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
How does traffic to your actual Facebook page break out for you? For example, how much “Shop Now” traffic do you get? I see you are highly responsive (according to FB), so that is likely helpful. But so few people visit the actual page anymore as compared to 5 years ago.
ReplyDeleteNot sure what you mean by break out?....by demographics? We do get a lot of facebook traffic to our websites because we pay for it with dynamic ads. Our owned facebook pages get much less traffic respectively, but we continue to grow that engagement basically every month
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