Gain efficiency in managing your web marketing
Published in Autojournal in March 2018
Simplify your data
The management of a car dealership generates a multitude of data. Operational, financial and marketing data. This data becomes extremely difficult to track and the time required to understand it is simply not enough.
The financials are generally simple and have been the same for decades. It is therefore easy to interpret and let's face it, a profit or loss is the most important indicator of whether or not our dealership is healthy.
Marketing as it was known in the 1990s provided a limited number of variables and those used by agencies and media sellers were simple to understand. How many people will the ad reach? How often will you see the ad on TV or hear it on the radio? How many times will it appear?
Change of course
Internet marketing, which first appeared in the early 2000s, has completely changed the conversation. We now talk about behavioral metrics, engagement, average time, page views, bounce rate and so on. The dealership manager is now bombarded with various statistics that are often incomprehensible or meaningless.
This article aims to help you implement a practice called "Lean Analytics". This approach refocuses the manager on the very essence of managing a business through the various investments in Internet marketing.
The data changes, the concepts remain
In just 25 years, marketing has completely changed. There has been an explosion in the number of mediums available. Even more, consumers now have absolute control over a brand's image. These drastic changes have two important consequences for the manager. First, a lot of information about customers and their behaviors. Secondly, the stress of managing this volume of information is frightening. Business has been around for centuries and its basic concepts remain the same. Sales generate revenue and to sell products we must have existing customers and work to acquire new ones. Operating the business and having inventory generates costs. The difference between these two concepts gives us profitability. These concepts are still relevant today!
In measuring digital marketing campaigns focused on new customer acquisition, it is important to align the units of measurement of success with the concept of profitability. We need to get back to basics. There is no need to track 25 different statistics to measure the success of campaigns. Only the number of Internet inquiries, the conversion rate and the cost per acquisition should be measured and attributed correctly to the respective campaigns. These three statistics are directly related to profitability! There is no need to try to make the bounce rate or the number of page views speak for the success of a campaign, it is simply a waste of time.
Satisfaction and reputation
If we want to measure the overall satisfaction of our online customers, there is no need to spend hours looking at and analyzing Google Analytics. Google my Business and Facebook page provides the number of stars that users have entered as well as their written reviews. It's that simple! Still too often today dealerships do not take control of their online reviews and sales suffer severely. One statistic is important in this case: what is my rating? Some dealerships have already taken the lead on this issue and installed in-store digital tools so that people can leave their comments and ratings directly at the point of sale.
Branding campaigns (banners on online media placements and video ads) are harder to measure, but how critical to a dealership's success in 2018 and the years to come. To simplify the measurement of these campaigns, there are a few questions to ask yourself before you begin. The first being that if we invest heavily in our brand image, people will logically search for us more online. It is easy via Google Search Console to isolate the search volume for our dealership's brand. If we see an increase in searches correlated with one of our campaigns, it means the campaign is effective. Video viewing offers a very important statistic. It's simple to know how many users have viewed 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of your video. This metric is very indicative of user engagement with our brand.
When it comes to branding campaigns, it's crucial to talk to your web marketing agency and review the different metrics available and choose a few that are closely related to increasing your brand recognition. The volume of leads that physically enter your dealership can also be an excellent metric for a branding campaign.
The key to success: measuring only actionable data
What is "Actionable Data"? It is data that, when analyzed, allows us to make changes to increase the performance of our Internet advertising programs. It is revealing data on the profitability of the company. To give a concrete example, a debt-to-equity ratio in accounting clearly indicates whether a company has too much debt. It is concrete and it is easy to act to correct the situation if necessary.
It is important to keep this management concept. Successful managers are those who use only actionable data in their executive dashboards. As a dealership, it is important to simplify the vast majority of our data analysis to spend the minimum amount of time understanding it and the maximum amount of time using it to our advantage!
