As of 2016, eight of every ten people use search engines to look for products and services. To capture your share of the market, you need the right strategy to drive traffic to your page, then compel a shopping behavior (also known as a conversion).
That’s essentially what you, or your agency, need to focus on through your marketing:
- Traffic
- Conversions
Succeeding at only one is a large-scale failure. You could be driving volumes of qualified traffic to poorly conceived pages. Or you are driving little to no traffic to highly effective pages. When you excel at both, you’ll reach peak effectiveness; it’s what we call Opportunity Marketing.
Opportunity Marketing (n) — strategic use of data to find opportunities that the net greatest number of new shoppers
Traffic. Conversions. How Do You Find the Opportunities?
As the old cliche goes, “the proof is in the pudding.” We pull data from sources like Google Analytics, AdWords, Google Search Console, and Moz. These are your gold mines, so you need to be digging deep and often.
This is where we’ll slow down. Break things into chunks.
The first step to find your opportunities is a proper setup of your Google Analytics accounts.
Google Analytics Setup and Tips
If you have your Google Analytics set up, you can check out our blog on GA Goals recommendations and installation steps. Once you’ve opened that in a new tab, you can continue to the next section about driving traffic.
If you don’t have your Google Analytics account set up, let’s first talk about why it’s important to have your Google Analytics account set up — beyond the mere fact that it’s your periscope to all the data you need to succeed in the modern market.
When you have your GA account, you can set up your goals (check out our goal recommendations and installation steps here). With your goals, you can measure your traffic and conversion metrics among the following strategic features:
- Sources
- Geographies
- Days and hours
- Pages
- Devices
Now it’s time. You’re ready for Google Analytics. (15-20 minutes of time)
- Sign up for a Google account.
- Create your login
- Go into your ADMIN setup and find your code
- Send the code to your website provider
- Or you can plug it in through Tag Manager or the header of your website
- Turn it on
It’s that simple.
Identifying Your Greatest Opportunities to Increase Traffic
The whole purpose of your dealership site is to get people taking actions that lead to a sale. Naturally, the more people who visit your site, the more opportunities you have to make that happen.
There are three primary strategies to drive high-quality traffic.
If you want to really dive into how to drive traffic, you can get many more insights about the three strategies listed above and a few exclusive Reunion tips right here.
Identifying Your Greatest Opportunities to Increase Conversions
Conversions arrive through a variety of sources, like social channels, direct channels, video, and display. It is, however, important to look at your data and make sure paid and organic traffic are high-quality, in-market shoppers — the ones that will convert equally, no matter the source.
By measuring these properly, you can also identify when something is wrong based on below-the-benchmark conversions.
- Spending too much
- Not enough site visibility
We’ve set the industry benchmark using our dealer network of more than 150 partners, so contact us if you want to see how you stack up against the competition.
If you notice that your organic conversions hit this benchmark, but paid isn’t, that’s indicating you have an opportunity to refine your PPC strategy to increase paid conversions.
If your organic conversions seem rather low, you can seize that opportunity to create content that will help hyper-target those in-market shoppers.
Either way, these datasets can help you identify where your efforts should go for conversions.
Does learning more insights about how to optimize your site for conversions interest you? You can get direct tips, strategies, and more with our blog that covers this very topic.
So Ask Yourself …
Are you ready to start letting Data Beat Intuition to help you sell more cars?