On this week’s episode of Auto Marketing Now, Brian Pasch talks about using data sources to understand who is visiting your website and how to supercharge your marketing strategy using anonymous shopper data.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
Speaker 1: Welcome to Auto Marketing Now. On today’s show, we’re going to talk about using data sources to understand who’s visiting your website, and how to supercharge your marketing strategy using anonymous shopper data. Of course, we’re going to have our popular email grab bag, so what are we waiting for? Let’s get started with today’s show.
Brian Pasch: In today’s strategy session, I’m going to talk to you about doing more with the visitors that are coming to your website. Have you ever thought about how few people actually convert each month who visit your website? Here’s some numbers to chew on between 1% and 2% of all visitors to your website will submit a lead form. .5% will chat to the point where becomes a lead, and then phone calls can be anywhere from 3% up to 10% of the total visitors that come to your website. And hose phone calls are a mix of sales, service, and just calling the dealership for some related conversation. But think about this. Let’s just say 90% of all the people that come to your website don’t convert. Wouldn’t it be cool to do something with that data? And that’s what we’re going to talk about on today’s show.
Brian Pasch: Dealers have told me, “Brian, I get 20,000, 30,000 visitors a month. How do I know who those people are? How can I market to those people?” So let’s step back in history a little bit. Most dealers understand the concept of remarketing. Google or Facebook or some third party puts a pixel on your website so that when someone visits the dealership website, maybe it drops a cookie or some tracking mechanism, so that when they go to other websites, you can follow them, right? So the Google display network is probably the most familiar to everyone here on today’s show because Google has a very wide range of websites that those display retargeting ads or video pre-roll ads can be displayed on, right? Millions of websites. So most dealers today are doing retargeting, but you don’t know who they are. Okay. Then let’s take the conversation one step further.
Brian Pasch: Using the PCG specification for Google analytics, I’ve shown dealers how they can start tracking what consumers do on their website that don’t convert. Obviously if someone calls you, you have a conversation. If someone submits a lead, you follow up. But if 90% of the people don’t convert, the specification shows you how to track. Did they look at photos? Did they play a video? Did they download the car facts? Did they use the payment calculator? These are really important things to track. Why? Because I’m not a believer that you should retarget everyone who comes to your website. It’s a complete waste. Someone who comes to the homepage spends two seconds just to get your phone number and leaves. Why would you spend a dollar or a penny chasing that person with some random message? What I’ve told dealers on this show is that by tracking engagement, you could start to eliminate 20, 30 even 40% waste in your digital budget because you’re paying for things, meaning meaning campaigns and advertising, that’s not bringing engaged shoppers to your website.
Brian Pasch: So number one, if you install Google tag manager and if you follow the PCG specification, you can track engagement and eliminate waste and retarget people who show some intent that’s associated with buying a car or servicing their car. But some new breakthroughs in marketing are really providing some even more exciting insights. Now what I’m going to talk about today isn’t brand-brand new, but it’s kind of brand new to dealers. There have been companies for years offering business owners the ability when somebody is on their website that they can match a percentage of those people so that you can see, Oh, someone from J&J’s corporate office visited, or hey, somebody from the dentist visit our website. Meaning the IP address in many cases was compared to the public routing network and they found the IP address to come from this building.
Brian Pasch: And there was only one business in this building and it was that company that’s been going on for years. You could actually see which companies visited your website. So for example, if you’re a plumbing supply company and you had this on your website, if you saw that Bob Brown, the local architect was on your website, someone in his office, you can just call up, “Hey, I’d like to talk to Bob and you know, I just want to reconnect, get you out to lunch, show you some of the cool things we’re doing.” You know, without being too creepy. But today things have gotten even more interesting because there’s so much data that’s publicly available, so people’s IP addresses is publicly available, people’s names and addresses publicly available. You get the idea. Today about a third, think about that, a third, of all the people who visit your website can be matched to some name, address, name, address, phone number, maybe name, address, email or some combination.
Brian Pasch: A third, just think about that. A dealer gets 30,000 people a month to their website and they can know the 10,000 people by name or address, or name and email, or name or phone. It’s pretty revolutionary. When you think about it, as long as your privacy policy is updated, these software programs use public information to match that anonymous shopper to an actual person. Now, what do you do with this information? Well, this is the tricky part. Number one, I’ve been experimenting with strategies where when that person comes on the dealership’s website and you know their name and address, that you can fire off, what I’m going to say is a dynamic printer, somebody who you can send a data file to. And you send a letter from the dealership. It’s a generic letter. It doesn’t say, “Oh, by the way, you’re on my website.” The letter says, “Hey, we’re just reaching out to all consumers in the local market to let you know about our current promotion.”
Brian Pasch: Or maybe it’s a, “Hey, we’re reaching out to select members of the community to offer this special $500 gift certificate.” Something meaning they’re on your website and let’s just say that you didn’t care if they were just on your website. You sent this letter to someone who’s on your website that engaged with new or used cars. Because remember there are people who come to your website, just come to the homepage. You have no idea what type of offer they might be interested in. So imagine if a third of the anonymous shoppers could be matched to some contact data and you could see of those ones that match, which ones were shopping for a car. What if you could each day just dynamically, even if it was 20 letters or 30 letters, a personal note from the general manager, encouraging them to contact you and reach out for a special offer.
Brian Pasch: That’s one way people are doing. Number two, those matches that have email addresses, they’re including them into a dynamic email marketing campaign. Again, just saying, we’re reaching out to select members of the community to let you know about our current specials and offers. Okay. And then the third thing, which obviously gets a little bit more aggressive, is to call that consumer. Meaning it’s not uncommon in other industries to use outbound call centers, right? Outbound call centers to call consumers. Now, depending on the laws that would apply to outbound telemarketing, you got to make sure that people are not on the do not call list. Okay. Because they haven’t expressed any permission to allow you to call them. But other people who are not on the do not call list, you can say, look, we’re just calling people in the local market to invite them down to the dealership.
Brian Pasch: We have some expanded service hours, we’re running some special promotions, but here’s the idea. A third, a third of the anonymous shoppers can be matched into some way in which you can communicate with them, and testing different channels. This is going to change the way in which we market to in-market shoppers. Now for some of you might say, well this is a little too creepy. Okay, got it. Others who’d be saying, man, this is what I’ve been waiting for. The key here is to make sure that the companies that you use for this matching are compliant. That they’re using compliant sources for data and most importantly that your privacy policy is updated to say that any visitors to your website could be subject to a data matching to identify and to offer marketing offers.
Brian Pasch: So this is a breakthrough that is pretty exciting for me as a marketing professional and maybe a little scary for consumers. But here’s the bottom line. There’s a tremendous amount of data that’s available for free or low cost that business owners can leverage. And as long as the privacy laws allow it and everything is compliant, this changes the whole return on ad spend because now you can reach out with a personal offer to people who were anonymously visiting your website. And then of course that changes the rules of engagement and can give your dealership a competitive edge. And that’s today’s strategy session.
Brian Pasch: And now for today’s email grab bag question. A digital marketing manager wrote in to ask, “Brian, I’ve been following your discussions on the Google analytics specification and I have a question. Will all website providers support event tracking and engagement tracking in Google analytics?”
Brian Pasch: Well, that’s a great question because for the last two years I’ve been out there like John the Baptist preaching that dealers need to take their data seriously. It has to be seen as a strategic asset. And I’ve been working with the website community to support open standards. Why are open standards important? Because if Google analytics is set up properly, a recording for conversion channels plus consumer engagement, and a dealer moves their website platform to another provider, if both are supporting the same specification, guess what? No break in data, no break in performance data, no break in your analysis to really determine if this new website is doing a better job than the one you had before.
Brian Pasch: Isn’t it funny, most dealers change websites and never go back and see how the old website performed versus the new? And the reason why is there has never been any standards. So today the majority of dealership website providers in the US are supporting this standard. Those include dealer re-process, dealer inspire, fusion, zone, CDK and dealer.com. Other website platforms have promised or committed that they will become compliant. We’re just waiting for their final notification. So if you want to maximize your return on ad spend, if you want to eliminate waste in your marketing investments, you need to be tracking what consumers are doing on your website.
Speaker 1: You need to have all four conversion goals working and the PCG specification is an open standard that any website platform can and should support to help you sell more cars in the digital age. I hope that answered your question, and if you have a question, and I use it on air. I’ll send you a free copy of my latest book, Who Sold It. It’s a complete discussion on automotive attribution and strategies in which dealers can implement to improve their return on ad spend. Thank you so much for watching today’s show, and I’ll see you next week on Auto Marketing Now.
