If your website is your digital showroom, then your Google Analytics (or any other tracking tool) needs to accurately represent your digital traffic. There is an inherent issue that many dealers may not know about with Google Analytics — it is designed for e-commerce. What does this mean? Simply put, your Google Analytics needs to be configured for automotive.
There are the basic building blocks like ensuring proper ASC (Automotive Standards Council) events are coming into your GA4 property. This will ensure that no matter the provider, everyone is comparing the same metrics. However, the property should only track hard conversions such as a form submission, click to call, or chat submission. We can all agree we do not want to artificially inflate our Key Event numbers. Inflated Key Event numbers may lead to misguided spend and non-transparent reporting — ultimately poor marketing decision making. Even with the right Key Events set up in your GA4 property, the numbers still may be inflated.
The culprit of the inflation is the default Counting Method in GA4. Since GA4 is designed for e-commerce the Counting Method is set to once per event. This makes sense when you want to see the number of items added to a cart but not necessarily when you want to track when one person calls your dealership the first time in a session.
Ready for accurate insights? Let iFrog audit your GA4 today and unlock your true digital performance!