When thinking about analytics, and comparing Orbee to something more traditional, like GA4 or it’s predecessor Universal Analytics (aka “GA”), I think the biggest difference is that Orbee was built from the ground up with Automotive Retail in mind whereas Google built their analysis tool to be a one-size-fits all tool for measuring website activity regardless of industry or specialty. Let me explain.
GA4 is laborious, and simultaneously broad and narrow
For as comprehensive as Google’s solution is, there is quite a lot of effort required for the average layman to learn it. And even more effort needed to get to a point where one would feel truly comfortable utilizing it to make business decisions. Now make no mistake, GA4 is a phenomenal tool and every dealership should have it. When properly paired with ASC events and a good set of Explorations it can be an immensely powerful measurement tool. With that being said, the vast majority of what you will find in GA4 is what I would consider to be “nice to know” information for the average dealership. Much of the actionable information will be used by your adtech partner of choice to help drive more efficiencies in ad spend and improve user experience. However, even for the more veteran GA users in our space there has been a steep learning curve. There is a lot to be built out and there have been constant unannounced changes/adjustments by Google. Despite many of our vendor friends doing an absolutely stellar job of setting up GA4 for their clients, in the end there is still the learning curve for the end user, and sifting through the “nice to know” to get down to the “need to know”. Even then, you might not get exactly what you’re looking for.
Where Orbee begins to differentiate itself from GA4
Now I say “begins” because as a platform, Orbee is far more comprehensive than any analytics only tool. Collecting and leveraging first party data to power advertising across all different mediums and integrating with your CRM partner, are just two features of the Orbee platform that GA4 was never set up to do, but we excel at.
From just an analytics standpoint, our goal is to make industry specific metrics prominent and easy to understand. We do not want you to struggle to see how many VDPs an ad campaign generated as an example. Nor do we want to show you nondescript numbers that represent “users”, we want to show you who those users actually are, and what their shopper journey looks like on both macro and micro levels, and then have your ad campaigns spring into action based on those journeys. We want to integrate with your partners, not silo them out, giving you a single point solution for monitoring the health of your website as well as your campaigns. We want you to know which of your vehicles are not generating activity across all of your marketing and sales floor activity so you can focus your efforts on the vehicles that need the attention and not waste precious ad dollars on vehicles that will organically sell themselves.
These are just some examples of how we at Orbee look at things vs how GA4, in spite of all its scale, simply does not. So while GA4 is in fact a very valuable necessity, at some point you have to ask yourself “can Google do that?”. I’ll save you some time, the answer is no, but (shameless plug) Orbee can.