
By Brian Pasch
Defining Shopper Traffic
Automotive dealers are in the business to sell cars. Generating traffic to the dealership’s website is important. However, I don’t want dealers to only increase traffic to their website, I want them to increase shopping traffic.
Visitors to a dealer’s website that look at Vehicle Detail Pages (VDPs) are shoppers.
I define the term “shopper” as a visitor to a dealer’s website that looks at an in-stock vehicle displayed on a Vehicle Detail Page (VDP). If someone visits the dealership’s home page, the “About Us” page, the directions page, or any “promotional” page on their website, they may be shopping – but I can’t know that for sure.
So let me talk to dealers directly; I recommend that you track VDP activity and monthly trends so that you can review your “shopper” traffic at any time. I will show you how to setup Google Analytics VDP goals in this post as well as show you some automated tools to track VDP activity.
Dealers can track VDP activities in Google Analytics using data segments and/or goals. If you setup Google Analytics goals for VDP activity, then dealers can gain the additional insights offered by Multi-Channel Sales Funnel reporting. This is a more advanced topic that I will not go into in this post, but it has strong value for marketing strategies.
In order to track shoppers and complete an in-depth analysis, dealers will need to trigger a Google Analytics “goal” when a VDP is viewed. Once a VDP goal is created for new and used vehicles, dealers can see how many unique visitors triggered various types of goals in any time period; this is how they will be able to calculate shopper activity.
Identifying Your Unique VDP URL Pattern
Dealers, since there are dozens of companies that offer website platforms, let me give you some advice on how to identify the unique URL patterns that define a VDP on your website. Select a used car from your website inventory and go to the Vehicle Detail Page (VDP).