DISCLAIMER: The tips you find here may not be for everyone. Your mileage may vary, as always, but understand it’s mostly targeted to automotive dealership websites.
Since the release of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), many website owners have struggled with finding the specific data they need, especially those in industries like automotive.
Over the last 12 months, I’ve focused on helping clients simplify their GA4 setups to better track website traffic. This newsletter is designed to give you an easy approach to isolating traffic for specific pages on your automotive dealership website.
Over the last 20 years, I have helped many clients with specific requests like the ones I will share below.
In short, usually they are terrified of the Google Analytics platform, and they just want to be able to see the raw website traffic data for specific pages on their website, at a glance.
Then I started working in the automotive marketing world and that request was more important than ever.
The Request: Find Traffic Going Directly To My Sales Pages
As you know, websites have many different types of content.
For automotive websites, I like to bucket those into sales, service, and about content.
- Sales will include product listing pages and product detail pages.
- Service will include service scheduling and service specials pages.
- About will include the homepage, about, staff, directions and other pages.
For this request, let’s take a look at the product listing pages (SRP) and the product detail pages (VDP).
GA4 Is Simpler Than It Looks
Automotive websites often follow a straightforward URL structure, so setting up filters is easier than you might think. The goal here is to isolate the sales pages, like inventory pages, using a simple filter.
First, gather the URLs you want to track—these might be the pages that show your vehicle listings, such as /used-inventory/index.htm or /new-inventory/index.htm.
If you’re unfamiliar with writing filters or regular expressions (regex), you can use tools like ChatGPT to generate the correct filter for you.
Simply paste your URL list into ChatGPT and ask for a GA4 page path regex filter that captures these URLs.
/used-inventory/index\.htm$|/bargain-inventory/index\.htm$|/new-inventory/index\.htm$|/all-inventory/index\.htm$|/certified-inventory/index\.htm$
NOTE: Your URLs might vary slightly based on your site structure, but the process is the same.
Then it’s time to log into your GA4 account and apply the sales index page filter.
TL;DR
- Open your GA4 account and navigate to your report.
- Click the edit (pencil) option.
- Add a filter for the page URLs you’re interested in.
- Save the filtered report with a clear name like Traffic to SRPs.
If everything is set up correctly, you will see a table showing only traffic to those specific pages.
The entire purpose of this process is to quickly access isolated traffic data for important pages directly from the GA4 menu.
Filtering traffic to specific pages is useful in several scenarios:
- Tracking page performance: Measure whether changes to inventory or service pages are improving traffic or engagement.
- Monitoring campaign success: Analyze how marketing campaigns drive traffic directly to these pages.
By creating these custom reports, you save time and gain a clearer picture of what is working on your site.
This setup is especially useful when managing multiple GA4 accounts or large websites with location-specific sections.
You can further refine your data by applying additional filters if needed.
This Is Just The Beginning
Once you create and save this report, you’ll have a fast and easy way to track how visitors interact with your most important pages.
This simple setup can save time and provide a clearer understanding of your website’s performance.
If you need help setting up GA4, building custom reports, or filtering data, feel free to reach out.
