Two Ways To Clean Up Google Analytics Data

There are some special cases of UTM tags that bear mentioning and I call out two in this section. One example is when dealers want to track how many consumers visit their website from their Google My Business (GMB) listing. Why would they want to see these visits? Traffic from the GMB page is often the highest converting and most engaged traffic channel to a dealer’s website. This traffic represents a majority of conversions that occur each month for dealers in the United States.

When consumers search for your business name on Google, your GMB listing will often show. Your GMB listing is considered by GA to be organic traffic and not paid or referral. Click on the Google My Business website button are a good proxy for brand awareness.

Also, I have noticed that as reviews increase on your GMB, calls and clicks can also increase. To track just how many people are using the GMB website button link (see red arrow) you will need to add a Google UTM tag to your website URL in your Google My Business listing editor.

Go to the URL builder tool: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/. Set source to “google” and medium to “organic” because, otherwise, it will throw off your organic traffic reports in GA. Use the Copy URL button to save the new tags and then log into GMB and edit the field that contains your website address.

Similar tags should be created for all manual links to the dealer’s website that are being used in email, CRM, YouTube videos, or marketing templates. Download the UTM Tagging Guide for more specific examples so your GA data can be as accurate as possible. 

Where is my Email Traffic from CRM Activities?

The second example of special tagging revolves around email campaign generated from CRM workflows, newsletters, or third-party email marketing. Every month, dealers send out thousands of emails from their CRM, but if you look at the traffic GA shows in the email channel for some dealers, you will be scratching your head. Take a look at this dealer below:

In this period, there were 47,763 sessions on the dealer’s website yet there were only 4 sessions for email. Can this be correct? No! This is a perfect example of why standards for marketing campaigns need to be implemented and inspected. There are hundreds of consumers who are clicking on CRM emails and who also click on links back to the dealer’s website. The problem is that without proper UTM tags, the traffic comes into GA under the Direct Channel.

To fix this problem, someone from the dealership will need to go into their CRM templates and update all hard links with UTM tags. The minimum tags should be source = “crm” and medium = “email”. If you wanted to be more granular, the campaign could be called “crm_outreach” and the content could be the template name like “first_personal_response”.

Build Actionable Skills in Google Analytics

I encourage all dealership owners and managers to identify one person in their organization that they trust and get them registered for AAAS. My Google Analytics Certification Workshop is only offered two or three times a year and on Sunday, I am integrating the workshop into the AAA program. This makes attending the conference even more affordable because the workshop normally is priced at $995 per person.

Take the time to review the powerful content, speakers, panels, and workshops at AAAS this year. With a Dealer Premium Pass, you gain access to my GA workshop. Detail can be found here: https://automotiveattributionsummit.com. Best of all, all attendees of my workshop will go home to the workbook for GA to use as a guide to accomplish a full configuration of GA for their dealership(s).