Your shop’s website plays a key role in the success of your business. It’s an area you can market your key differentiators, generate leads and win new business. But do you even know how your website is performing?
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Google Analytics for auto repair websites can help in this area. Let’s break down some key Google Analytics features and their role in measuring your shop’s website traffic and engagement.
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But first: what matters for website performance?
Benchmarks for website performance can vary. Important factors include:
- How users land on your website (from social media, organically, or through paid Google campaigns)Â
- The quality of traffic coming in (are they customers in your area looking for general repairs and maintenance?)
- What their journey navigating the website looks like
Google Analytics provides a goldmine of knowledge for your team to gather insights into your customers. You can’t just focus on the number of website visitors every month, right?
So let’s get you started with a few basic features you should keep an eye on for your auto shop website, and then we will move on to a few more complicated ones.
8 useful features of Google Analytics for your auto repair website
1. Bounce rate
You might have heard this term before. But let’s break it down anyway.
Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. According to Autoshop Solutions, a normal range for website bounce rates in the auto repair industry is 40-65%. Anything over 65% means your website isn’t resonating well with most visitors.Â
It’s good practice to monitor your bounce rate so you can make improvements if most visitors immediately exit the website.
2. Unique visitors
Next, we have visitors. These are any number of people who have visited your website. However, if one person visits your website about 10 times, it will still count as one unique visitor.Â
This gives you a clear picture of how many unique people visit your website for information. We will cover where they come from and how to track that soon.Â
3. Visitor journey
We find a number of insights from the visitor journey. This function provides insight into the entire journey your visitor took through the website. You see your website from your audience’s eyes by analyzing how they navigate it.Â
A great insight you get here is the page where you lose most visitors. Where people fall off is where you spend your resources. You can focus on improving copy in those places and run A/B tests on call-to-action buttons. These are the exit pages.Â
For example, if you notice visitors are dropping at the ‘About Us’ page, and don’t engage with the website beyond that, then go ahead and update the copy for it.Â
Add more compelling content and call-to-action buttons. Speak to your shop’s unique value proposition. What special auto repair services do you offer? How does your business differentiate itself from competing shops in the area? Cover these details with engaging copy.
Your visitor journey or visitor flow also allows you to study how the visitor landed on your lead generation form, or your ‘schedule a shop visit’ page. It’s probably a good indicator of what they are interested in. Were they reading your blog post on engine repairs before? Did they spend time on your tire services page?
You can understand that from the pages they visit before they book a meeting or request a call from your auto repair shop.Â
4. Pages per visit
Pages per visit signify the average number of pages a visitor goes through in one visit. You want your site visitors to interact with your website, explore various pages, and consume the content you have put out there for your customer’s benefit.Â
For the automotive industry, a good performance indicator for the pages per visit is 1.5-2.5 pages, according to Shop Marketing Pros.Â
Focus on your audience’s pain points, answer the questions they might have, and you will see them stick around for a long time.
5. Time on site
Just as the name suggests, this is the time your audience spends on your website. You want them to engage with your website, move around, but also always come back to the action you want them to take. For auto repair shops, an ideal time on site would be somewhere around 1-2 minutes.
6. Demographics
This might seem boring studying the age, gender, and geographic location of your audience. However, it’s a feature packed with insights!
You will find demographics under the audience section of Google Analytics. With a solid understanding of what your audience looks like, you can create marketing campaigns specifically for them.
Understanding geographic location will tell you how to talk to your customer base. For example, if you’re based in a big metropolitan city, you will address different pain points. However, if you’re based in and attracting an audience from a small town, your entire marketing approach will change.
Even gender and age have a significant impact on how you approach your customers. If you see more female customers coming onto your website, you can run ad campaigns tailored specifically for them.
Your Google Analytics is a powerful source that will tell you about your audience’s whereabouts and helps you plan targeted campaigns.
7. Acquisition
Okay, so now do you know how people are coming to your website? We touched upon this previously but let’s dive in. You want to know if a social media campaign brought your audience to your auto repair website, or if it was direct traffic, referral traffic, organic search, or paid search.
Let’s quickly go over what each of these terms means.Â
- Direct traffic is when your audience comes directly to your website (by adding your URL in the search bar).Â
- Referral traffic when someone found your links on another website or blog and followed them back to your auto repair shop’s website.Â
- Organic search means that your website popped up when someone made a query regarding auto shops or car repair, and then came to your website to explore.
- Paid search is all the traffic you get from your paid Google ads campaigns.Â
- Social traffic is any traffic that comes to your website from an ad campaign run on your social media channels.
These are all the various ways you ‘acquire’ your audience. You’re advertising on multiple channels. So you have to keep tabs on them and understand which is working better for you, allowing you to redirect resources to that particular source.
8. Behavior
Another section of Google Analytics that is worth exploring is the Behaviour section. Here you will see which pages on your websites have the most visitors. This is a great indicator of which page provides your audience with the most value.
So whatever that page is, for instance, ‘Car Oil Change for SUVs’, then you know you want to create more content for that and market that service to your customers. Again, use this wealth of data to get valuable insights and use them to strengthen your auto repair business.
This also sheds light on all the blogs that are getting the most attention on your website. That tells you what kind of helpful content your audience likes. You use your resources to create relevant content.Â
What’s GA4?
Now that we’ve covered some important Google Analytics features for your auto repair shop, it’s crucial to mention the upgrade that Google Analytics has undergone – GA4.
GA4 is the next generation of Google Analytics, built on a completely new architecture. It offers all the features and more of Universal Analytics. While Universal Analytics focused more on an era dominated by desktops as the primary device for surfing the web, GA4 focuses on capturing sessions across different devices and platforms.
With GA4, you’ll gain deeper insights into customer behavior, track user interactions across various platforms, and better understand the customer journey.
This upgraded version provides a more comprehensive and powerful toolset to measure your website’s performance and make informed marketing decisions. Best of all, GA4 is free to use, offering an excellent opportunity to stay ahead of the curve and maximize your auto repair shop’s online presence.
Consider integrating GA4 into your website analytics to take full advantage of its enhanced capabilities and propel your shop to new heights.
» Looking to transform your shop? Schedule a free demo today.
Final thoughts
Google Analytics is a great tool to help you understand your website performance. Use these Google Analytics features for auto repair websites to ramp up your shop’s business and revenue!
FAQs
Yes, Google Analytics 4 is free. You don’t have to pay for use of GA4 properties on your auto repair shop’s account.Â
Google Analytics has many useful features to help you interpret your auto repair shop’s data. You can look at page views, bounce rates, time per visit, unique visitors, and other key indicators to analyze your website’s performance.
