In May 2022, I published an invitation to the automotive retail community to join forces and create a unified standard for event names to guide how auto dealers, agencies, and OEMs utilize Google Analytics. The new version of analytics (GA4) was soon to become the only version supported by Google, and everyone was working on how to transition to this new measurement platform.
Fortunately, hundreds of dealers, tech leaders, and software developers joined together to form the Automotive Standards Council. Our original vision to create a standard naming convention for GA4 events, with detailed parameters, is freely available and known as ASC Specification for GA4, version 1.1.
The members of the Automotive Standards Council (ASC) have contributed to the wide support of this specification and yet we have more work to accomplish.
Unintended benefits of ASC specification
When the Council first went to work on a unified naming convention, members were so focused on being ready for the GA4 cutover we didn’t realize the other meaningful benefits we would deliver to the automotive industry and for CDP vendors. Here are just a few:
- By creating a unified event naming framework, dealer groups could finally create roll-up reports for online engagement without manual GTM tagging, which frequently breaks when website CTA buttons or tools changed.
- CDP platforms could ingest events from the ASC data layer making real-time retailing possible, at scale, without manual tagging.
- Marketing and website traffic dashboards (i.e., Foundation Direct) had a much easier time comparing campaign performance and the conversion rates of website tools.
- The ASC specification has also allowed progressive dealers to create abandoned shopping cart audiences for trade, credit, payments, and service.
- The ASC specification allows agencies to more fully optimize Google Ads campaigns.
More work to be done
The work of the ASC membership is not done. There are still several companies who are struggling to consistently send engaged events into GA4. The council members offer advice and coaching services for any company who needs some direction on how to support the ASC specification.
We also have some vendors who refuse to support the ASC specification, which is their choice to make. The lack of ASC support means that tech companies may NOT be getting the credit or attribution they should for their software products, which may lead to increased churn rates.
More and more dealer groups are making ASC support a mandatory requirement for tools which sit on a dealership website.
After three years of focused development, I find it odd that more vendors are not supporting this industry standard. Dealers can use their buying power to “encourage” tech companies to support the ASC specification.
The good news is that more top tier companies have delivered support for the ASC specification in the first half of 2025.
Thank you ASC members
I want to thank all the members of the Automotive Standards Council for their dedication to making the specification effective and adopted by all primary technology vendors. In the second half of this year, I hope to see additional OEM support for the ASC specification with the help of OEM program management leaders at Shift Digital and J.D. Power.
Dealers, agencies, and tech companies can download the ASC specification for free.
P.S. Dealers who are interested in real-time retailing, enabled by the ASC specification, when connecting retail data to a CDP or data lake should register for the 2025 Modern Retailing Conference (MRC) in Palm Beach, Florida, Nov 16-18th. The conference will showcase new ways in which a data-driven dealership can innovate retail outcomes in sales and service.
