Too often at the dealership we are bombarded with data and statistics delivered to us by each vendor, yet never tied together to give us a complete view of our Internet operations. Each vendor scurries to justify their existence by providing “Key Metrics.” At my last store, I sometimes felt like I was trying to put together a million piece puzzle, in the dark, attempting to understand how our Internet business was performing. Through time and experience, however, I learned to determine what was mission critical (and what was just good information to have available for review) to run a successful Internet sales center.

Today I want to spend time talking about the mission critical components that can put your website on the fast track for Internet sales. This not an exhaustive list, but I will share a few of the most important items with you here.

Unique website visitors is an important metric, but not the most important. It is much more important to understand where these unique visitors came from, and what they did when they got to your website. Knowing that "Bill Thompson" visited your website is good, but knowing what Bill Thompson did while visiting your website is much more contextually relevant, especially if you want to sell him. Think website intelligence.

Learning to segment website traffic and quickly identify whether it falls into one of three categories: buyers, potential buyers and disqualified traffic, are good reasons for getting up in the morning. Removing the disqualified shoppers should always be goal number one. These are the people who find their way to your site without any intention of purchasing or submitting a lead, and you do not want to waste valuable time trying to communicate with them. Here is a good example, someone who did a Google search with the keywords “Infinity Speakers,” yet found their way onto your site. Bounce rate is another important metric. High bounce rates from your homepage come down to one of two things: a bad website or poorly targeted traffic.

Here is a quick example of where disqualified traffic could be coming from. Let's say you are on FaceBook or Twitter. From either place, you could be driving 300-400 unique visitors per month to the dealership website, but if no one ever converts or you can't track the shoppers' click path funnel, you are missing key information needed for online sales' success. Connecting the dots between visitors and action is mission critical.

The next key is managing potential buyers. These people have gone through a click funnel, possibly visited your site multiple times, yet have not pulled the trigger. Understanding this group's behavior should be a continuous endeavor. The goal is to constantly test elements of your website to improve performance and move more of these prospects into a buying frame of mind. The best way to learn what they need and want is to watch them in real-time, as they navigate your site, viewing pages and content.

This reminds me of a story I was told about why colleges never put concrete pathways in the first year after they construct new buildings. Why? Because students always cut the trail and find the most efficient way to get around the campus. After a year of this trail development, the schools then pave them. It makes sense, and you should be working to understanding the trails people cut on your website. What are they looking at, in what order? Where do they stay the longest? Business intelligence strikes again!

Keywords are another area to pay particular attention to. We all know that Google can be a great tool to drive hundreds or thousands of qualified shoppers to your site every month. Learning what keywords drive traffic is good, but the real secret sauce is learning what keywords convert into action. This should be monitored on a daily basis to understand which keywords convert to chat, website form submission, email and even phone calls. This is the information that gives you true ROI for your Google marketing spend.

To wrap up this month, I can’t stress the importance of taking all the statistics and consolidating them down to the most crucial data points. This is the business intelligence that will keep you in business, allow you to build a great Internet department and keep cars moving every day. They say the devil is in the details; I say the sales are in the statistics.