Category Archives: ROI

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.

When managing a campaign, you usually only find out about a problem after it’s too late. If you’re watching accounts closely you should be able to minimize the damage though. It’s all about having a plan based on what indicator tells you there’s a problem.

For instance, if you suddenly see a dip in traffic, here are some thing to investigate:

• Has something fundamentally changed in the site structure? if landing page URLs have changed and the ads have not been updated, your quality score will take a hit, reducing your ad exposure.
• Check recent keyword changes. Sometimes if someone added the wrong negative keyword, it can suddenly prevent your ads from showing at all.
• Are you making first page bids? Ensure all of your bids are high enough to show up on the first page of search results. There’s a good SEO joke that says “Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? Page 2 of Google.”
• Does your landing page content match your ads? This is a factor in determining quality score, and if that score is too low, the ad might not show.

If your ad spend is too high:

• Review the daily budget. First and foremost, bust out the calculator and make sure the campaign wasn’t already setup to spend more than you intended.

If CPC is too high:

• What kind of bid management do you have set? If you’re using enhanced CPC, your CPC may be getting bumped up over time and you might want to switch over to manual bidding.
• What is the competition like on your keywords? If you’re going after highly competitive keywords, you might have a hard time keeping up with the average CPC.
• Does your landing page content match your ads? Again, if your quality score is low, you may have to pay more per click to have a decent ad position.

If leads aren’t coming in:

• Are you advertising anything out of stock? If someone clicks on an ad for a vacuum cleaner and you don’t have one to sell them, they’re sure not going to buy something else, they’re going to bounce.
• Are sales historically down this time of year? If sales are usually down in January, it may not the fault of PPC. Consider lowering spend until your busy months.
• What is the competition offering? If your competitors are offering lower prices or nicer incentives, you might need to evaluate what you offer to stay in the game.

PPC can be very confusing, so why not let our professionals take over your existing Google Adwords account.  Our PPC and car dealer industry experts can dramatically improve your ROI.

Kevin Drongowski
PPC Manager
[email protected]

SEO and PPC have very different costs and results. For PPC/search advertising, your ROI is pretty clear. You spent X dollars, you got Y clicks, of which Z people converted. However, when it comes to SEO and content development, the results are much less clear.

When you put the time or money into writing quality content, you might not see any benefits in the first 30 or even 60 days. Over time, though, the more high quality articles you publish, the more your traffic will improve and the more it will benefit your search ranking.

This can make SEO very discouraging to pursue, but the results are far more sustainable. With PPC, you buy a click, and boom, it’s over. You either made a sale or you didn’t. With SEO, you are building authority and relevance, which will continue to drive traffic for months or even years. This makes it hard to convince someone just starting out that it’s worth the time and money, but when it comes to long term results, a strong SEO effort will pay dividends.

To Your Success,

Kevin Drongowski
PPC Manager
PGI Auto
[email protected]