Pub. 16 2017-2018 Issue 1

N E W J E R S E Y C O A L I T I O N O F A U T O M O T I V E R E T A I L E R S 19 new jersey auto retailer W W W . N J C A R . O R G What drives us? Helping auto dealerships grow. We understand the intricacies of the auto industry and the challenges you face. From floor plan and acquisition financing to working capital loans, a fully automated sweep, and indirect auto financing, we offer a full suite of dealer finance services. For more information, contact David Stevenson, KeyBank Dealer Finance at 610-212-4276 or visit key.com/dealer. All credit products are subject to credit approval. Key.com is a federally registered service mark of KeyCorp. ©2016 KeyCorp. KeyBank is Member FDIC. 160928-140256 For dealers using traditional marketing metrics, they have no clear measure of the quality of their paid traffic that does not convert to a lead. Dealers, if given the chance, would like to knowmore about the consumers who click on their online advertising. Today, it is possible to track what consumers do on your website, whether they convert or not! The future of automotive marketing metrics will include a healthy balance of consumer engagement data as well as the traditional conversion data. Applying Engagement Metrics Dealers spend thousands of dollars each month sending consumers to their inventory Search Results Pages (SRP) and Vehicle Detail Pages (VDP), yet only 5% will convert to a lead. The power of engagement metrics is that dealers can now see what the other 95% did on their website visit: □ Did they play a video? □ Did they scroll through photos of the vehicle? □ Did they scroll down the page to read the specifications? □ Did they click on a button to start a trade-in process? □ Did they apply for financing? Wouldn’t a used car manager want to know the percentage of paid visitors who engaged with photos and videos of their inventory? The answer is “Yes!” Let me give you an example of how these new metrics can help increase your showroom traffic with a newmeasure of engagement, Photo Engagement Rate (PER). PER is defined as the percentage of visitors who look through photos of a vehicle on an SRP or VDP. For used car inventory advertising campaigns, the PER should be over 20%. If your agency is sending traffic that rarely looks at photos (ex. PER 5%) then you know that the quality of their advertising audience needs to be improved. When PER increases, vehicle turn rates and conversions increase. If PER is low, your dealership could also see if the total engagement is low using a metric called Zero Engagements per Page (ZEP). If ZEP is 75%, it means that 75% of the consumers who clicked on your ads received ZERO engagement points. That means that they never looked at photos, played a video, or clicked on any button. They didn’t even scroll down the page. Wouldn’t you want to know if you are paying for ad campaigns that have incredibly low engagement? How Do You Track Engagement? Using the Google TagManager, dealers can track what consumers clicked on while visiting each page of their website. PCG has built a standardized set of Google Tag Manager scripts to capture website engagement for the most popular websites that dealers use in the United States. We have also published the industry’s first open standards for Google Analytics engagement event names. You can download a copy at: http://bit.ly/PCGDefinitions Without engagement metrics, dealers have a large marketing blind spot. It is a multimillion-dollar problem. Engagement can result in increased sales if dealers follow a few simple tips: □ To sell more vehicles, find the keywords and targeting strate- gies that send engaged shoppers to your website. □ To increase the results of your advertising investments, reduce the number of quick bounces with no page engagement. □ To inspect your advertising campaigns for BOT traffic, mea- sure engagement of your website and track any odd behavior of page views. Unless you understand the scope of the problem and how it impacts all your online investments, you will never be able to eliminate waste in your online marketing budget. Focusing on worthless metrics of some vendors can prevent the dealership from inspecting the quality of the vendors’ marketing strategies. When you add quality metrics to your monthly marketing reports, you will finally have the tools to boost sales. With strong head- winds slowing down vehicle sales, dealers need to use new tools and strategies to eliminate waste and increase showroom traffic without increasing their marketing budgets. Engagement metrics will greatly assist dealers in the years ahead and progressive dealers are already seeing the benefits. Brian Pasch is CEO of PCG Digital Marketing. Brian is an active speaker at auto- motive industry conferences, 20 Groups and digital marketing workshops. He can be reached at brian@pcgcompanies.com .