There are many solutions available for capturing data about your website visitors. Many automotive dealerships and digital marketing vendors stay with Google Analytics, which is the standard free solution. However, the potential of a website’s complex data cannot be fully tapped without some kind of custom analytics set up.
This is by no means a knock against Google. They've created a free solution that works well for most people. The reason an automotive dealer might want to opt for a custom analytics solution lies in the advanced detail, and much more accurate reporting.
Google Analytics provides session data, and supposedly does it’s best to filter out bots and other unwanted or irrelevant traffic. With custom analytics, parameters can be set to show only visitors that are legitimate. Reporting can be filtered with regards to time on site, IP address, location, and many other useful specifics that Google Analytics does not provide for filtering your traffic.
Custom analytics will also give more detail about website traffic and it's behavior. With Google Analytics, a dealer would not be able to find a specific user and see every event that the person triggered with extreme accuracy. Custom analytics allow one to literally trace a user’s steps and see everything that they viewed. In aggregate, this level of information can help make any marketing plan much more effective.
Google Analytics is great, but serious automotive dealerships are going to want to upgrade to a custom analytics solution in order to take full advantage of their website's visitor data and use it for effective marketing. Are any of you guys using custom analytics?
