, so that we can identify and correct problems. That's why we want to use it, and it doesn't have to be the general manager using GA4. It can be a marketing director, it can be an internet director, it could be a sales manager or a GSM it doesn't matter who, but someone in the dealership needs to look at on a regular basis. And then if you are looking at a third-party reporting platform, right, like we use one. The reason we built a third-party reporting platform is I can API all data into one page and that one page can be viewed on a cell phone or on a website or wherever somebody wants to look at it, and they can see all of their data in one place, so they can look for a hole.
Speaker 3:What is a hole? Something that changed? Hold on this. Cost per click should be $2. How come it's $4? Let's go investigate. Now I can dive into AdWords. Now I can dive into Analytics and I can start investigating problems. Right, and the purpose of this is to tell me where to look to find the cause of a problem so that I can fix it Right. So that's what GA4 is all about anyway. Sorry to go on a long tangent there, but I think that's the best comparison, that at least it's the one that stood out to me. I learned to read a financial statement because I want to understand the health of my business. I learned to read GA4 because I want to understand the health of my advertising. Regardless, you got to understand the health.
Speaker 2:It's a great analogy. You know understanding how to read that P&L statement Both saves and makes dealerships really any business. It both saves money and it also makes money if you know what you're looking at. And Google Analytics, albeit a free tool, it literally, if you know what you're doing, using it up, using it as a management measurement tool, it will save your dealership money and it will make your dealership money because of what it informs you of. I think that's huge. So that's a good dovetail into just your thoughts on and I love it.
Speaker 2:This is a common theme with you and your company. But transparent reporting right, it's a necessity. Love to know some of your thoughts on why that's so important. It's one thing that makes these revelations known that, hey, this is a great tool, it's free, it can help you save money, help you make money. But the transparency piece is really critical and we talked just a little bit about how it's important on both sides of the coin. The dealers, of course, are going to want to see that. But real, legitimate partners or vendors I'm not a big fan of the partner term, but service provider I love a lot. So the service provider, legitimate ones they want that transparency. They should want that transparency, just as the dealer's going to want that transparent visibility.
Speaker 3:It's funny you say that I don't like that partner term very much. Someone once told me you realize, if you're writing them a check, they're a vendor, not a partner, right? They're one of two things If you write them a check, they're a vendor or they're an employee, right? That is very different than a partner.
Speaker 2:The sidebar for me is just, I've always felt like when people are like, well, we're not your vendor, we're a partner and I probably have friends that might even watch this and see like, well, come on, we are partners and they want to like I don't want to debate with people in the industry so you can all just bugger off, like I don't care.
Speaker 2:But I do want to say that I think it's just more of a salesy term to try to tell people like well, we're your partner, because really, if you are, then show me where, when all of your clients had a downturn in business during COVID, that you literally reduced all their invoices at the same time by the same percentage that their business went down and you took the ride with them so that you wouldn't lose their business. Like that's somebody who might say, well, I'm going to feel the same pain as you, but that's not what most people do. So I'm a bigger fan of like, hey, yeah, we're one of your vendors, probably one of the ones that tell you the truth. We're an honest vendor. But I also love service provider because you can have a tremendous amount of integrity.
Speaker 3:I also think partner denotes a two-way relationship. So I have some dealers that I would consider a partner, and the reason I consider them a partner is that it's a two-way relationship. It's not. They buy advertising technology from us. We fulfill their accounts for them. We report on those accounts. It is we collaborate on ideas together on how do we improve, what can we do differently in the future to make things better?
Speaker 3:I have an idea, would you? It is, hey, I'd like to test this. Can we test this in your store? And really, a true partnership is a two-way approach where both people are collaborating on how to make things better. Instead of you know, let me. Let me talk to you about what my latest idea is for a new no-transcript special pitch program blah, blah, blah. Right, that's not quite the same thing, but anyways, easy tangent to go off on.
Speaker 3:So we talked about transparency in GA4. I think we bypass where do you look. So, as a dealer, I think there's important to know where do you look in GA4 to find the most relevant information, because the first time you click on it you appear on a screen that looks funny. So on the left-hand side of GA4, you want to click on reports and you want to look at user acquisition, because that's going to look familiar. That's where we find the reporting that tells us about the health of what's happening in the dealership. It's reports on the left-hand side in user acquisition, and that one is really important. The next one is a tab underneath that called Explore on the left-hand side. If your AdWords account is connected to analytics, it shows underneath Explore. So any good vendor should connect their AdWords account to the analytics account. If they refuse to connect that account, it's because they're hiding something Every single time, no matter what they tell you. There is no transparency that you can verify. What's the attorney phrase? Trust, but verify. You know why attorneys say that? Because they don't want to get screwed. So the obligation is to the responsibility is to put that in there, to put the contract in place and then to connect the AdWords account to the analytics account so that we can verify that all of those funds were spent correctly. So why does it matter?
Speaker 3:Let's pick on display. We all know that I'm not the biggest proponent of display, and it's not that I don't like it as a medium, far from it. There are some items that function really well in display. The challenge is that the automotive industry display world is a pile of junk. If you see three seconds engagement time, that was money that you left on the table. That was money that you wasted. So three second engagement time is not a real human, it's just not. You can try to sell me on why that's real. I'm going to politely disagree with you because I think that's not true.
Speaker 3:So that explore section and connect it with AdWords. That's where you find it. Then the last one is an advertising section. So the problem is you got these four tabs above that, which are super confusing. Google wants to sell you things and that's why it's there. So let's just go to the other ones Reports, explore and advertising. Advertising is where you find something called top conversions. Top conversions is where you see how many people from your advertising were early touchpoints, middle touchpoints and late touchpoints before conversion, and that is incredibly, incredibly important.
Speaker 3:Good consumers, real humans, don't just click on one thing. They tend to click on multiple items that drive them to your website before they finally convert and buy a vehicle. So it will look like they showed up off of a Facebook ad, a Meta ad, whatever. They went over there after work. They jumped back on their cell phone. They went to go put that URL in. It popped up, they click on it. So that's a direct visit because it just appeared in their URL.
Speaker 3:They spent a little bit of time. They disconnect. They go eat dinner. They said, oh yeah, that was at, you know, and I'm just going to use my old store because you know, I love those guys, tynan. So they oh yeah, it was Tynan. So then they go to tynanscom and then they go, try to find the vehicle that way. Then they go back and they see the search ad for the vehicle they're looking and they click on that search ad because they're already familiar with your dealership, right? Consumers come back three, four, five, seven, 20 times before they convert. Think about yourself, right? I recently did a little bit of purchasing online, probably not that much different than a lot of other people out there. The ones that I was able to pick in the first click were the ones my wife sent me to buy for her, because I suck at buying presents. It just is what it is right.
Speaker 3:Meaning that my wife didn't send me a link, for I probably had to go through three, four, five, six, seven times before I made the purchase, and I think that's how most of us actually work, right. So those are the areas that you look and what those do is those are the places where GA4 will start to look familiar After that transparency. When you look at those reports, there's a portion that's so incredibly important and it is engagement time, and I cannot stress this enough. Engagement time on something that clicks into your website should never be less than 15 seconds and, in reality, should really not be much more than a minute, maybe a minute 20. But I would even say that is starting to go a little bit too far because it's average engagement time, right. So I want to look at all my ad sources in there, and in my ad sources it's going to show my direct visits they're direct and organic are going to be the largest because you're direct and organic went to one URL, usually the homepage, and then they had to find what they were looking for, be it service parts or sales. So, organic, three minutes, organic time, super regular. You're going to see that all the time, right. Two minutes organic time, no problem. You probably have a website that's easy to navigate and that's a good thing, not a bad thing. One minute time on site, 30 seconds time on site, organic traffic Everything is wrong. You got a problem right Now if I'm paying for it, my email blast, my third party email blast, which I mean, why are you running that anyways? But that's a whole another conversation. My display campaigns, my social campaigns, my search campaigns, my performance max or VLA campaigns every one of those you know.
Speaker 3:I want to look at time on your. You want to look at engagement time. We used to compare bounce rate and time on site. We used to look for a low bounce rate, but then it changed because we realized that we want them to land on the first page Healthy and healthy. Healthy bounce rate for a well-written social ad is like 60%, by the way. Why is that healthy? Because they actually clicked on the right vehicle, because you showed them the right vehicle using their data. That was the vehicle they wanted to buy, so they clicked on it and spent some time look at it and probably clicked on it five or six times, because that's what they do. Right Time on site 15 seconds, I'm sorry. It used to be anywhere from 30 seconds on the low end to a minute and a half on the high end. Now we look at engagement time.
Speaker 3:Engagement time is once they got to your website, how much time were they scrolling the picture, moving the mouse or doing something that showed that they were engaged? It isn't just I threw it up on the website and then I never touched it again. That's why the old metric didn't work In the old days. What you could do is you could build a bot that you ran through an email blast. It would open the website, it would stay on there for 22 hours and then it would log off and then that would skew the engagement time on it. So you look at the average time on site. You'd see 20 seconds on that campaign and you say my email blast is kicking ass. And then you go sort those clicks and you'd find that 98% of those clicks were one second or less, but randomly two or 3% were on there for 20 plus hours.
Speaker 3:I'm going to ask you a question. You think that's a human? Probably not. Engagement time doesn't allow that to happen anymore. That's why engagement time is strong.
Speaker 3:So with engagement time I'm looking for anywhere between 15 seconds and really I want to cap out in a minute, when I've got engagement time of more than a minute, I want a very clear reason. Why Did I not land them on the right place in the first click? Or is there something that's outside of the ordinary Like, for example, I've got our Ram 1500 customer and on my Ram 1500 customer I've got 65 in stock? Because I've got 65 in stock, there are two minutes time on site on the Ram ads, looking at engagement, because they truly are shopping for a vehicle and they're trying to find which one of the black ones had the right equipment package. That's a real consumer and that's what they'll do. They'll sort it by color, they'll get into equipment. That's how they look at it.
Speaker 3:So I think, as a dealer, our hot buttons are find the three places where you look, which is reports, explore and advertising. Go look at engagement time and is my engagement time off If it's less than 15 seconds? Start asking questions why in the world am I paying for this? What would happen if I allocated this money to other areas? And then, on the flip side, if I'm looking at a paid advertisement with two minutes engagement time, where did I land that customer that made them look like that, because most customers don't spend you don't average two minutes time on site.
Speaker 3:For a well-written ad it's 30 to 45 seconds is really the sweet spot for most consumers because people have a short attention span. So I know that's a really long-winded setup. But transparency that is why that transparency matters. That's the definition of how you see it, how you look at it, how you find it and how you use it in order to make an educated decision or maybe ask an educated question. The educated question is how come on my display campaign or how come on my social campaign? They were engaged for eight seconds and if the vendor stutters, you should probably spend that money elsewhere, right? Well, probably that's a problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, most definitely I. So much to unpack. I mean we could go for a lot longer, but I think this is a good place to put the cap back on this bottle of awesome and and I won't surprise me audience, if we end up talking about GA4 again in the future. I you know. I don't know if you have any parting Last comments that you wanted to make before I do kind of wrap it up, but man just so much. There's a lot of really good stuff in here.
Speaker 3:The first time you pop into GA4, you may notice something. You may notice that you click on something and it looks like it's wrong. Sometimes, when you click on an item in GA4, it doesn't properly load and the problem still isn't fixed. So we notice sometimes that when I go to click on something, my that I click on it and the data doesn't load. There is massive amounts of data that feeds into GA4 and one of the challenges that occurs on the dealer side is you'll click through two, three, four, five different clicks. Well, all of a sudden, you you've just got Google thinking and now that you've got Google thinking, it needs to figure stuff out. So when that occurs, if you click on something and your data doesn't change, you may need to log out and log back in.
Speaker 3:It does happen, right? It's frustrating to marketers. It's frustrating to us. One of the reasons we built our backend uh reporting tool Was because we were so frustrated with google analytics and this happening, and it was. It was tripling the amount of Time that it took for my people to inspect an account, and so I had to build a separate way for them to do the inspection, because I could no longer rely on what google was doing, so just I, I think that's an important caveat to throw out there.
Speaker 3:Um, the other thing I would say, right is, you know it's selfish, self-plug here, but we are happy to look at the account with you. If you've got a question about the account, the setup of it, whatever, you feel free to reach out like that's exactly what we're here for, you know. So I'll tell you a quick story. You know so, as you know, sean, because we met from our mutual friend, jeff Clark, right, and uh, what an easy guy to love. And so I'm, I mean, I'm, I'm a geek, right, it is what it is, right? So, um, it's easy for me to get obsessed with the data, obsessed with the numbers, and when I'm in that mode, absolutely not the most personable person on the planet, right, because the more time you spend engulfed in something and buried in it, right, it's like my buddy that's an accountant. He is a phenomenal accountant, maybe not the most charisma you've ever seen. He's like talking to a door. Nice guy, you know, he's super funny at the bar because he lets loose at the bar, but, man, you catch him in the middle of your work day. You would think you just pissed. The sherry outs, right? Yeah, well, the thing about Jeff Clark that I.
Speaker 3:One of the many things I love about Jeff Clark is he reminded me so much about how much relationships matter. And the thing about relationships and and and how much they matter is that you build a relationship by answering questions when there's nothing else going on, right Like when there is no business that's going to occur, and I would say that any good vendor should absolutely be willing to sit there and look at the account with you. I know we are, and what I find is you know, I mean, there's a number of vendors out there to do a great job and nothing, and some of them are friends of ours, right Like. We've got some people that we compete with that I truly love competing with them Because they're great people, they're wonderful adversaries and even though I still think I'm better and of course, they think they're better it's always nice to be able to say, hey, you know what?
Speaker 3:This is my friend's company and they are doing a great job for you, or it's my friend's company. Let me just make a phone call for you favorite. You understand. I told you that I am super grateful for everyone speaking with me. I feel like you will cry. You just have to see who is there, even on a phone call, email, because you know, I somebody made. Because, ultimately, the more knowledgeable you are about how to look at this, the easier it is for us to do our job, and I think that's really the key.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's great and a lot of great observations there and I completely understand some of those sentiments as well. I mean, I know all of you guys out there and work with some of you and I'm like I'm not picking, I just love all of you guys. So I just went because I get you know dealer friends of mine. When they find out, hey, what are you dealing with with these guys, what are you working with these guys, I'm like I love them all. You need to talk to them all. You're the one that's gonna make that decision, so I'm not gonna give you the opportunity to hang it back on me and you're like hey, you said that they were, I love them, they're great. You need like, sometimes it might come down to they're maybe equally capable, but you might jive better with the people. Like you said when Clark, relationships, relationships, relationships sometimes that's gonna be the key factor above everything else, because everything else is, you know, equal.
Speaker 3:So you know what happens when you work on the vendor side for a while you miss working in the dealer side. So I can tell you for most of us that that spend a number of years in a dealership. First, it's refreshing to talk to people to sell cars every day, because I gotta tell you that I miss that part. It's fun closing car deals. It's fun desk and car deals. It's fun in finance. It's fun at the push at the end of the month.
Speaker 3:You know, I mean I would love to say I miss the hours. But, believe it or not, the vendor hours are worse than the car guy hours because you just start working at six AM instead and you work until 10 or 11 o'clock at night because you know you're at a computer instead of sitting at the desk. Like the hours unfortunately are longer. But car people are fun to talk to, like that's the other thing that's good about it is car people are. If you ever think you wanna break in the car business, go spend about an hour in another type of industry and it will remind you why the car business is so great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure I mean some of my very favorite. This is a big industry. The longer you're in it, I guess, the smaller it kinda gets. But I'm with you, man. Like some of my very favorite people and some people that have become some of my best friends in the car business are actually dealers Just wonderful people, and being able to experience their side, the retail side of the industry, is always refreshing. It charges me up. It really really charges me. So well I gotta say to the audience thanks for joining us for another episode of Automotive Alchemy.
Speaker 2:Today. We uncovered some really good points on GA4 and how it can revolutionize your dealership's digital strategy. Right, it can save you money, it can make you money. A free tool that actually has a tremendous value. Remember, hey, understanding and implementing GA4, it's not just a step forward, it's really a leap into the future for marketing. There's a lot of future proofing you can do. When you set it up the right way, it literally becomes like a crystal ball.
Speaker 2:But how has it gone for you? You may not be happy with it. Are there pros and cons? We'd love to hear from you. And so you need to know also that when Kieran says, hey, we're here to help you. They're here If you need them and you'd like to go deeper or even take advantage of a complimentary digital marketing audit, along with just talking through some stuff with GA4, go to dealeralchemistcom and get in touch. And if you'd like to meet some actual dealer alchemists in person, well, nada is coming up soon and you will find dealer alchemists at booth 6643N and that's N like North 6643N you will find the dealer alchemist booth and a whole bunch of people that will be more than happy to talk you through some of that stuff. So, of course, don't miss our next episode, where we're gonna continue to take these automotive challenges and turn them into goals until next time. So I hope that was helpful.