An Overview Of the Automotive Standards Council Events
In 2022, the Automotive Standards Council came together to create a set of standardized events for automotive dealers to be able to more accurately compare their performance over time. Through the efforts of many people, there became a list of over 40 events and parameters that can now be passed into your GA4.
Confirm Your ASC Events
Seeing as there are only 13 tools that are “Certified” as of September 2024, I would highly recommend you confirm all your data is coming in accurately. In order to do this, you want to first confirm that all your providers are passing information over. You will also want to check a few things like your hostnames and referrals to insure that you are only getting data from your domain, and any events being passed over via Measurement Protocol is accurately attributing it to the correct sessions.
Deciding On Conversions
One of the hardest parts is deciding what you want to include as conversions in GA4. Do you want to have each segmented form type (asc_form_submission_sales,asc_form_submission_service,etc…) or do you just want to know all form submissions (asc_form_submission)? You need to assess the merits of both, as each will have their own advantages and drawbacks.
Using Your Data
Once you’ve decided what is important to your business, its time to start analyzing. You can easily use the native reports to begin analyzing the data to view what channels drive your traffic. Note that if you have data not being properly attributed at this stage, it is not entirely effective to do this. I would highly recommend the Traffic Acquisition report on a weekly basis and confirm that conversion volume and traffic is in-line with what you were anticipating.
Advanced Reports
If you want to understand what your customers are doing, you will want to explore the funnel report. The Funnel Report is phenomenal for telling you where users drop out of your funnel. You will build the same report using the ASC events (asc_itemlist_pageview, asc_item_pageview, asc_form_submission) where you will see at what stage your users fall out of the funnel. From there, you can focus efforts on improving that stage of the funnel to ultimately drive more leads.