Digital Dealer - April 2019 - 28

Road Trip to DD26 | April 9-11, 2019 | Orlando

DD26

M A R K E T I N G & A DVERT ISING: Da ta & An a lyti cs

When Analytics
Lie
Google Analytics has
been lying to you for
years.
There is an easy way
to see this; open GA, find
traffic sources, and pick a
vendor (source or source/
medium) who provides
some kind of direct-to-VDP
traffic. It can be retargeting, dynamic social ads,
or a display campaign -
anything that takes your
customer directly to a
VDP. Look at time on page
and session time for that
provider. With a standard
implementation of Google
Analytics, you will see time
on page is longer than session time. How is that even
possible, you ask? How can
someone spend less time
doing a total task than they
spent doing a component of
it?
The fact is Google Analytics is broken, and by exploring this further, you'll see
how this may have caused
you to misunderstand your
advertising ROI. In this
article, we'll focus specifically on how bounces are
defined, and how you can
use Google Tag Manager
to correct that important
metric.
Google Analytics was designed for traditional e-commerce; you find something
on a search results page,
add it to your cart, and then
check out. It was designed
28

APRIL 2019

GOOGLE TAG
MANAGER GIVES US NEW
PIXEL CAPABILITY AND A
POWERFUL SET OF TOOLS
TO PROVIDE ADDITIONAL
DATA ON SITE TRAFFIC
DELIVERED BY MODERN
PROVIDERS."
to show how much traffic
your site is getting from organic search, paid search,
and your other channels.
It's a great foundational
tool, but some parts of it do
not account for the way the
modern internet works. Why
hasn't Google fixed this?
They have to an extent, but
they did it in such a way
that it didn't disrupt the GA
product for core e-com-

D I G I TA L D E A L E R . C O M

merce clients. They created
Google Tag Manager which
integrates into Google Analytics. Google Tag Manager
gives us new pixel capability and a powerful set of
tools to provide additional
data on site traffic delivered
by modern providers.
GTM allows us to create
a pixel which fires when an
event is triggered instead
of just once per page load.

FEATURED SPEAKER
By Casey Tuggle
CMO, SocialBot and
Kelly Auto Group, Inc.

The traditional GA tracking
pixel fires only when a
page loads, and that is why
GA can't tell how long a
user spent on a session if
only one page was visited.
Without the pixel firing
again on a second page,
there was no second event
to measure and Google
knew nothing about what
happened on the first
page visited. In this math,
Google understands 1
minute on page 1, plus no
visit to page 2, means an
average session time of 0
seconds. The session time
for this single-page traffic
is unrealistically low and
the bounce rate high.
A user who visits just
one page is a "bounce."
We have been conditioned
to believe bounces are
bad. This is not true for the
auto industry with standard
GA. If bounces were bad,
how are retargeting vendors still in business? They
put users straight onto the
VDP every time, and if we
believe the data on VDPs
being the most important
page for conversions, there
is a substantial amount of
value from a direct-to-VDP
advertiser. A bounce does
not take traffic quality into
account, and the VDP engagement we are looking
to create will instead look
like a failure. We need
GTM to solve this problem.

HOW TO CREATE
AND CONNECT A TAG
MANAGER ACCOUNT TO
GOOGLE ANALYTICS:

Start by going to
tagmanager.google.com.
Click the create account
button, and complete the
http://tagmanager.google.com http://www.DIGITALDEALER.COM
Digital Dealer - April 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Dealer - April 2019
