Create Google Analytics Alerts To Avoid Blunders

As my friends and colleagues prepare for the new year, I wanted to encourage all automotive dealers and vendors to pledge additional resources to educate your employees on Google Analytics. While some may find Google Analytics too complicated, others will find that GA is a great starting point before you graduate to customized business intelligence tools like VistaDash.

With the PCG Specification for Google Analytics, the automotive industry now has a common set of names for consumer engagement events and goal conversions. Based on this standard, larger dealers group can finally have consistent metrics across different website platforms and agency partners.

One of the most ignored features of Google Analytics is Custom Alerts. You can find this feature on the Admin menu, under your working View, as shown below:

Custom Alerts Limit Data Loss from Costly Blunders

Dealers need to set customer alerts to avoid data loss from common blunders. Here are a few common blunders that often screw up GA data and marketing reports:

• A website platform change occurs and no one updates the conversion goals to reflect the new destination page URLs. When this happens all GA conversion reports are corrupted and you can't go back and backfill the data in GA.
• A new advertising agency is sending a significant amount of traffic to the website and no one is inspecting traffic quality. Bounce rate goes through the roof and no one notices.
• VDP and SRP views are significantly dropping, indicating a slowdown in shopper activity on the dealer's website, and no one notices this trend for months. This happens frequently and is often related to random cuts in advertising investments.

The list of possible changes in data that could indicate a problem is quite long, but I hope these three examples trigger a thought process regarding other metrics and KPIs that should be tracked, if data increases or decreases drastically.

When alerts are triggered, Google Analytics will send an email or text message to any group of people you like. This process creates an escalation process for GA data hygiene and shows that your organization cares that you data is being properly recorded.

Start to Create Alerts

In the example below, a dealer has a fusionZONE website and the VDP pages all start with: /vehicle-details/. This is important to know if you want to set alerts when VDP traffic is down. You could also set custom alerts for used car VDPs (/vehicle-details/used-) or new car VDPs (/vehicle-details/new-) once you inspect the page URL structure.

By the way, if you would like to learn more about fusionZONE website, download our recent PCG Research report on their platform here: https://www.pcgresearch.com/fusionzone/

When you create and save alerts, you will see them displayed as shown below:

Let's look at the definitions for these three alerts so you can see how easy they are to create. Use these examples as a guide to create a full set of alerts for your GA account.

Drop in Lead Form Conversions

In this example, I am using the PCG goal name for Form Conversions (CPE-Conversion-Forms) and sending an alert if the leads drop by 25% in a one week period. If your website is not optimize using the PCG Specification for Google Analytics, you would use the goal name that is working for form conversions.

Drop in VDP Views

In this example, I am using a custom Segment called VDP Views - fusionZONE websites that looks for pages that begin with /vehicle-details/. This segment needs to be created BEFORE this alert can work, and if you have a different website platform, the pattern will be different.

Here is what that custom segment definition looks like:

In the custom alert below I am not looking at "All Traffic", like the first alert. I am only looking at sessions that touch a Vehicle Detail Page (VDP), using my Segment. Once again, the alert will trigger when the VDP views drop 25% over a week period. You can change the duration as you like to a longer time period if you like.

High Bounce Rate

While I do not use Bounce Rate as a quality KPI, many dealers still talk about this metric. So if you wanted to get an alert when the bounce rate jumps significantly higher on your website, like up 25%, you can create an alert that looks like this:

A variation of this would be to change "All Traffic" to Paid Traffic or Referral Traffic, to have alerts more targeted by advertising channel.

Data Centric Companies Have To Step Up Their Game

This advice is just another example of the 100 plays in my upcoming book "2018 Digital Marketing Playbook". For the first time, I have taken my 13 years of automotive consulting and written digestible tips to help dealers and their agency partners improve marketing outcomes.

Q: How do you eat an elephant?

A: One fork full at a time.

This book takes the automotive digital marketing "elephant" and breaks it down into manageable plays that can be executed individually and implemented quickly.

Dealership Managers do not like to read long books. So, this new Playbook is topical and each play is 1-2 pages long, on average. Each play has a sign-off box for when the play was completed. This is the only book of its kind because it is specific to the automotive industry and has proven plays based on the success of the dealers that I coach.

Attendees of the Automotive Engagement Conference (AEC) will receive their own copy of the Playbook. I encourage dealership managers and their agency partners to come to these two warm-weather events TOGETHER, to improve your game plan for 2018. Tickets are $99 per person and every attendee will get a bundle of PCG books to help their organization grow in knowledge and skills.

Register for the AEC here: https://pcgcompanies.com/aec/

GA Training For Automotive Vendors

If you work at an organization that calls on dealers, and you would like your sales and support teams to build greater confidence in Google Analytics, then consider registering them for my industry workshop: January 22-23rd in West Palm Beach. Details on this special hands-on workshop can be found here: https://www.pcgtraining.com/gawestpalmbeach/