Facebook Ads For Car Dealerships

With the FIFA World Cup just starting a couple days ago, be prepared for World Cup mania to reach all ends of the world. As you read this your Facebook news feed is probably saturated with World Cup talk and your favorite sports bar is probably already packed with crazed soccer fanatics. Every 4 years Google Trends shows a huge spike in search volume for the term “World Cup”. However, one place where the World Cup will be limited is on the paid search section of Google search results. The reason for this is because FIFA, the organization that puts on the World Cup, has trademarked terms such as “World Cup”, “FIFA”, and even “Brazil 2014”.

As a car dealership how does this news relate to you? Well, it’s a relevant reminder of Google Adword’s trademark policy. Adwords current policy allows advertisers to bid on others’ trademarked keywords; however, advertiser are not permitted to use trademarked terms in the ad text. This means that if you’re a Honda dealer, then you won’t be able to use the terms Ford, Chevy, or Nissan in your ad text. This can be quite the hurdle if you want to use PPC to help sell your used car inventory.

There is a way to circumvent Adword’s trademark policy. Google’s trademark policy regarding resellers states the following:

The ad’s landing page is primarily dedicated to selling (or clearly facilitating the sale of) the goods or services corresponding to a trademark term.

This means that if you’re a Honda a dealer that wants to write an ad for the 2011 Ford Focus in your used sales lot you’re going to need to make the landing page for your ad the product page for that specific vehicle. You could go through your whole inventory and write sets of trademark compliant ads for each vehicle in your inventory. However, you probably don’t have time for that. You’re too busy selling cars.

With Used Dynamic Inventory Based Ads you can have Adwords trademark compliant ads automatically built for every vehicle in your inventory. Ads are directly linked to vehicles in your inventory and is refreshed daily, so you’ll only advertise vehicles that are currently in your inventory. As vehicles are added to your inventory, ads are automatically generated. Imagine all the time you’ll save. Thus, freeing you up to watch team USA make a miracle run at the Cup. Fingers crossed.

Putting a portion of your valuable advertising budget into paid search is a great way to attract new visitors to your dealerships website and sell some cars. Especially when you consider that a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that automotive shoppers are 71% more likely to be swayed by digital advertising than the average consumer. With digital marketing, including paid search, having so much influence on car shoppers; doing PPC is practically a no-brainer.

The decision to do PPC is a no-brainer, but the day-to-day management of a PPC campaign takes some thought and attention. One aspect of PPC where many dealerships fall short on is ad copy. Many dealerships miss out on valuable opportunities to attract and convert prospective car buyers when they fall victim mismanaged ad copy. Here are some tips to avoid some common PPC with ad copy.

Used Varied Ad Copy and Constantly Test Them
A trap that some PPC campaigns falls into is that the same ads are used for all keywords. No matter how great your one ad is, it won’t be effective with all keywords. A person searching for “bad credit auto loans” has a much different intention than someone searching for “dealerships in gotham city”. Depending on the size of the keyword list in an ad group, you should have at least 3-5 ads in rotation.

In addition to having a varied ad copy, you should also be constantly testing them. A/B testing for PPC ad copy is pretty simpler than other kinds of A/B test because there are fewer things to test. The aspects of the ad copy you’re going to want to test are the headline, the text body, the call to action, and the destination URL. All you have to do is simply duplicate an ad you want to test, change one aspect of it, and see which one performs better. Pause the losing ad and repeat the process. Think of it is PPC ad copy Thunderdome. Two ads enter. One ad leaves.

A couple things to note when testing ad copy. You’re going want to decide on the metric you’ll be judging them on beforehand. Are you going to be look at CTR or conversions? Also, you’re going to want to make an ad group level change in the account settings to rotate the ads evenly instead of showing the more successful one. This ensures that both ads get equal opportunity to be displayed.

Make Your Dealership Stand Out With Your Ad Copy
Many dealerships fall in line and have very general ad copy, even for competitive keywords. Write ad copy that stands out from the rest by providing specific information. Put information such as monthly specials, lease offers, and  facts about your dealerships such as service awards in your ad copy. These facts that are unique to your dealership will set you apart from the competition and give users a reason to click on your ad.

We made a great effort last month to get all our websites to integrate with our dealer’s phone, chat, and form systems.

The result is a back end system that gives you data like what you see here with deeper view on a daily basis on where your leads come from.

Phone systems integration:

You can now listed to your phone tracking system straight from the website’s back end (no need to log in another system to check calls).

PPC mobile tracking update:

We wrote a new new script that modifies an existing PPC tracking.

Anything that was showing up as just a “call button” was not swapping out to the call tracking number on mobile sites. Thus, not giving credit to the PPC call tracking number for the lead from mobile sites with “call buttons”. The updated script fills in that gap so both “call buttons” and text based phone numbers are swapped out properly on mobile sites.

This will allow dealers to better track their mobile PPC campaigns and to see the tracking in the website’s back end.

For more information about PPC integration please email Sok [email protected]

For those of you posting with us on CraigsList we can now post to EbayClassifieds for free.

As an example see: http://www.ebayclassifieds.com/user/Definitive-Motor

With EbayClassifieds, there are a few limitations such as:

• We can only post 25 ads per day per account
• We cannot post any duplicates
• Ads also stay live on this platform for 60 days
• We’re only allowed to upload 8 images but the image display is very nice

The reply via email is a form which in the future may give us the ability to send more complete leads to a CRM as compared to Craigslist.

Notice that the ads stay live for 60 days so at this time we are not automatically setting up every dealership but just by request.

For more information contact [email protected]

We recently added a small banner to the Larson Automotive Group chat box with a link to new vehicles under $20K.

Whether that is what you want to advertise or not is not the point, what I want to bring to your attention is that there are places on your current advertising that you can use to bring attention to particular areas of your business.

The chat box is a great place to add a promotion to a landing page, offer, etc.

For more questions or to create a graphic for your chat window just content your Dealer Lab account manager [email protected].

Google announced a few days ago via Matt Cutts Twitter that they are rolling another Panda update.

This is significant because we tend to react to big events but not to small roll outs and Google (Panda updates started in 2011). In this article from last year you can see some time perspective and also a good video from Matt Cutts explaining what to do if you were affected by the changes.

How does Panda affect my dealership?

We believe that Panda will affect long tail searches right away and different dealers need to look at slightly different strategies depending on their situation.

Some easy to see gains are searches like this one 2014 toyota corolla everett.

For dealers like Tom Matson in Auburn where they have heavy PPC competition plus Google bringing “other” Auburn’s across the US into the SERP local content was very important (notice usually Auburn Dodge Indiana in the SERP).

May 20^th, Google released yet another update to their search algorithm.  This update primarily targeted duplicate content, thin content, and low quality content.  This update is estimated to effect approximately 7.5% of search results.  Everyday Google is working on ways to improve their search results, trying to serve up the best possible search results.

What is duplicate content, thin content, and low quality content?

Duplicate content is when one website steals or borrows content from another website.  For example an article from one blog is copy and pasted into another blog.  Google gives very little value to content it recognizes as duplicate than original / unique content.

Thin content is when a webpage or website has very little content on the page or site.  Google doesn’t give a number of words it likes to see on every page, but if a webpage has less then 50 or 100 words on it, there is a chance Google won’t value it very highly.

Low quality content is a mixture of duplicated content, spammy content, bad spelling, and grammatical errors.  If a webpage’s content is copy and pasted from another site and then only reworded slightly, that could be seen as low quality content.

What does this mean for dealerships?

With every update Google releases the importance of high quality and unique content increases.  Content Motive offers a variety of SEO and content marketing products that focus on producing high quality unique content.  Not only does the content Content Motive produces index well in Google search results, the content is also invaluable to car shoppers looking for information on the cars and services they are interested in.  Let our professional writers help boost your dealership’s content marketing strategy.

When trying to make a sale with a customer it’s always a good idea to avoid industry jargon and to match the customer’s speech in order to build rapport. In an attempt to sound more business like or professional salespeople may use the term ‘vehicle’ as in, “How long have you owned the vehicle, sir?” In your everyday vernacular, how often do you use the term ‘vehicle’ or  ‘automobile’ over ‘cars’? Very rarely, I suppose. Most people tend to use the term ‘my car’ or ‘my truck’ when referring to their four-wheeled pride and joy.  Another example of professional talk vs. everyday vernacular is the use of ‘pre owned’ rather than used.

Using these trade jargon may not make them head for the hills, but it may make the interaction seem more like a sales pitch rather than a friendly rapport — that hopefully ends in a sale. Mirroring the customer’s language is essential in making the sale face to face. Does the same hold true when you’re trying to make the sale in the online realm?

I used Google’s Keyword planner tool to find out how some sales lot trade jargon compares with its everyday counterpart. Here’s what I found.

Cars vs. Vehicles & Automobiles

Used vs. Pre owned & Pre-owned

In conclusion, it looks like the everyday terms of ‘cars’ and ‘used’ is widely more popular than its trade jargon counterpart online. So when it comes to writing ad copy for PPC or coming up with SEO keywords you want to target, it’s better to stick with everyday talk if you want to reach the most people.

When deciding to invest in PPC marketing, one of the first questions that needs to be answered is, “How much should I spend?” Since most car dealers know that they need to get involved in PPC since nearly 90 percent of people us the internet when shopping for cars. However, most people don’t have a clue when it comes to deciding how much of their marketing budget should be allocated to PPC advertising. Here are some things that you should consider when determining your PPC ad budget.

Your advertising target radius
First, determine what areas you want your ads to target. Are you going to be advertising your product locally? regionally? nationally? Or globally? The wider you cast your advertising net the more traffic you’ll be bringing in and the larger your budget to be. Having a $5,000 dollar monthly budget may be adequate for a business with a 20-mile target radius around their business, but that same amount would be spread quite thin on a state or national level. In fact, that amount probably wouldn’t last before your first coffee in advertised on a national level.

What is the monthly search volume on your keywords
Do a little bit of keyword research and compile a list of the keywords you want to target and also the most popular keywords in your specific industry. Use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to find out what the monthly search volumes are for the keywords you want to target. Set the target ad targeting in the keyword planner to get the most relevant search volume information. If there are a lot of high volume keywords on your list then you’re probably going to need a larger budget.

What is the CPC of the keywords on your list?
In the same Keyword Planner tool you can also find the CPC (cost-per-click) for the keywords on your list. The CPCs can vary depending on the keyword match type, type of keyword, and your specific advertising niche. Your branded keywords such as your dealership name will be much cheaper than general industry terms such as “used cars”. Exact match keywords are cheaper than high volume broad match keywords. Dealerships that want to bid on terms such as “bad credit car loan” may need to pay a premium to compete in this highly competitive finance niche.

Now do some math

Monthly Search Volume x Average CPC x 3% CTR = Your Suggest Monthly Budget

The 3% CTR is just an estimate. The CTR will vary depending on the specific industry and the quality of your ad copy.

If you’re finding that the suggested monthly budget is way more than you can afford then you may want to consider some things such as weeding out some keywords or decreasing your target radius until you find a number that you’re comfortable with.

We started building a new type of set pages for content, specially focused on new cars.

The pages don’t look different than many other companies new car model pages, what is different are the links to content.

In this example for Larson Nissan, you can see that besides accessing the inventory, brochures, incentives, etc (information that most dealer websites have) we also added pages with model information and trim information. The model and trim pages are build with unique content as required by the latest Google SEO updates.

These pages are not built all at once but several each month, for example you can see that Larson Cadillac has model pages but not trims yet. Whilehttp://www.toyotaoftacoma.com/op-2013-toyota-camry-hybrid-for-sale-near-fife/ it would be easier for us to build it all at once a constant flow of content signals Google that there is new material to index and therefore increases the chances of getting our website crawled and therefore indexed.

Enhancing content with video:

We also build pages for those dealers that have been working with us for a while for the 2013 model line. Notice that in this case we also added pages for the Hybrid models and that we used Toyota Corporate Youtube account videos with custom geo-located content to create video / model pages.

Magic Toyota created high quality videos with What’s Next Media so we open those as a layover instead of cresting a new page (we created pages with them in a different section of the site for indexing purposes). These videos have a specific branding purpose for the dealer so we wanted to keep the customer’s full attention on them.

Simple pages purely for content:

BMW is known for their remarkable number of different sub-models, however we kept it simple for this dealer. Same as for this Audi dealer where links to their incentives pages were more important than other things.

For more information about creating content please check our latest article: Top 5 must knows for dealer content marketing or go to Content Motive for more dealer content marketing and SEO services.

In the dashboard you will now notice that leads can be classified as a paid PPC lead.

These leads will have a dollar sign $ indicating that those are not organic to the website.

Our goal is to further integrate assets like Google PPC that are external but related to your web presence.

With one quick look you will be able to see how many leads and what type of leads you get every day in the website. The different icons show where the leads originate and in some cases they can have several sources of information. In the attached screenshot you can see that the PPC click resulted in a chat lead. There are 2 other instances in this example where you can see how the system differentiates from submissions from the dealer’s mobile site.

Some of you astute, detail-orientated types may have noticed a while back that Google Analytics has changed the way that their data is displayed. Don’t panic, this isn’t a major algorithm that will alter the landscape of search marketing — they didn’t even give the update an animal code name such as Penguin or Panda. Here’s a rundown of what changes were made in Google Analytics:

• Visits are now Sessions
• Unique Visitors are now Users

Aside from a slight learning curve of adjusting to the new terminology, this shouldn’t affect Analytics users too much. A post-it it note on your computer would probably suffice in helping you adjust to the change while you get adjusted to this new terminology.

Some people have speculated that the change was made because the mobile industry doesn’t user terms like “visits” or “unique visitors”. This slight change in terminology could definitely be a sign of a sea change where analyzing data from mobile users is becoming more important.

Further Reading:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2731565?hl=en