How are you measuring your Google Ads Results?

For many Dealers this is tough. They rely on the relationship with their Advertisement Agency/Digital Marketing Partner and trust they are working in their best interest. The reality is that many just do not know.

When we are spending money on Advertisement though it is not so we get more fans of our website. It is to increase sales.

Keeping it simple, if we have 7 ads that we place in newspaper. (For those that remember those days) Each ad was different in content but you knew that only one of them was making the phone ring, or getting people to come in. Knowing the other 6 are not effective opens up options. You can save 85% of your budget, place the ad more often or in other papers, maybe even tweak the better performing ones of the 6 that did not work and see if you can get them to perform the highest.

Digital Ads work the same way. -

So that begs the question, how do you KNOW if they are working or not?

First, lets get the obvious out of the way. There is benefit to branding advertisement. That is when you are using these ads as Digital Billboards to increase awareness. Many will argue that you will not get a return out of this and it is targeting the immeasurable-influence on future action. If that is your plan, then I strongly recommend that it be a solid plan. Know what percentage of your Ad budget is assigned to this, measure the results so you can understand them and can build on them. Personally, I would recommend that this segment of your OVERALL Ad budget, and proportionally your Digital Marketing Budget, should never exceed 20%.

So let's look at what should be the majority of the spend. In Pay Per Click, specifically Search Ads, your ad will convert in one of two ways.

First from the ad (much lower percentage) where the customer should be able to click on your phone number or click to text/chat. If your ads are not set up this way, using the extensions, you should talk to your provider or consider making this change. (If you are not sure, just do an incognito/private browsing search for your Dealership/keywords you know will bring up your ad).

Secondly, the customer will click to go to your website and convert on the site. Most are following this route. When they get to your site, we want them to convert correct? They are going to convert in a number of ways. Typically it is going to be in one of the following ways:

-Form Lead-Through a Contact form, Get your ePrice, Learn more...etc

-Digital Retailing Tool-works within the site but sends information differently from the site

-Trade Tool-Also sends information but differently also.

-Chat Tool-Since this is an active communication tool it should be measured in two layers, engagement in the tool (specifically the correct department) and lead submission.

-Actual Sales Phone Calls-This is the most important and often most overlooked. (Never rely on click to call metrics!) Adding a dedicated number to your ads will help you measure the conversions on the search page. If they call that number they had to have seen your ad. The majority of calls will occur on the website though. There are two ways to track this effectively. The hard way is to create a duplicated experience and pages that are only accessible through the string of pages that are linked to the ad. This is easier to do for events where there are only a few pages as long as there is not a navigational header/footer involved as part of the root domain. The easier way, and most reliable without the maintenance is Dynamic Number insertion. It is important that the tool does three things though as not all DNI tools do: 1) Send events to Google 2) Assign the phone number by session not source. 3) Includes the Session ID to Google with the event so you can see past the last click. (CallRevu's CallVision DNI does all three)

Each of these items should be established as a goal in Google Analytics. Depending on your website/tool it may need to be based on what page (destination) a customer is sent to when they submit a form, or an event that fired when the process occurred. You can use Google Analytics Real Time view to track this while completing a test lead on each tool. If you have trouble, reach out to me and I will be glad to walk you through.

Once the goals are set you can view the campaigns in Analytics, including cost, and you can select the conversions to display for each campaign. You can create a simple table in excel to then notate your conversions for each campaign. Switching conversions will allow you to chart all of the conversions on a Campaign level which will show you which ones are effective, and which ones are not. Now you have information that you can act on--or at least have a meaningful relationship with those that will act on it.