Category Archives: integrated ppc

Google recently released their Vehicle Dealer vertical report for the Q4 of 2015. The data yielded some interesting data that shed some new light on the vertical and reinforced past trends. According to the report search queries in the Vehicle Dealers Category grew by 13%. Interestingly, Desktop searches declined by 3 percent and Tablet queries declined by 5 percent, while Mobile queries grew by 33%. This is not groundbreaking news, but it does reinforce the fact that mobile traffic is increasingly becoming a larger part of the pie.

The report also shed some light on interesting trends in regards to the paid search auctions on Google search results.

Queries, Impression and Clicks saw huge increases for Mobile on the Adwords search auction. On the contrary, those same metrics saw a decrease on desktop – no surprise there. An interesting trend that I wasn’t aware of was that Ad Depth decreased quite significantly for desktop queries, a drop of 8.79%. The Ad Depth refers to the number of ad placement spots for a particular search query. A near 10% drop in Ad Depth means that a search term that used to yield 10 search ad spots may only be showing 9 ad spots now. One less ad spot on the search results page means a decrease in impressions and a rise in CPC as the same number of advertisers competes for even less ad space. If your dealership Adwords campaign saw a rise in CPC in the past 3 months then this may be a contributing factor.

The big takeaway from Google’s report is that mobile traffic and desktop traffic is trending in opposite directions. In fact 62% of all searches in the Vehicle Dealers vertical are made on mobile or tablet devices. So what does this mean for car dealerships? Well, it means having a mobile responsive website and a digital advertising strategy to reach mobile users is even more important and increasing by the day.

In our current digital age there is no shortage of ways for prospective car buyers to connect with businesses. Consumers can fill out an online form or communicate with your site’s chat function. These forms of communication provide great value to a business; however, the tried and true act of picking up a phone is still considered the most valuable conversion. In our mobile obsessed society, making a phone call is a matter of reaching out to one’s pockets.

To properly evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns, tracking your phone conversions is very important. Here are some numbers to consider to highlight the importance of tracking calls from your digital marketing campaigns:

• By the end of 2014 there will be 2 billion smartphones globally
• Google found that nearly half of mobile consumers searching on their smartphones are more likely to explore other brands when they can’t call a business directly from their search results.
• Click-to-call usage on mobile devices has increased exponentially in recent years. The call tracking analytics company Marchex now drive over 40 million calls per month from Google Adwords.
• 71% of most advertisers search engine conversions occur over the phone.

Tracking phone call is important for every business in every industry. However, it is especially important for business involved high investment purchases such as car buying. Integrated PPC offers call tracking solutions with your digital marketing campaign that allows you to track every one of your phone conversions. Phone call data will be available 24/7 through your dealer dashboard and you’ll even be able to listen to the phone calls.

This past week Google made an announcement that close variant keyword matching will be applied to all ‘Exact’ and ‘Phrase’ match keywords. Starting in late September, Google will be removing the option to opt out of close variant matching. This isn’t an earth shattering announcement on the scale of Panda or Hummingbird, but it’s still noteworthy nonetheless.

Close variant matching was introduced in 2012 and according to Google advertisers have seen strong results from it with advertisers receiving an average of 7 percent more exact and phrase match clicks. For most campaigns this change will have no effect as the default setting for campaigns is to include close variant matching.

An example of close variant would be an advertiser targeting the exact match keyword [car dealer]. The ad would show up for these additional terms:
– car dealers
– car daeler
– car da ler
– car dealer’s
– car dealership

This move to force close variant matching could be a sign of a general trend towards mobile and voice search. These search platforms have much higher instances of misspellings and typos due to garbled voice recognition or cumbersome typing on mobile devices.

There benefits of close variant matching is that it takes away the need to create an extensive keyword list of misspellings and increases overall traffic volume for exact and phrase match keywords. The downside to it is that the inability to truly control exactly what words trigger an ad does take some control away from the advertiser. However, there is a work around this issue. You can build a list of negative keywords of misspellings for variant terms that you don’t want to show up for.

To learn more about how close variant matching might effect your campaign you can contact your Integrated PPC strategist. You can depend on us to stay on top of changes in the digital marketing landscape.

I look at a lot of car dealership websites everyday and have a weird habit of peeking into their source code to see if they have Google’s remarketing code embedded into their site – such odd behavior is a hazard of my occupation. I’m often really surprised at how many dealerships aren’t doing remarketing.

If your car dealership isn’t doing remarketing, then I can guarantee that you’re missing out on potential customers. Here are some reasons why you should be doing remarketing.

Increase Conversions
On average, only 5% of first-time visitors will convert on your website. There are a variety of factors that play into this conversion rate such as the general user experience of your site. Another reason is that people like do do research before they make purchase. The average car shopper will visit multiple car sites during their shopping process. Don’t you want to grab some of that other 95% that didn’t originally convert on your site?

Remarketing Is Cost Effective
In general, the CPC’s for remarketing can be much lower than paid search ads. Let’s say your average CPC to bring in a car shopper to your site the first time around is $3, and the CPC for your remarketing ad is only $1. With remarketing your can reel them back to your site the second time around at a fraction of the costs.

Timing Is Everything
When a customer first comes to your site they may just not be ready to buy. No matter how great your landing page is or how convincing your site’s content is, if a customer is in the initial stages of the sales funnel you’re going to have a hard time making the conversion. A remarketing ad will follow a customer as they traverse down the sales funnel, so when they’re ready to make the conversion your ad will be shown to bring them back to your site.

Cheap Branding
Remarketing is a really cost effective way to brand your dealership. Your ad will be seen thousands of times. However, you’ll only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

If you’re not doing remarketing right now then talk to an Integrated PPC representative to start your remarketing campaign.

Social PPC on a platform such as Facebook won’t replace advertising on Google anytime soon. However, with nearly 699 million users on Facebook – many who visit the site multiple times a day – social media PPC is becoming harder to ignore from any digital marketing strategy. Social PPC makes a great complement to a search campaign to increase the reach of your car dealership. Here’s what you need to know about advertising of Facebook.

How are ads targeted?
Facebook has advanced targeting options that allows you to target your audience based on location, gender, age, likes and interests, education, workplace location, relationship status, and more. Such a comprehensive targeting option allows you to exactly pinpoint who sees your ad. So you can show specifically relevant ads to a narrow targeted audience.

You can even target your ads to people who you are already connected to you. Bring back return customers by advertising people who have already ‘liked’ your company page. You can even target audiences based on an email address lists from your CRM. The email address targeting option can be utilized to show car service based ads to someone who just bought a car from your dealership. Thus, allowing you to increase profits by ‘double-dipping’ on a sale and creating customer loyalty.

Where on the page can Facebook ads be seen?
Facebook ads will either be shown directly in the news feed or on Facebook’s right hand column.

What is the average cost per click for Facebook ads?
Overall the average cost per click for a Facebook ad is $0.80 – much lower than Adwords. it’s also important to note that there’s a discrepancy between ads that lead to a Facebook page and ads that lead off-site of Facebook. For ads that direct to a Facebook page the average CPC is $0.70. For ads that lead off-Facebook the average CPC is $1.08.

What is the average CTR for Facebook Ads?
The average click-through-rate for Facebook ads is 0.041 percent. This average CTR is comparable to the average for display ads on the Google Display Network.

If you’d like to learn more about advertising on Facebook, then contact an Integrated PPC representative.

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.

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.

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.

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.