Traffic from bots, crawlers, and other automated sources can really add up for many dealerships. Whether these come from Google crawling your site, or other beneficial sources, this traffic isn’t meaningful. We’ve yet to see Google Bot buy a car. Just like filtering out in-dealership traffic from your staff, this will provide improved metrics. The small but meaningful pool of data will help you make more informed decisions about your marketing investments. This change will affect both the Client Portal as well as any primary shared view in Google Analytics.
Working with Convertus means a truly transparent and honest relationship. It’s the core value that has driven our success since we began. Although other providers will always default to the most inflated traffic numbers as they endeavour to provide fluff over substance, we believe in empowering our dealers. The information presented in the Client Portal has been refined to provide a more successful and effective analysis of your online presence.
Let’s get down to some specifics, shall we? Bot traffic is usually from a website crawler that gathers information about the website it is crawling. It is common for dealership websites to see heavy bot traffic from companies looking for vehicle detail page information. The average store will see around 1% of page views from these common bot traffic sources. We have observed some inconsistency in this and have identified as much as 20% of page views coming from bots. This automated traffic can drastically increase a website’s bounce rate in a short period of time. It will also influence other important website metrics, including but not limited to pages-per-session and average session duration. With clearer data the goal for conversion rates becomes easier to measure.
What to do if you see traffic that you believe is coming from an automated source? Reach out to us and allow our Organic Team to investigate and we will provide you with answers.