The Automotive Standards Council comprises dealers, technology providers, and OEMs to create a single Standards for Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Much like current versions of Google Analytics, GA4 will be the best way for any company in the automotive sector to understand the impact of advertising, marketing, and online content. Its important for every industry to have a council like this one to ensure accurate scoring engagement levels and reporting across various website platforms and goods. The automotive world is much more complex than most, making it less of a plug-and-play industry regarding GA4.
The groundwork is necessary
This council of like-minded, experienced analytic and programming professionals will work tirelessly to create universal standards for the automotive industry. The groundwork for GA4 will ensure any company in the industry can review and utilize reporting from GA4 to analyze the performance of their website and marketing efforts. When GA4 was first announced, this council was formed by Brian Pasch to ensure previous standardization errors are not repeated. Hopefully, this will alleviate the growing pains experienced with previous versions of Google Analytics.
How can this council help industry members?
The goals of the Automotive Standards Council are to guide and educate the automotive industry to ensure a smooth transition to GA4. This education and guidance will come through the publishing of online standards, best practices, and training materials that support GA4. If there are changes required of GA4 to support the auto industry, the council will send these changes to Google in hopes of creating updates that will benefit the industry and offer better overall reporting from this new analytics tool. Although this council can offer requests for changes, the true goal is to help the auto industry transition to GA4 smoothly.
How can GA4 specification ensure smooth reporting in the auto industry?
Multiple website support
Some dealership groups have to support multiple website platforms due to OEM mandates. Transitioning to a single Standards analytics system in the industry can easily and reliably create the necessary roll-up reporting to ensure reports include online engagement across several websites and various tools.
Conversions from lead to sale significance
For years, it’s been nearly impossible for dealers to track leads from start to finish because of vague conversion definitions. The Automotive Standards Council can assist dealers in creating a conversion-specific program utilizing GA4 reporting. This means a dealer can measure how many conversions come from various systems, which helps them know where the most conversions come from. The conversions can be specific to each department, sales, service, and parts within a dealership.
GA4 allows for greater data integrity and stability
The council members are responsible for sending events into GA4 utilizing their native code set instead of a tag manager. This allows the data to remain stable and ensure its integrity. Using a tag manager often allows the data to become corrupted. This new system removes this challenge and makes it much easier for dealers to trust the data generated and analyzed.
Platforms support the council specifications
The Automotive Standards Council is creating a set of specifications for all major automotive website platforms and digital retailing software providers. This ensures a more consistent data package and analytics reporting, which helps the council understand what events should be sent into GA4.
Dealers experience performance improvements
Dealers should implement all features of the new specifications created by the council. This will allow dealers to improve the performance of their Google Ads campaigns. The digital agencies being utilized by dealers must send enhanced conversion signals into Google Ads based on the department associated with the campaign. This also requires dealers to have specific campaigns for each department and alleviates the mixed conversion signals.
Room for individuality
Although the Automotive Standards Council is creating a set of specifications and standardizations for the automotive industry, specifically dealers, to utilize GA4 reporting, there’s still room for individuality. There’s enough room left for vendors to add their own unique events in GA4 to support their products and track performance.
The new Automotive Standards Council is working to create the right systems, set of standards, and functionality for the automotive industry to transition from GA3 to GA4. This new Google reporting tool is relied upon for its information regarding the industry and how various advertising campaigns are performing. Will all dealers embrace the new standards? How long will we see growing pains during the transition to GA4?
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