As a successful car dealership, the bottom line is to sell as many cars as possible, constantly trying to break last month's record. While digital marketing isn’t the only factor in selling more cars, it does play a huge role. If you’re able to get more people to view your website and inventory, you’re more likely to have them contact you or visit your dealership. In this article, we’re going to talk about the keys to measuring the success of your dealership's marketing strategy so you can better run campaigns. 

3 Steps to Measuring Your Digital Marketing

1. Budget and Resources

The first thing you need to do before starting a digital marketing campaign is to establish your available resources and budget. Be thorough in going over the help you have whether you have two staff working on the campaign or if you’ve hired a third-party marketing company. Once you know the resources and budget for the particular campaign it’s easier to determine what results would make the campaign a success. This leads us to the next step, the objective.

2. What’s the Objective?

Now that you know the budget and resources for the campaign, it’s time to figure out what the desired objectives are. Maybe you’re trying to get more website traffic, increase engagement on social, or have more lead forms completed on your website. Once you’ve decided on one or more of the desired outcomes of the campaign, you need to move on to the next step, deciding on a timeline for the campaign. 

3. What’s the Timeline?

Once you’ve determined the desired outcome of your campaign, you need to figure out a timeline for the campaign. Are there different stages to your marketing campaign, if so, at what point does each of them start? At what point do you start making changes to the campaign according to the performance? When do you decide that the campaign has either reached its goal and should be ended or failed to meet the desired outcome and be stopped. These are all questions that you should have the answers to before you launch a digital marketing campaign. 

Keeping Track of Website Conversions

One of the most, if not the most important metric to keep track of is website conversions. If you’re not keeping track of your website conversions, you’re pretty much left in the dark about whether your marketing efforts are paying dividends or not. If you don’t know if you’re getting conversions, you don’t know if you’re getting a good ROI from your campaign. 

Working With a Marketing Agency

If you decide to outsource your marketing efforts and hire a marketing agency, you should have high expectations. The first thing you should expect from them is to get regular reporting. This doesn’t mean you need to have a massive report done weekly or a meeting to break down every detail, a simple report with key metrics should suffice. This ensures that you’re still on par to meet your desired digital marketing goals. 

If you’re ever in a situation where the marketing agency working for you is avoiding sharing certain metrics with you, this is a huge red flag. Whether these are metrics you’re going to love or hate, they need to be completely transparent in how each campaign is performing.