Measure And Evaluate Your Automotive Business' Digital Marketing Strategy

By Author: Nate Rodney
Total Articles: 499
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With online mediums contributing to the creation of good customer bases, auto dealers are compelled to intelligently experiment with various digital marketing strategies. Hence, it becomes important for them to evaluate these strategies from the standpoint of user engagement and conversion. Having a solid analytical program in place, auto businesses can greatly improve their marketing efforts, thus, resulting in improved usability of website, user experience, brand reputation, ROI, etc.

Online data is easy to track and record
The online data created by various marketing strategies can be easily tracked and recorded. Moreover, the online data is very much accurate and genuine. This helps when truly analyzing your strategies. Also, there are many web analytical tools available that can help you analyze and measure the tracked and recorded data.

Evaluate various web metrics on a monthly basis
Evaluating various web metrics on a regular basis – we suggest monthly – is important not only for assessing the success of the campaign but also to determine spending on each campaign. Take a look ...
... at the traffic (and more importantly genuine leads) you are getting through various channels and see which is helping you the most. In general, we get traffic in 3 different ways – direct, through referrals and through search engines.

Direct traffic
Direct traffic is the number of visitors who directly come to your website (i.e., they are already familiar with your business). Hence, website traffic speaks up for how familiar your targeted audience is with your business. On analyzing website traffic in detail, you can get information from unique visits, repeated visits, subscribers, page views per visit, time spent on each page, bounce rate, internal keywords searched, etc.

By knowing the above mentioned details, you can assess the popularity of the pages on your website, what internal keywords are searched for and what content on your site is the most popular. By knowing this you can develop related content that your visitor is looking for.

Traffic through referrals
Analyze traffic coming from various referral sources – display banner ads, social media, article directories, auto forums, etc. Know where the back links that are coming to your website are from. Count the number of back links and also measure the quality of these back links. This will help you refine your PR and advertising strategies.

Search engine traffic
Search engines are the gateways for your auto business to get introduced to a big chunk of your audience. Hence, the traffic from search engines is a key metric in revealing the extent of your website's online visibility. Search engine traffic can be from organic search rankings or PPC ads. People consider SEO and PPC results to be genuine and thus, rely more on them to make a purchase or to contact a business.

According to a study conducted by Polk and autotrader.com, around 70% of car buyers use search engines to get information about auto dealerships.

Organic traffic and conversion rate lift
As organic rankings are not paid, any traffic coming from organic results speaks to the credibility of your business. As search engines are the major tools for drawing traffic to your website, it is important to see how much of the traffic coming from search engines is getting converted in to leads or conversions.

Also, it is important to see if the traffic is increasing or decreasing over a period of time, as the organic search engine rankings are highly variable (due to SE algorithms or competitors strategies).

Since search engine traffic is crucial for a business's success, an in-depth analysis of recorded data can help you know important details about your SEO marketing strategy.

PPC traffic and conversion rate lift
As PPC is a paid campaign, it becomes imperative to measure the traffic and number of conversions resulted from the PPC ads. Knowing the increase or decrease in conversion rate will help you in deciding whether to continue or hold the campaign, and also identify the areas that need to be improved.

Also, one can measure the search engine traffic (organic or PPC) based on the keywords. See what kind of keywords (industry specific, generic and location based); drive more traffic to your website.

Mobile site traffic
Mobile searches are increasing rapidly. Hence, it becomes very important to check as to how successful your mobile website is at drawing in traffic. Mobile site traffic is a critical parameter that suggests the extent of your mobile web visibility and the degree of user experience your mobile site is providing. These two parameters speak for the easy reach of your auto dealership and better presentation of your products, respectively.

Correct the loopholes in your marketing strategy
Analyzing various metrics will help you measure the success of your marketing strategies and also lets you know about the necessary improvements to be made to generate a higher number of conversions. It will also help you optimize your strategies by closing loopholes and implementing ideas that work and engage customers.

Analyze the performance by establishing sales objectives
Having understood all the above web metrics, you can now evaluate what strategy works better for your established sales objective. A strategy that can bring higher conversions can be adopted to meet the required sales targets. And, other strategies can be used to create awareness about your business.

Measuring and evaluating your digital marketing performance through analyzing various web metrics will help you develop more matured and customer centric marketing strategies. This will not only help you target your customers better, but also increase your ROI.

Search Optics, Inc. is a leader in digital marketing solutions for the automotive industry. Search Optics interactive marketing services include custom websites, search engine optimization, paid search and mobile solutions that generate leads which result in sales opportunities. Search Optics specializes in automotive marketing and automotive SEO.