DealerOMG: Which Metrics are the Most Important in a Digital Campaign

Great question. Right now, it seems like 95% of the reporting out there is VDP views, how many VDP views did I get? What was the cost per VDP view? I’m gonna say something that might be shocking. I don’t care about the views. I don’t care at all about VDP views. I can drive VDP views super cheap all day long. And there’s a good chance it’s not going to help you sell a single car. It’s not that meaningful of a metric. So with Facebook, for me, it all depends on the objective of the campaign. Right?

If I’m running a brand campaign, then my metrics are going to be reached. How many people saw it – frequency? How often did they see it? It might be how many, what percentage of the video did they view, how many people viewed 50% of it, or 75% of it. If I want to sell my car, I want to buy your car campaign, then I’m sending people to the trade tool. And I’m going to measure how many people actually completed the trade tool, because that’s meaningful.

How many people viewed the page is kind of meaningful, but the beauty of Facebook is the pixel, and with GA and everything else, you can track those hard actions that you’re trying to create. We actually just started rolling out GA for all of our clients. So we don’t just use Facebook reporting, we tried to integrate GA as well. And in our case, we’re running GA all the way up through Big Query and then pulling out a whole bunch of very custom conversions. Things that I think are more meaningful than VDP views, for example, one of which is if you want to know VDP views, cool. But one of the things we’re able to report on is what we call SRP to VDP. And here’s why that’s significant.

If I run inventory ads, those carousels on Facebook, the only action you can take from that results in a VDP view. So anybody that clicks anything, I get a VDP view. That’s fine. What’s more meaningful is if somebody is on my website, does a search, comes to a search results page, then clicks on a vehicle and goes to a VDP view. That’s a measurement I’m actually interested in. I want to know what source is sending those to me. So that’s something we report on as well. But at the end of the day, for me, the most meaningful metrics I can provide are the really low funnel, meaningful actions clicks to call website forms. Open to chat, you know, did those things really help me sell cars? Yeah.