Case Study: Dr. Squatch Soap Co.

Dr. Squatch Soap Co. is based in California and best I can tell launched with a Kickstarter campaign in 2016.  Now they have millions in sales direct to their website, mail-order, or through various on-line retailers including amazon.com, wal-mart.com, and target.com.  They are clearly using web analytics to help drive their e-commerce business and I uncovered this two ways.  One, I’m a customer so I have interaction with the brand.  They clearly retarget me through the use of pixels after I’ve been on the site.  They also have a strong facebook advertising campaign with retargeting built into their spending.  Second, Dr. Squatch has a pretty clear explanation of data collection, personal information, and their policies pertaining to all on their website.  The information is really buried.  I actually couldn’t find it by navigating their website and instead had to do a search.  Google brought the page up immediately at the top of my search.  The terms and conditions page spells out what they capture and this includes but is not limited to:

-        - Site usage

-      -  IP address

-     -   Referral URL

-      -  Browser type

-       - Operating system type

-       - Form fills

-      -  Device used

-      -  Mobile network information

-       - Number of visitors

-       - Frequency of visitors

Dr. Squatch also explains on this page how they use tools like cookies and pixels to track consumer interactions with e-mail, the website, and their on-line advertising (including mobile advertising).  It’s obvious to me they are using all these things.  Since I’m a customer and I interact with the website, and I’m on their e-mail list, I experience many different touch-points with them.  They will send me offers after I have been browsing on the website.  They will send me reminders if I haven’t purchased in a while.  All of these message are personalized to exactly the things I’m interested in, and have been researching or shopping for.  The frequency of communication is directly responsive to my interaction with their website and emails.  The more I interact, the more they communicate with me.  This communication is typically a smattering of all the things I mention above, including display ads, facebook ads, and emails.  I have only bought direct from them twice, but I’ve also purchased their product from amazon.  I’m a prime member so shipping is free, faster, and the product is the same price.  The only limitation with ordering from amazon is the selection is substantially less than ordering direct from Dr. Squatch. 

As a marketer I think there are some considerations for them to improve using their data here.  First, I think they could reach out to me and ask why I’m not a repeat purchaser.  If they learned I ordered from amazon, then maybe they could offer me free shipping and a broader selection.  My interaction with any of their ads is almost non-existent.  Their ads definitely drive brand awareness, and keeps them top of mind with me, but I never “click” an ad.  This is probably because I just haven’t seen anything compelling.  They should consider A/B testing different creative executions, messages, offers, etc…  This is also a way to uncover why I’m not a repeat shopper.  My guess is there are many others like me (that discovered the products on amazon), and it could provide a nice boost to their profit to drive repeat shoppers.

From an on-page SEO perspective I see them having a fairly strong strategy here.  I actually took a couple of their pages and ran them through Internet Marketing Ninjas SEO comparison tool.  They have strong use of Head Tag Elements with tags in URL’s and with Meta Descriptions.  I’ve included some charts below for reference.  If I search directly for the brand term “dr squatch”, all results provide a consistent ad copy result.  Whether it’s their website, amazon, facebook, or wal-mart the organic rankings have similar ad copy.  This is likely driven by metrics that guided them on how to do this.

Keyword usage is in depth on their website, particularly the home page.  Words like, natural, shipping, skin, soap, squatch all appear numerous times to help them rank organically.  Additionally, they have a great blog on their site.  Each page has good URL extensions and lots of keywords pertaining to product, and the lifestyle they target.  This includes words like natural, manly, men’s, men, lifestyle, and of course all the key product words like soap, lotion, and shampoo.  The blog content is diverse.  By tracking the time on these pages, and which specific pages, Dr. Squatch will learn what topics are driving the most interest.  This could be a good indicator for language and keywords they could use in other places on the site, and across all their advertising.  Organic should feed paid and vice-versa.

Two other key things that I notice on their site.  First, they have links to all their social media accounts including facebook, twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and YouTube.  There is piles of content on all the social media sites, they are very strong with their use of video.  Lastly, I performed another keyword search without using their brand terms, instead using “natural men’s soap”.  They were right at the top of Google with zero-click results allowing the shopper to purchase right there.  The top paid ads were two different competitors, but the number one and number two organic spot is held by them.  Number one was their ad copy and a link to a product page for soap.  Number two was amazon with similar ad copy and a link to purchase soap.  I conclude their SEO strategy is quite sound, and their paid strategy is not as strong but really effective.  It seems most of their paid digital advertising is reactive.  By this I mean, if you search for them or if you visit any of their digital properties, they will retarget you.  I take the same approach with my own budget in regards to digital advertising.  They definitely let other companies take the top spot on some paid keyword searches however.  If I was them I would probably put a broader keyword search list together to blunt the competition a little.  Even though they rank high in Organic, it will still allow the shopper/searcher to see other choices instead of Dr. Squatch owning that entire top space on the search results page.

REFERENCES

Author, M.H.Fleischner (2017). SEO Made Simple, Insider Secrets for Driving More Traffic to Your Website. Middletown, DE: ©Michael H. Fleischner

Internet Marketing Ninjas. Side-by-Side SEO Comparison Tool (2019, February 23). Retrieved from: https://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/seo-compare/

Dr. Squatch Soap Co. Website Terms and Conditions of Use (2019, February 23). Retrieved from: https://drsquatch.com/pages/terms-conditions

Alternative Web Analytic Tools versus GA

There are a few different web analytics tools available that a business could use for their business.  Here’s a list of a few to consider, but I’ll focus on just one comparison to GA (Google Analytics).

1.     Adobe – pretty much a direct competitor to GA but geared more toward enterprise and business users.

2.     Hubspot – Lots of basic analytics capabilities but also integrates in a CRM

3.     SEMrush – great tool for keyword research for both SEM and SEO and helps you narrow in on what keywords to target, but more limited in pure website analytics

4.     Data Studio – technically still Google, but worth calling out separately because it’s a visualization platform that can use any data source, including GA.

I’m going to focus on Hubspot.  Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Cambridge, MA.  Hubspot goes beyond web analytics and provides tools to manage social media, content, SEO, and websites.  To me it definitely provides an advantage given the user-friendly interface and that fact that it’s one portal to see data associated with a CRM, marketing campaigns, sales activity, and customer service.  All these categories are set-up in “Hubs”…see what they did there?  All this said, the biggest difference versus GA is that it integrates with a CRM.  If you are running GA, then you need a separate CRM, and the data doesn’t really talk to one another.  You have to manually access reports from both systems and try to make heads or tails of the insights and performance.  With Hubspot it’s all under one system or “roof”.  The CRM feature from Hubspot provides insights against specific contacts and it actually has contact information. The marketing hub allows you to drive lead generation, automate in-bound campaigns at scale, and provides analytics.  The sales and service hubs are geared towards outbound sales activity like email (which you could also tag in GA), and customer feedback.  Hubspot actually provides Live Chat (GA does not).  Live Chat is a common feature available for websites today, but they don’t always integrate easily with other systems if from another company.  In GA you can tag Chat leads, but you won’t get much more engaging information than that.

There are several common features and functions between Hubspot and GA.  They both provide website traffic reports, but GA has many more layers of data and as a result delivers much more in depth information.  Page Views is a common metric with both of these tools.  Sources and Goal Setting is another common functionality with both Hubspot and GA.  Conversions are also available with both platforms, but GA shows tracking for every interaction with every session, whereas Hubspot does not.  As a marketer, and website manager, I would want to see the details and be able to aggregate and track that data over time.

There are some major differences in the two, and in these topics GA is the clear winner.  This is primarily the broad reaching and depth of analytics for websites.  In this arena GA delivers so much more data.  Sometimes this is noted as overwhelming, and I can relate given the last five to seven years of my career being thrown into the deep-end with GA.  It just takes time, practice, patience, and some outside guidance (thanks Professor and every other mentor I’ve had along the way).  Segmentation is a good example of the depth of analytics GA provides that Hubspot does not.  You just can’t get segmentation by device, referral source, etc… and you definitely can’t get Cohort Analysis from Hubspot.  Another difference in the two is the SEO reporting.  In the article I read (Ford, 2019) he denotes that SEO reporting is better with Hubspot because it makes reports more actionable and easier to read with their visualizations.  Maybe I sort of agree with this.  My experience with Hubspot is limited in real life, and capped only by my research for this blog post.  Although, admittedly I did have a discussion with a reliable colleague about it too.  GA does provide good insight on SEO but only through Search Console, and that’s not always available to everyone.  Technically it is another tool to have to learn.  See what I mean about the depth of GA…it’s really the depth of Google!  As I mentioned previously Hubspot has a CRM hub that is actually offered free with their service.  GA is NOT a CRM.  In this match Hubspot is the clear winner.  They can give data to analyze customer interactions down to the contact level.  GA doesn’t provide any contact information (because they can’t given PII laws).  GA isn’t a CRM, there isn’t a feature to allow customers to opt-in with GA.  Businesses need to have a CRM for that, which ultimately leads to different systems.  Furthermore, Hubspot makes it easier to analyze and manage this information because just like their other hubs the CRM hub visualizes the customer journey.  If I’m thinking about this from a marketing perspective… not every marketer is a data geek, or wants to navigate through GA on their own.  I find this especially with higher level marketing professionals.  My VP and CEO at Hanesbrands didn’t want to see piles and piles of numbers from GA, they wanted to know what the data said, what to do about it, and wanted it in an intuitively easy to understand format.  With Hubspot visualization approach it could be very applicable for this.

Not surprisingly, I have an opinion about what one could or should do when it comes to picking one of these platforms.  Web Analytics are absolutely necessary if you are running a website, but a CRM is also necessary if you want robust information about your customer.  Hubspot provides both to make it simple, but it really lacks the depth of data a true website analytics person would want.  The bottom line is that you need both.  GA is a necessary evil to run websites, and a CRM is a necessary evil.  Even if you chose Hubspot because you get a free CRM and great visualizations…you’ll still need GA.  It’s inevitable that questions will arise that can only be answered by GA, and not by Hubspot.  That said, the choice really needs to be driven by what is needed and applicable for the goals of your business and role that analytics plays for that specific business.  I got through all of that and didn’t even post a chart or a report…so unlike me. J

REFERENCES

E. Ford. November 7, 2019. HubSpot Vs Google Analytics: A Comparison of Website Analytics Tools for Marketers. Retrieved from: https://supermetrics.com/blog/hubspot-vs-google-analytics

Hubspot.com. Retrieved from: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/reports/why-do-hubspot-and-google-analytics-not-match

GA Comparison from my Blog vs a full GA account

For this exercise I'll continue to analyze and reference the GA account for Modern Toyota. There are some big differences versus my newly created blog account, and that is primarily just driven by activity, history, and depth of data available

First, I like to review my Acquisition Report in GA.  This breaks down where my traffic is coming from by channel.  It also allows me to see that over a trend line throughout whatever period I have chosen to review.  I’m usually looking at one month at a time, or one quarter at a time…and typically I compare this with year-over-year data.  Additionally the Acquisition Report provide a view of all those channels broke out with other metrics like, Users, Sessions, Bounce Rate, Pages per Session and Average Session Duration.  I can get these things from my blog account, however there just isn’t much data there to review.

We are also learning about Goals in Google Analytics.  In my existing GA account with Modern Toyota or in the Demo site you can see examples of goals that are already set.  These include things like certain page views, click-to-call conversions, chat leads, and form submissions.  This report also aggregates all of the set goals so we can see a total every month.  I can’t see any of that in my blog account yet.  This is really because none have been set-up yet.

Another report I review that gives me ideas to create new marketing strategies is the Interests Overview report.  The Affinity Categories piece in particular can help spark ideas.  None of this data shows up in the blog GA yet (and probably never will during the class).

The Affinity report is what I find the most interesting.  If I start to break down the data, and dig deeper into the layers I can see that big numbers of my users have an affinity with other categories that I may be able to use for partner marketing.  Or, I can simply find local companies or brands in those categories and possibly run some kind of partnership promotion. For example, the top category is “fast food cravers”.  In this situation we could dig for top performing fast food restaurants in the area and offer discounts, or coupons, or food while you wait….  Grub Hub is everywhere now.  We could partner with Grub Hub so the shopper could decide what fast food they want.  It could go as far as being a permanent program.  Lots of companies try to add value to the consumer experience and avoid trying to drive traffic with shallow giveaways.  We could provide a direct-link to Grub Hub our website right next to the Schedule Service tool.  That way you could do both at once.  Or, provide iPads in our Customer Lounge with the Grub Hub app pre-loaded so customers can order while they wait.  There’s so many directions you could take this one small data point.  They key is to spend the time looking at it, peeling through the layers to identify the biggest opportunities, then testing for success.

REFERENCES

Google Analytics. Acquisition Overview. February 10, 2020. Retrieved from: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/?authuser=1#/report/trafficsources-overview/a5960233w11520950p12050842/

Google Analytics. Interests Overview. February 10, 2020. Retrieved from: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/?authuser=1#/report/trafficsources-overview/a5960233w11520950p12050842/

Google Analytics. Interests: Affinity Categories (Reach). February 10, 2020. Retrieved from: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/?authuser=1#/report/visitors-demographics-interest-branding/a5960233w11520950p12050842/

How to approach Social Media participation in the world of marketing

            First and foremost when making decisions about how to market your business, where to market your business, and what to market…one has to always consider what’s best for their particular industry and their particular business.  What are your goals?  Who is your target consumer?  If you can answer these things then you can easily find the best social media channel for you.  If you can’t answer these questions, then that’s the first step.

            The example I’ll use yet again will be Modern Toyota, one of the dealerships that I manage marketing and advertising for.  There is a two-pronged approach that I believe is applicable to many businesses.  The first prong is geared towards actually building a social community.  After all, this is exactly why social media was started.  Before the days of ad tools being offered on facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc…. the only thing a business could do was post content to their page.  Based on my experience this is a great strategy to reinforce your brand message, values, services, and content specific to your specific store, brand, or product.  It allows you to create a relationship with your consumers because they can comment, like, share, and review.  In the world of automotive the best social media platforms to drive this strategy are facebook and Instagram.  Both platforms allow the content to be highly visual, add commentary, and link to website pages for more information and detail.  Also facebook has the most users, and even though their biggest user base is 25-34 (Statista), users of all age groups that would buy a car are still there in large numbers.  Plus, facebook and Instagram posts can be linked to hit both properties at once.

            The second prong of this strategy is actual paid advertising.  Utilizing facebook carousel ads, or static image ads provides means of pushing offers, sales, and incentives to in-market shoppers on the same social media platforms that you are filling with more organic content.  It creates an eco-system in which you are present with the shopper along the way.  If we consider the “ideal situation” from Lake in the Week 3 Lesson we end up checking all the boxes:

-       -  You want people to make noise.  We allow and promote this by creating quality engaging organic content they can comment on or share

-       -  You want people to store and share things.  On facebook all posts are shareable, and saveable…the same on Instagram

-       -  You want people to love your website.  All paid ads on both platforms are pushed to relevant content on our website specific to the shopper

And these are just a few of the elements Lake mentions to drive engagement.

            This now leads to the conversation about how to allocate marketing resources to manage this.  For Modern Toyota and all other stores in the network, social media is a huge piece of what we do to stay in front of consumers pre-purchase, during the purchase funnel, and post-purchase (with things like Service, and then on to the next purchase).  All of this activity demands much attention, so we have a full-time Social Media Manager.  This role manages our Reputation on-line, while also creating, editing, and posting organic content.  Across facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google My Business pages we have over 100 accounts.  All of the paid ad strategy on social is managed directly by me with our agencies.  This is due to it being a piece of our total advertising strategy each month.  We drive many impressions every month with our social media, and the vast majority of that is paid traffic, but organic is quite strong given the industry and it grows every month for us.  We also use an agency to manage our Reputation by driving survey participation.  We have considered diving deeper into using things like YouTube, Snapchat, and even Pinterest.  The challenge here is the demand for fresh content.  We are a small team and already have so much to manage.  We could hire an agency to expand, but that becomes very expensive very quickly.  Google My Business is absolutely a necessity since it delivers your business info on the right side of the page organically.  GMB houses you location, phone numbers, hours, images, reviews, specials, and links to your website or even click-to-call.  Facebook and Instagram are linked so one post equals two posts.  Twitter isn’t as much of a necessity, but we use it.  It could be cut from our future strategy given the growing use of Snapchat and our desire to be on Pinterest.  For now, we want to ensure we’re delivering robust, engaging content every day across facebook and Instagram primarily.  If you stretch yourself too thin and cannot do this every day then you become less relevant to your social community and will be less likely to show up in their newsfeed or be followed by them.  We have gone as far as creating a posting calendar so we can look ahead a month at a time and plan content creation.  For example, we have a Throwback Thursday once or twice a month where we post something historical about our company (Modern has been around since 1933 so plenty to share).  This gets you in a rhythm and gives your social community something familiar to look forward to.

            Below are some reports I pulled so you can see the engagement we get on our social media, the metrics we use to see demographics, and volume breakdown of different things.  In the beginning of our strategy this helped us decide what to amplify and what to ignore.  The data drove us to focus on facebook and Instagram.  In January of 2017 we were driving about 500,000 impressions per month with social media (including organic and paid), and now we drive well over 2,000,000 per month.  I should mention this ALL social media for all our 14 stores.  Our best month was 2.6MM impressions in one month.  Anecdotally our Social Media Manager wants to hit 5MM impressions.  Seems like a giant leap, but if we consider an increase in spend and our ongoing growth in organic….who knows, maybe by 2021!

REFERENCES

Author, A. Kaushik (2010). Web Analytics 2.0, The Art of Online Accountability & Science of Customer Centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing\

Greenberg, M. (2009, October 20). Content is king of social marketing. MultichannelMerchant.com. Retrieved April 12, 2012 from http://multichannelmerchant.com/social-media/1020-content-social-marketing/

Kallas, P. (2019, July 9). 48 Social Media KPIs You Need to Know (Key Performance Indicators). Retrieved from: https://www.dreamgrow.com/48-social-media-kpis-key-performance-indicators/

Modern Toyota Sprout Social Facebook Analytics Overview report. January 2020. Retrieved from https://app.sproutsocial.com/reports/facebook_performance/overview

Statista. (2019). Most Popular Social Networks Worldwide. Retrieved from: https://www-statista-com.www.libproxy.wvu.edu/study/40227/social-social-media-usage-in-the-united-states-statista-dossier/

Week 3 Lesson: Social Media Analytics & Advertising Channels. Retrived from: https://cas-ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_136005_1&content_id=_6268282_1&framesetWrapped=true

Let's discuss metrics: Conversions

This is blog-post 2 of 2 to discuss another metric that I use every month if not more frequently.  Conversions are one of the best ways to truly measure engagement on your website.  If you are running a website that isn’t e-commerce, this is the next best thing to a transaction.  In my case in automotive we are not an e-commerce site. 

Conversions can be measured many ways.  It’s a big umbrella that we roll-up.  In GA conversions are accounted for by Goal Completions.  Under Goal Completions is various different specific goals that a shopper can produce.  For example, we measure VDP Views, or Vehicle Detail Page Views.  This is when a shopper is actually looking a detailed page for a specific vehicle.  This would be considered quality traffic and in our GA is rolled up to Goal Completions.  On the back-end of our website provider we do not include these in our Conversions.  Instead we consider Form Submissions and Click-To-Calls as a conversion.  Both of these combined out of our total website traffic gives us our rate.  Not every provider considers the same metrics in their formulas so as Kaushik mentions in the text it’s good to ask lots of questions from your vendors to understand how everything is calculated.  Kaushik also discusses this in the context of your visitors.  Do you want your rate measured with Unique Visitors as your denominator or your Total Visits? (Kaushik p.55)  In my case we want to view the Conversions with the Unique Visitors as the denominator.  In the world of auto shopping the consumer buying funnel is a long process ranging from 90-105 days.  Shoppers will visit a site many times before deciding what they want to buy.  This makes sense given the high dollar amount of this transaction.  The process is research heavy for the shopper.  Some industry reports have said a shopper will visit 26 different websites before stepping foot into a dealership, and that 90% of the shopping funnel is spent on-line.  Given this information it’s important to measure how many conversions we’re getting out of those Unique Visitors, and at what rate are they converting.  If we pair this metric with overall traffic then we can put into context how many visits we need overall to drive a conversion, and how many visits from each Unique Visitor.  This information may drive us to spend more or spend less on campaigns.  For example, if we have a sales target to reach that is higher than normal, we know we need to drive “X” traffic to reach “Y” conversions.  We also know how many Conversions we need to get appointments, and in turn sales.  The exception to all this is to consider other Goals that we have set-up under Conversions.  Some of those Unique Visitors are on the website to Schedule Service or to find Directions.  Once we deduct those traffic numbers from the total Unique Visitors we get a pretty clear picture of what has to happen to achieve certain other conversions like Form Submissions and Click-to-Calls.  Charts below show a snapshot of Q3 and Q4 in 2019.  Changes from quarter to quarter are noted with the percent changes in specific goal completions.  One goal being up or down doesn’t necessarily tell the whole store, we have to view everything in context.  For example, VDP Views were up almost across the board, but Mobile Calls and Form Submissions were down.  Does one mean success and the other not?  No, if people are looking at our inventory, but not clicking-to-call or submitting a form it doesn’t mean they didn’t visit the store or buy a car.  We can see that Maps and Directions was up huge…so maybe shoppers got what they needed off the site and then visited the store or called to make an appointment at a later time.  This is where the importance of what’s happening at retail and not just the web metrics becomes important.  If I start to see Conversions drop then I call the GM at the store and get his view on current performance.  If he’s tracking ok, then I don’t panic….if he’s tracking slow then I might dig into more metrics and sources to try and identify a problem.  Vice-versa of that sometimes all the metrics and conversions show strong positive performance but a store could be struggling.  This might mean that shoppers are engaging but they aren’t ready to buy yet, we have to remember that long funnel.  It’s interesting to pull out one or two key metrics and discuss, but for me it just makes me want to discuss ALL the metrics.  Talking about one at a time seems challenging to put things into context.

Details of Conversions:

REFERENCES

Author, A. Kaushik (2010). Web Analytics 2.0, The Art of Online Accountability & Science of Customer Centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing

Modern Toyota Google Analytics. Conversion Goals Overview report. January 2020. Retrieved from https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/?authuser=1#/report/conversions-goals-overview/a5960233w11520950p190641014/_u.date00=20191001&_u.date01=20191231&_u.date10=20190701&_u.date11=20190930/

Let's discuss metrics: Referrer or Referral Traffic

This is blog-post 1 of 2 where I will discuss a couple of specific metrics from the real world that I use basically every month.  In this instance I’ll share some performance from Modern Toyota, the biggest volume store in the Modern Auto network.  Every month we have a dashboard of metrics that are reviewed in order to keep a pulse on the business.  Seasonality always plays a part, but we know the tone of the business.  If there is a huge drop or spike in a couple key metrics, and no outside reason to drive that, then we know to start investigating.

One key metric that I review every month is Referrer or Referral Traffic. Illustrated below are some key charts that I will draw from as we go.  As Kaushik notes in the text Referrer traffic will show you what websites are sending traffic, and how that fits into the whole (Kaushik p.71).  These are two important thoughts for this metric.  In this instance this website (moderntoyota.com) receives lots of referral traffic from sources that we pay for.  We need to understand how to measure that spend in any way possible, so referral traffic is one way to do that.  If you paid to list your inventory on a website you’d want to understand what you were getting out of it.  We see that Referral traffic for this site is about 20% of the total users, with Paid Search, Organic Search, and Direct Traffic taking the top spots.  This lets us see the importance in the whole.  It’s certainly not the top source, but it plays an important and big enough part that we track it over time.  In the second report shown we see the breakdown in Referral Traffic.  Ranking #1 is Toyota.com which makes sense that we get traffic direct from the OEM and we pay for that as part of our program with Toyota.  Ranking #2 is facebook mobile traffic.  This one is important to watch.  When you have a strong social media strategy across organic content and paid social advertising then you expect this referral source to rank high.  Over time we track events that we implement on facebook and Instagram and then can monitor spikes in referral traffic to see whether or not it’s working for us.  Traffic for facebook is now over 70% mobile and we are seeing the same shifts in the automotive world.  When I started in this role 3 years ago, mobile traffic was ranging 45-50% of the total.  Now, mobile traffic is upwards of 60% at some websites.  This said, we optimize everything we do for mobile on facebook and on our websites.  Without understanding the importance of this referrer traffic being mobile, we may not have been optimized for it.

In the text Kaushik also mentions segmenting sources (Kaushik p.71).  When you start to split Referrer’s out you can then break that traffic down and see how good of quality it is.  Things to check for would be Bounce Rate, or Time on Site for each referrer.  As we move down our list we see “listing services” at numbers 3-5 on our list by User volume.  Cars.com, Autotrader.com, and CarGurus.com are all sites that we pay to post our inventory with.  We measure them in many ways so ranking them by User volume like everything else is not the total story.  However, it does show their importance as a Referrer.  We have experimented with using all 3 of them at once, and variations of using 2 out of the 3.  In most instances there isn’t a dramatic influence on the business or the overall website traffic.  I would anticipate a negative impact however if we were to reduce this to 1 out of the 3.  As a Referrer they bring views to our inventory on their sites, and then in turn when a consumer is lower funnel and ready to search locally, they’ll move to our site.  We see this behavior fairly consistently.  It’s partnering with these referrer’s that enables us to drive that traffic and in turn translate that into more robust engagement activity like conversions…and with that statement, this is a good segue into my next post.

Sources for our web traffic:

  Details of the Referral Traffic:

REFERENCES

Author, A. Kaushik (2010). Web Analytics 2.0, The Art of Online Accountability & Science of Customer Centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing

Modern Toyota Google Analytics. Acquisition Overview report. January 2020. Retrieved from https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/?authuser=1#/report/trafficsources-overview/a5960233w11520950p190641014/_u.date00=20191001&_u.date01=20191231&_u.date10=20190701&_u.date11=20190930

Modern Toyota Google Analytics. Referral Traffic report. January 2020. Retrieved from https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/?authuser=1#/report/trafficsources-referrals/a5960233w11520950p190641014/_u.date00=20191001&_u.date01=20191231&_u.date10=20190701&_u.date11=20190930/

Testing...

Just added GA with the html code, and now just testing and posting to make sure I'm on track