Pub. 17 2018-2019 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 25 new jersey auto retailer W W W . N J C A R . O R G CPL number will change significantly. It is not uncommon to find that 50 percent of AdWords leads, for new and used car marketing campaigns, are not for vehicle sales opportunities. It's critical that a very short, connected call (< 15 seconds), with no meaningful two-way communication, is not considered a lead. AdWords reports will consider any con- nected call as a conversion, regardless of length or outcome. Dealers must configure Google Analytics properly to track all four conversion chan- nels to inspect the performance of their agency partners. Example #2 also shows why dealers need to invest in automation to determine the outcomes of all inbound phone calls generated by referral traffic to their website. Make A Decision To Create Better AdWords Reports To maximize the effectiveness of all online marketing investments, dealers must: • Measure conversions by campaign. Do not accept roll-up reporting, as shown in Example #1, which averages performance of multiple campaigns. • Invest in Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) to associate phone calls with campaign-level data in Google Ana- lytics, for all referral traffic. Make sure that chat and SMS conversions are also recorded in Google Analytics. • Determine the outcome of each lead to better align marketing investments with the outcomes the dealership needs to reach its sales goals. DNI companies can help with determining phone call outcomes. • Measure click traffic quality to im- prove overall campaign performance since a very small percentage of paid clicks convert to a lead. This can be accomplished by implementing en- gagement tracking in the PCG Speci- fication for Google Analytics. Digging Deeper: It's Even More Ex- pensive The CPL gets even more expensive when dealers look at the Assisted Conversion reports in Google Analytics. When dealers find it took multiple visits, across multiple channels, to generate an AdWords or Facebook conversion, the CPL can be 200 percent higher. In the example below, it took multiple visits and multiple channels before this consumer converted to a lead via AdWords, in the last attribution position. Dealers Need Proper Reporting Dealers need actionable data from their advertising reports. Check and see if your Google Analytics account is configured properly using this free tool: https://vis- tadash.com/ga-audit-tool/. Our industry has a long way to go to get dealers what they need to sell more cars in a digital age. Brian Pasch is CEO of PCG Digital Marketing. Brian is an active speaker at automotive industry conferences, 20 Groups and digital marketing workshops. He can be reached at brian@pcgcompanies.com