In this fourth installment of Dealer Diagnostic, we sit down with Zach Billings, Wikimotive’s CEO and Co-Founder, to discuss the metrics dealers should trust, how reporting can inflate marketing performance, and why bad measurement leads to bad decisions. Whether you want to read the full transcript here or watch the conversation for yourself, we’ve got you covered.
Why is it harder to know what’s working?
It’s not getting harder to figure out what’s working and what’s not in your digital marketing. The signals are the same as they’ve been for years. In fact, they’ve gotten even clearer as more data has become available. The problem is that the signal-to-noise ratio has gotten way out of whack. So, while the signal is still available and there and the same as it’s always been, the noise is much greater now.
And as a result, there are more reports with more complicated vanity metrics, and it’s making it a lot more difficult to just see the signal that’s right there in front of you. And the signal is forms, calls, chats, trade leads, and scheduled service appointments. It’s hard conversions that should lead to personally identifiable customer information in your CRM. That’s the signal, and we’ve been able to measure it for the better part of a decade.
Dealer Takeaway: More reporting doesn’t necessarily mean more clarity. Keep your attention on actions that create identifiable customer opportunities.
Which metrics matter most?
The metrics that I trust the most, and that everybody should trust the most, are conversions, specifically hard conversions. It’s not VDP views. It’s not all the vanity metrics that get thrown at us in reports: rankings, impressions, and all of that. It’s very simply forms, calls, chats, trade leads, digital retailing submissions, scheduled service appointments. It’s things that mean you’ve got people in your CRM. Those are the only measures that matter when it comes to your marketing.
Surely, you want more sales and more actual service ROs that have generated profitability, but where marketing measurement ends is: Did I get the conversion? Did I get the app back? Store process takes over from there.
Dealer Takeaway: Prioritize actions that bring people into your CRM, then examine how your store turns those opportunities into sales and service business.
How can conversion reporting be misleading?
The easiest metric to manipulate and misunderstand is key events, which are conversions, and it’s all in definitions. Okay? So, let’s just say, for instance, you’re in Google Analytics 4. And for those of you who don’t regularly use Analytics, this is even more dangerous, and you need to pay attention to this because your vendor gives you this report, and you don’t always understand the makeup of it.
So, you’ve got this metric, and it’s: This is how many conversions XYZ marketing generated. Say you’ve got 10 forms, 10 chats, 10 calls. That’s 30 conversions. You’d say, okay, I got 30 key events, 30 conversions.
Now, let’s say we add VDP views as a key event, and there are 300 of them. Now the report says I’ve got 330 conversions, which means, mathematically, my cost per conversion is now being reported at one-tenth what it really was.
Trusting key events at face value without carefully inspecting the makeup of those key events makes conversions itself—key events—the easiest metric to misunderstand and potentially for a vendor…
Dealer Takeaway: Ask exactly which actions count as conversions. Adding page views to that total can make performance look better without generating another lead.
How has GA4 changed reporting?
GA4 has changed the reporting conversation in that the feeling, the prevailing sentiment, is that I can’t find the information I used to find in Universal Analytics. And myself, I had to go through the learning curve. When GA4 came out, Universal Analytics was easier. It was simpler. It was more direct to be able to break down broad metrics into more narrow signals that you could measure. But the truth is that GA4 actually contains more granular information.
You have to know more to be able to wield the weapon, but it’s a more powerful weapon than we had with Universal Analytics. So, we actually have more info now, but the common conversation is more confusion because it’s more complicated, and it takes more knowledge to use it.
Dealer Takeaway: Getting useful answers from GA4 requires understanding how to find and interpret the data behind the report.
How can the wrong metrics lead to bad decisions?
The danger of making marketing decisions based on inflated attribution is that you can believe that some marketing sources are working vastly better than they are, and you can unwittingly end up using apples-and-oranges measures. I’ll give a for instance.
If you measure VDP views as your KPI for marketing success, if you have SEO on the one hand, it’s going to drive a lot of its traffic to the homepage and to landing pages, not to VDPs, which means that people have to go from their landing location and navigate to VDPs, which is common on websites. People expect this. Consumers expect this. But your total VDP count will only be the number of people who managed to navigate there who were serious about their visit.
On the other hand, say that you have vehicle listing ads. Well, vehicle listing ads drive 100% of their traffic directly to VDPs, so your success rate will be 100%.
Which one is more valuable?
You don’t know because those are apples-and-oranges measures. You would very easily take VDPs as your KPI there and invest more money in your vehicle listing ads, not realizing that SEO was actually driving the higher-quality traffic. And so, you have to be careful to look at your measures and make sure that they are calibrated to the marketing medium that you’re trying to measure and are apples to apples.
Dealer Takeaway: Compare channels using meaningful customer actions. A channel that sends visitors directly to VDPs has an automatic advantage when VDP views define success.
How can dealers know whether a report is truthful?
There is no way for a dealer to know if a report is truthful or not unless you do one of two things:
Learn data analysis for yourself at an extremely robust level, or find a partner you trust so much that you can take their word at face value.
And those are both difficult things to do. This is a rough reality.
The truth is that there is so much nuance, so much context that can exist inside of data for the purpose of attribution, that you cannot possibly use one simple set of measures. You cannot go to your 20 group and look at your composite report and say that the traffic or the KPIs that are being reported, the conversion measures—because you don’t know what they are—the cost per conversion—because you don’t know how the individual marketing sources led to those conversions…
You can’t know if these things are true performance or not unless you have become an advanced user of Analytics yourself or you just can de facto trust the person who’s going to look at it for you. Those are your two options.
Dealer Takeaway: A report needs interpretation. Build the expertise to examine its definitions and attribution, or work with someone you trust to do that analysis.
Which three metrics should dealers review every month?
The three metrics that a dealership should look at every month for any of their marketing mediums are forms, calls, and chat events in Analytics. The reason I say those three is not that they are necessarily the best or most complete or most perfect measure of whether you got conversions or not. What they are is generally consistent. I’m not romantic about measurement of marketing data.
Okay? In a perfect world, I wish we had perfection. I wish we had a crystal ball where we could just see that we sold the blue one to Mr. Jones on Tuesday because VLA did this or because SEO did this. We don’t have that data.
So, you have to go to what is the most consistent baseline that you can establish. Forms fire reliable events in Analytics. Calls—click-to-calls specifically, which are not a hard conversion—fire reliable events in Analytics. Chat, assuming you have a chat provider that’s firing events, fires reliable events in Analytics.
Can you trust that that is a complete number of conversions? No. But can you trust that going from 20 reported conversions to 40 was a 100% increase? Yes.
You can. Use those three.
Dealer Takeaway: Use forms, click-to-calls, and chat events as a practical baseline for tracking change, with consistent tracking and definitions. Recognize that these events don’t represent a complete count of qualified leads.
