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Who’s Tracking Your Website Traffic?

April 25th, 2022

sMedia is driving the digital transformation in automotive. Watch for semi-monthly News Desk updates with offerings and education from our team of smartie pants’.

If you have a website then you likely have a UA (Universal Analytics) tag installed there. This is what allows you to track Google Analytics (GA) data. Even if you don’t have your own analytics account, your website provider and vendors almost definitely do. While a Universal Analytics tag from Google doesn’t provide true attribution information, this data is vital to tracking your website traffic insights. But who controls access to your analytics? How is that analytics account set up? And how many tags are installed on your site?

THE PROBLEM

Websites can accumulate a pile of tracking tags and pixels over time. Every time you add a new tool to your website or work with a new digital vendor, they’re likely asking to install their own tag. Without proper oversight and management, your website can acquire too many trackers, and that can have serious implications:

  •  SLOW DOWN – Your website can start to slow down with too many tags and that creates a negative experience for your shoppers in addition to impacting SEO.
  •  SLOPPY DATA – Having too many trackers can cause conflicts that result in duplicate, incomplete, and inaccurate reporting. If the data isn’t accurate, how can you use it to improve your business, validate your vendor performance, and track traffic metrics? 

sMedia audited hundreds of dealer websites and found a large majority of them had multiple and even duplicate installations of UA tags and/or Google Tag Manager containers. Ideally, a website should have no more than 2 GTM containers and your vendor tags should live inside those containers. 

So what’s installed on your website?

You can download and install Google Tag Assistant on your browser to find out!

SO WHY DO YOU CARE?

  •  SURRENDERING CONTROL – Last year, many dealerships struggled with Facebook access issues due to changes made to Business Manager. Dealerships quickly learned that they should own and manage their properties rather than hand the keys to a revolving door of vendors.

The same applies to your website tags. Surrendering control to a third party or relying on your website provider to install and remove vendor tags on your website means they decide how to deploy tags, and who has access to your website analytics – often with little regard for how it will impact the rest of your tracking.

THE SOLUTION

  • GOOGLE TAG MANAGER (GTM): Google Tag Manager is a free tag management system that allows you to manage and deploy marketing tags (snippets of code or tracking pixels) on your website without having to modify your website code.

SO WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

Dealers should have a GTM container they own and manage themselves – and then grant access to that container to vendors as needed. This will drastically reduce the excessive amount of tags and containers on a website, and give a dealer the visibility they need to know who and what is operating on their site – thus improving performance and data integrity.

BENEFITS OF OWNING YOUR OWN GTM

  • Increased agility
  • Manage Everything in One Spot 
  • Better Performance & Faster loading time
  • Accuracy and Access

WANT HELP WITH GTM OR INTERESTED IN GA4? 

LET’S TALK

Also in the news…

 

INDUSTRY ACQUISITIONS CONTINUE

The businesses that serve the auto industry and large auto groups, are being gobbled up by investment companies. The consolidation of large providers and dealer groups by investment firms primarily focused on quarterly shareholder returns is sure to change the landscape. Dealerships are reliant on technology & service providers to invest in innovating new auto-focused solutions. It remains to be seen what all the consolidation will mean for dealerships.

CDK Global to Be Acquired by Brookfield for $8.3 Billion 

Brookfield Business Partners announced it has entered into a partnership to acquire Nielsen Holdings for $16 billion. Nielsen is a global leader in third-party audience measurement, and an essential service provider to the video and audio advertising industry.

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