Monthly Archives: April 2014

Google runs a monopoly on the search engine marketing industry. That’s evident by the fact that over here at Integrated PPC nearly 98 percent of our clients ad spend is spent on Google. Yup, a paltry 2 percent of the budget that is managed here is spent on Bingads. Apparently, Bing’s marketing blitz of “Don’t get scroogled”, a few years back, fell on deaf ears.

With 70 percent of all search traffic going through them, Google is definitely the alpha dog in the search engine marketing industry. Any business that does PPC advertising needs to be advertising on Google — such a large portion of internet traffic is too significant to ignore. Accounting for nearly 20 percent of search traffic, Bing comes in at a very distant second. Twenty percent is still quite significant and could account for millions of potential customers, so Bing shouldn’t be ignored either. Here are three reasons why you should also consider advertising on Bingads, even if you’re already advertising on Google.

Lower CPC On Bing
The cost per click to advertise on Bing is significantly cheaper than Google. The cheaper CPCs can be advantageous for those advertising in expensive niches such as the auto loan sector, where each $12 click can quickly deplete your daily budget in Google. The downside to Bing is that fewer people will see your ads. However, you may end up with a better ROI if those who do click on your ads are converting.

Bing Has More Top Page Sponsored Ads
Studies have shown that more people pay attention to the ads at the top of the page than those that appear on the sidebar. The advantage Bing has over Google is that they display more ads on the top page than Google. If you conduct the same keyword search on Google and Bing, you’ll find that at least one more ad appears above Bing organic search results than Google. This means that a fourth position placement on Bing is not only cheaper, but it also has better ad placement on the top of the organic search results.

Easy Import To Bingads
For someone looking to advertise on both Bing and Google, Bingads makes it very effortless to import your Adwords campaigns to Bingads with an import to Adwords function. With just a couple clicks you could be advertising in both advertising platforms and maximizing your search engine traffic — no tedious rebuilding of your campaign involved here.

Many auto dealerships that manage their own pay per click aren’t aware of the various guidelines that Google expects their advertisers to follow. That is until they wonder why their ads aren’t getting any traffic and they noticed the dreaded ‘your ad as been disapproved’ icon. Actually, it’s not that dreadful, but knowing what Google’s guidelines are beforehand can save you the effort of having to edit your ad copy later. Here are some of the ad copy guidelines that you need to follow when writing ad copy. For full information Google’s guidelines go to https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1331529?hl=en

A deal you claim in the ad copy has to be on the advertised site.

Example:
Nissan GTR
Be Fast & Furious.
20% Off Vin Diesel’s Stunt Car!
sokittomecars.com

This ad would be disapproved if two of the following things was not present on the site: proof that the GTR was used in a Fast & Furious movie and information about the 20% off a GTR.

Google doesn’t allow misleading or scientifically unverifiable claims.

Example:
Jelly Bean Powered Car
Cut Down On Sweets
And Save Money On Gas!
sokittomecars.com

Common sense and Google would raise a red flag at this ridiculous claim. If you’re going to make claims like these, you need a verification that your claim is accurate and sound from a third party source.

Usage of superlatives such as “best” or “#1”

Example:
Sok It To Me Cars
The #1 Car Dealership.
Best Prices In Soktopia!
sokittomecars.com

This ad would be disapproved for the superlative claims in the ad copy. The words “best” and “#1” are not allowed unless there’s a third party verification listed on the site. In this case, Sok It To Me Cars is neither the best nor #1 dealer in Soktopia.

Understanding conversions is very important in knowing the impact of your pay per click campaign. Within the past year, Google has introduced various conversion metrics to give advertisers even more insight on how their paid ads are directly leading to leads and sales. Below are are some of the conversions that you should be aware of.

Converted Clicks
This is how many clicks resulted in a conversion action. Depending on the conversion tracking set-up, a conversion action could be anything such as an actual sale or a user filling out a contact form that provides leads for your sales, service, or finance department.

Phone Call Conversions
For ads with call extensions, the Phone Call Conversion is the number of phone calls that Adwords drives to the number that is listed on the call extension. In order to track phone call conversions, you must use a Google Call Forwarding Number.

Estimated Cross-Device Conversions
This metric occurs when a user clicks on an ad on one device such as a mobile phone, but then converts on a different device such as a desktop. In the multi-screen world we live, cross-device conversions is a great metric to show how your ads impact across multiple devices.

View-Through Conversions
This metric only applies to ads that appear on the Display Network. View-Through conversions occurs when a customer views your ad, but converts without actually clicking on it.

Estimated Total Conversions
This metric condenses various conversion types and bundles them together to give you a better idea of how Adwords is driving conversions. Estimated Total Conversions add up the following conversion types: converted clicks, conversions, estimated cross-device conversions, view through conversions, and phone call conversions.

Millenials, those born after 1982, are often described as tech-savvy, educated, self-involved, socially connected (a product of coming to age during the social networking era), and impatient. At 80 million strong they make up the largest generation in U.S. History since the Baby Boomers. According to industry experts they carry as much as $170 billions annually in spending power. Car dealerships and automotive brands that can develop brand loyalty early are well positioned to reap a hefty portion of the millenial’s spending pie.

Selling a car to millenials is a lot different than selling to their parents. Here are two things that car dealerships can do to market to millenials.
 
Get On Social Media
For many millenials, their social network is the center of their lives. It’s the driving force that keeps them updated with their peers and the world around them. In fact, some millenials don’t make a move without consulting their social network. It’s important for car dealerships to develop a social presence. This means crafting social media content that is shareable and using social media as facilitator for communications with them.
 
Target Them Where They Spend Their Time
Millenials came of age in the era of personal computing and have fully embraced the era of the smartphone. It’s estimated that they spend as much as 8 hours a day consuming media through various devices. Whether it’s checking their e-mail on their desktop, texting their friends on their smart phones, or reading an article on their tablet; millenials spend a lot of time online. If car dealerships want to attract millenials, then they need to invest in their online presence. This means doing PPC advertising to drive traffic to their site, making sure the dealer website is SEO optimized so that it can be found on organic search results, and crafting a user friendly website that’s easy to navigate for both desktops and mobile devices.

Why not let Content Motive’s dealer marketing experts handle your social media and SEO marketing needs for you?

For many brick-and-mortar businesses, such as car dealerships, conversion tracking is very important in measuring the success of a PPC campaign. In recent years Adwords has introduced various conversion types to give advertisers even more insight into the real impact of their paid search campaigns. The most recent conversion type to be released was cross-device conversions. Cross-device conversions addressed the nature of the multi-screen lifestyle that we currently live in where a user may see an advertisement on their mobile phone, but later complete the conversion on a different screen, such as their desktop PC.

Google is currently testing out a new conversion type to bridge the gap between online advertising and the cash register of a brick-and-mortar business. They launched a pilot program called “In-Store Attribution Transaction Reporting In Adwords” with six advertisers. Essentially, the pilot program tracked conversions from online activity to in-store sales by matching anonymous tracking cookies on users computers to in-store sales information collected by third party providers. Here’s a breakdown of how the process works:

A user clicks on an online ad > Google sends an anonymous “click ID” to the advertiser and that matches the cookie on the user’s computer > Days or weeks later that user may buy the product in the retailer’s store > The third party data company takes that purchase and links it back to the user’s cookie > The cookie is linked to Google’s click ID

With this new conversion tracking type, Google is able to tell Adwords advertisers which ads generated in-store sales and how much they generated. For those worried about Big Brother watching over your shoulder, the system is designed so that Google never knows the identity of the user.

So what does this mean for brick-and-mortar businesses, such as car dealerships, that do online advertising? Well, it means  greater insights into the effectiveness of their online advertising budget. A dealership will be able to get more accurate data on what brought their customers into the showroom floor.

In-store conversion tracking is currently in the testing phase and there’s no word on when it will be added to Adwords. When it is finally released, it’ll be an exciting game changer that will narrow the divide between online ads and the cash register.

In the age of social networking Facebook has become a large part of any online marketing campaign, alongside SEO and PPC. Just as how Google is constantly making changes to their algorithm to alter best practices and penalize SEO tactics that moved from an acceptable tactic to a spammy tactic (i.e. keyword stuffing); Facebook is following suit with changes of their own that will affect how many businesses use social networking to meet their marketing goals.

It’s a common practice for businesses to ask for likes, shares, and comments to promote their product or business. This practice has been going on since business started using their Facebook pages as a marketing tool. Under Facebook’s new guidelines, the social networking giant is cracking down on these calls to action, referring to this practice as “like-baiting”. If a business or website continues to follow the practice of “like-baiting”, it will be much less likely that their posts will show in a users news feed.

Another tactic Facebook is looking to squash is recirculated content. It’s not uncommon for businesses to re-post the same content over and over again to promote a product or an event. Facebook finds the repeated visibility of duplicate content greatly diminishes the user experience of their news feed. They found that reducing this practice causes users to hide 10 percent fewer stories from their news feed.

Facebook says that their goal isn’t to impact pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans, but rather focus on Pages that post explicitly asking for likes, comments, and shares. So if your business is practicing any of these social media marketing tactics, then you may need to rethink new and creative ways to get people to like your posts without specifically asking for them outright.

Content Motive’s current social media posting strategies will not be effected by these updates.  Content Motive is proud to offer unique content on each post and does not bait likes, but instead encourage people to follow on Facebook naturally.

Remarketing and how it works.

Retargeting display campaigns with banner ads is one of the most effective forms of online marketing. Banner advertisements are great at driving traffic and increasing brand awareness. It seems everyone is using, or at least should be, banner advertising as part of their PPC campaign. So what can you do to make your banner ad stand out from the rest? Here are some tips to help your banner ads perform their best.

Use Buttons Appropriately
Buttons are know to increase CTR and should be used if it’s appropriate for the banner ad. If you’re going to use them, place them after the copy, on the lower right side, and in a contrasting color.

Use Clearly Defined Frames On The Banner Ad
People’s eyes are naturally drawn to a subject inside of a frame. Take advantage of this natural inclination by framing the ad. If your ad is white, it’s quite common practice to put a 1 pixel gray border around the ad.

Keep The File Size Small
You ad needs to load fast. It would be a shame to miss out on an conversion because the user scrolled down to fast, before your ad could load. According to Google Adwords the file size should be under 150kb, and the smaller the better.

Is your PPC or Retargeting Campaigns under performing?  Let us at Integrated PPC use our professional automotive graphics designers increase your banner ads click through rates.

In our fast paced life, users are increasingly turning to their mobile devices to access information while on the go. This is especially true for local search. According to a recent survey finding 63 percent of people are now using multiple devices to find local business. Of that, 79 percent of them are mobile phones users and 81 percent are tablet owners.

The study finds that these following businesses are the most popular in local searches on mobile devices:

– According to the survey restaurants are searched 23 percent of the time.
– The auto industry, including auto service shops and dealerships, account for 10 percent of local search.
– Art and entertainment came in at 9 percent.

If your business falls in the above mentioned categories, what can you do to appeal to mobile users and give them a quality on-the-go web experience? According to the survey, 65 percent of smartphone users said the driving force behind their mobile search was a “need for information on the go”. Mobile users don’t want to be overwhelmed with content. They want quick access to details like addresses, phone number, and basic product/service information.

For those businesses running PPC campaigns, it should be noted that mobile visitors tend to be on the higher end of the sales funnel and in a browsing state-of-mind. However, numerous case studies show that many users will start their search on their mobile when they have some down time, but will continue and possibly initiate the conversion on the desktop.

If this study is any indication of whats to come, optimizing your PPC campaign and/or website for mobile should be on the top of every business’s to do list.

By its very nature, which is rooted in a bidding system for premium ad placement, PPC is very competitive form of marketing that breeds competition between brands. A PPC strategy that many business owners use is bidding on their competitor’s branded keywords. Bidding on your competitor’s branded keywords can open your business up to customers who you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. On the other hand, a shot across the bow at your competitor may cause your competitor to retaliate and bid on your branded terms – driving up the CPC for both terms. So before you decide to open the can of worms of bidding on your competition’s keywords, consider the pros and cons.

Pros:

• In general, branded keywords are a great way to attract customers who are high in the sales funnel and still weighing their options between brands. These are customers who may not have known about your brand, otherwise.
• Bidding on your competition doesn’t cannibalize your organic search listing. Chances are that you probably rank pretty high in organic search listings for your own branded terms. By bidding on your own branded terms you may be cannibalizing traffic that you would’ve gotten anyway through organic search listing.

Cons:

• Since the landing page has very little relevance with your competitor’s branded terms, you can expect low quality scores when you bid on your competitor’s branded keywords. This means you’ll have to pay a higher CPC when bidding on the competition.
• If your competitors aren’t bidding on your keywords now, then they will shortly as soon as you start to appear for their search terms.
• Using your competitor’s trademarked brand name in your ad text may draw the attention of Google and get your ad disapproved.

How to turn the “Cons” into “Pros”:  Don’t target exact trademarked names, but instead the city and the make that that dealership sells.  Create custom landing pages with keywords targeted not directly at your competing dealerships, but close to it.  This will raise the quality score of the page, lowering your CPC.

Together Integrated PPC and Content Motive can create great landing pages lowing your cost per click and greatly improving your landing page’s quality score.  What does this mean?  You can save money while maximizing your profits!  Click here to get started!

The old adage goes, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. That saying holds very true for the bidding war that is PPC. Knowing what your competition is doing is key in coming on top of paid and organic search results. A tool that should be in every search engine marketers arsenal of tricks is SpyFu. SpyFu is a free tool, though you can subscribe for even more features, that is great for keyword research and competitive analysis.

A quick search in SpyFu reveals a treasure trove of intel. Key metrics such as search volume, CPC, CTR, and ranking difficulty are great for performing keyword research. However, it should be noted that the data is not real-time. SpyFu obtains the data via web-scraping and it is refreshed on a monthly basis. As a result, the data is better used as a guide to track larger trends in SEM/SEO rather than a real-time keyword tracker.

As the name implies, SpyFu also reveals valuable information on your competitors PPC ad copy, projected monthly budget, and ad position. For SEO purposes, SpyFu reveals what domains dominate a search term with information such as the domain strength and estimated monthly clicks. Knowing what you’re up against is vital in determining your overall PPC and SEO strategy.

Let us figure out your strategy for your dealership.  Here at Integrated PPC and at Content Motive we have a cohesive strategy that leads the automotive industry.