Google Analytic's Data and Usage Question

[Rick Buffkin]

I need your help with an issue and I'm hoping someone here can help me structure this.

I want to see crossed shopped vehicle model data in Google Analytics. I can see all the standard data (Bounce %, Page views, etc, etc...) but I want to see cross shopper vehicle model data.

Example: If someone comes to the website and they look at a Toyota 4Runner. In my market lets say we think the most crossed shopped vehicle for a Toyota 4Runner on our website is a Toyota Tacoma but in reality our website data tells us we should be marketing to Prius V customers with 4Runner offers because 60% of the visitors shopping for a 4Runner also looked at Prius V and only 25% looked at Tacoma's and 15% looked at Sequoia's.

How can I set up Google Analytics to see the cross shopping data between vehicle models?

It would be nice to see overall searches but take it a step further to see VDP views and use that as a comparison. Maybe it's even better to use VDP's as the basis of it all. That's just an idea.

Any tips or ideas how to accomplish this in Google Analytics?

As always, thank you for any tips and suggestions.

 

[Chris Leslie]

I've thought a lot about this in the past too. I'm going to dig in on this as I have an idea how it might be done using customized reports. I'll share a link if I'm able to crack it.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

Thanks for chiming in @Chris Leslie. I've been playing around here and there with this. I think I may have stumbled upon a way as well this morning. My theory is in the Behavior > Events > Events Flow. For my method to work, I would need to grab the vehicle model name from the VDP each time a VDP is viewed then and fire an event into GA with that Event named via the model. Then from there, using the Events flow, you should be able to see the most popular crossed shopped model info for each model. Just set the first event to show which model you would want to see and then from there you can add 2nd, 3rd, 4th and so on events that was fired after that first initial event fired. All the events would be named via the models, so you should be able to see them in order.

This is a theory and I haven't tested it yet. I will spend some time this afternoon on it.

 

[Chris Leslie]

That sounds like it might work..

I did poke around a bit and found this. It'll take some work to export the data and then run a pivot table or something but at least it can give you a general idea of the amount of data you are looking at and if its worth exploring.

Go to
Behavior > All Pages

at the top underneath ALL USERS you will see EXPLORER and NAVIGATION SUMMARY.
click on Navigation Summary

Once you are loooking at that you can see on the left hand side the starting page paths. In my case I clicked on /new-vehicles/camaro/
it then spits out on the right hand side a list of the next pages people went to after looking at /new-vehicles/camaro/
on the left hand side it shows the previous page.

I suppose if you run it for a big enough time frame you could export it and run some excel hacks on the data..

Heres a screen of what I am looking at.

 

[Mark A Hoffman]

Rick - What you suggested should work. The trick, as you expected, is parsing the model from the VDP url. Depending on who your website provider is, that can go from "super easy" to "why the !@#^^ do they do it this way!?"

If you aren't familiar with Regex (regular expressions) you might want to take a look. If your URL structure is more complicated, regex is often the easiest way to get a match. Feel free to ping me if you need help on that.

Now, if you're really feeling ambitious and have some technical savvy...it's not terribly hard to drop your own tracking cookie with Javascript. You could identify each unique user (something GA won't let you do) and then simply record every URL they hit and then do the analysis with your own data. Obviously, not something I'd recommend for the faint of heart.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

Ok, first of all thank you @Chris Leslie and @Mark A Hoffman for chiming in. I'm gonna try the Events tracking to track the Cross shopping data. Here is how I'm deploying it.

I'm using Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Javascript. Tip: you can deploy your own JS through GTM. For anyone reading this, If your not familiar with either then you should really try and learn some basics of both. It's been quite a while since I went into my GTM account and they have added alot of functionality to the tool. You can send events into GA with the URL in the one of the Event fields and not even have to use JS. I'm using JS to keep my data a little bit cleaner.
I've created seperate tags in GTM to fire for New car VDP's, Used Car VDP's and Certified Car VDP's. Each time a visitor visits a VDP for one of the vehicles, an Event will be pushed into GA like this: eventCategory = (New, Used or Certified) Cross Shopping, eventAction = VDP View and eventLabel = URL vehicle data (ex: 2017 Toyota Camry).

Right now my thoughts are, I should be able to view the Event Flow by Label and then have my starting event with the model that I choose( 2017 Toyota Tacoma) and be able to see all the events that happened after that event and view the labels for those events as well. I think this will work. I may need to include the keyword New, Used or Certified in the eventLabel or I may need to change the eventCategory to the model name / info all together. I don't know yet. As far as the JS and GTM, in GTM, I'm using the JS Global variable as my variable for the eventLabel. I know the code is a little bit messy below but, I like to be able to see what is being grabbed from the URL and print it to the Console.


http://www.beamantoyota.com/new/Toy...ashville-bdd8a16f0a0e0adf3843aba0bcc10bfb.htm

This is the code that works for my URL structure:

<script>
var pathArray1 = window.location.pathname.split( '/' );
console.log("number 0.1: " + pathArray1[0]);
console.log("number 1.1: " + pathArray1[1]);
console.log("number 2.1: " + pathArray1[2]);
console.log("number 3.1: " + pathArray1[3]);

var pathArray = pathArray1[3].split('-');

console.log("Array 3.0: " + pathArray[0]);
console.log("Array 3.1: " + pathArray[1]);
console.log("Array 3.2: " + pathArray[2]);
console.log("combined: " + pathArray[0]+' '+pathArray[1]+' '+pathArray[2])

var PathYear = pathArray[0];
var PathMake = pathArray[1];
var PathModel = pathArray[2];
var pathDataCombined = pathArray[0]+' '+pathArray[1]+' '+pathArray[2];
</script>

This code will split the URL path(everything after .com) on the "/". Once the first split happens, I need to split it one more time and I grab the array in position [3] and split it on the "-". Now I have all the model info from the URL in position [0], [1] and [2]. For those of you that are trying this with me, you may need to adjust some of the parameters. Post your URL here on the forums and maybe we can help you get it split correctly. I'm sure there's easier ways to split the URL as well. This just worked for me. Also, GTM has a preview mode, so you can check and make sure your tags are firing correctly and you can view the data as well. I may have to add some tweaks to it. I don't know yet. To early to tell. Next task is setting up GA.

 

[Chris Leslie]

I think we just took this forum to lvl 10 nerd.. =)

 

[craigh]

Since you're using a Dealer.com website, there's an even easier way to do this. Assuming they haven't changed it, the Metadata tool lets you have all sorts of fun with javascript.

For this one, you can use the Metadata tool, go to new-inventory, then go to vehicle-details.htm and look at the Keywords box.
It should say something like:

New [Item Year] [Item Model] [Dealership City] [Dealership State], New [Item Year] [Item Bodystyle] [Item Make] [Dealership City] [Dealership State], [Item VIN], [Stock Number]

This simply outputs the contents of the description tag, but DDC is kind enough to let us close that tag and have some fun.
Start by adding "> to close out the Keywords meta tag, then lets set a global variable to Model, negating any future issues with Santa-Fe or F-150 that you might run into.

">
<script>window.modelGA = "[Item Model]"</script>
<meta tag="blank

This sets a global variable to the current page of window.modelGA that you can reference anywhere.
You can do the same thing to setup window.makeGA or anything else you want from their meta template tags.
You have to do this change here because GTM can't decode [Item Model], but the DDC metadata manager does.
The <meta tag="blank just opens a dummy tag that DDC can close for you, keeping all your page source nice and valid.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

This sets a global variable to the current page of window.modelGA that you can reference anywhere.

So I would still need to push the event into GA, correct??

 

[craigh]

So I would still need to push the event into GA, correct??

Yes, but when you're pushing it in the event you can just reference window.modelGA instead of having to parse the URL, etc.

If you wanted to shortcut you could just

var window.pathDataCombined = "[Item Year] [Item Make] [Item Model]";

prepending window just sets it as a variable accessible by the entire current page, so it ignores the scope of functions, etc.
I didn't triple check that GTM can see these variables, but I see no reason why they can't as long as their code executes on the page.