Category Archives: sem

The phone numbers associated with your website (tracking numbers) are now labeled in the lead :: phone area of the back end.

In the attached case we also added PPC (Pay Per Click) and Retargeting (ret) to this dealer’s internal report.

Our goal is to provide faster access to information on your daily digital performance. Remember that we can integrate 12 major phone systems with our back end and if you don’t have any we work with Marchex (Seattle based) which I think is $4 a number and $80/1000 minutes. It is well worth the money to have unique tracking numbers on the website by department even though all the numbers dial into the same front desk. It is our goal for 2015 to further divide the system call so we track mobile numbers independently from desk top numbers as we believe it is increasingly necessary to understand our mobile conversion rate independently.

If you have any questions or need help labeling or adding numbers to the system please content your DealerLab account manager.

The post New Phone Leads Tagging appeared first on Paramo Group.

The key to marketing is targeting where your customers are. In the 1930’s during the golden age of radio that place would be the radio. With the decline in radio and the rise in television during the 60’s you’d want your ad to be seen on TV. With the rise of the internet in the late 90’s and early 2000’s you’d want you ad to be seen online. The next frontier for marketers and advertisers is on mobile.

The next time you’re out in public, take some time to notice your surroundings. You’ll most likely see more than a handful of individuals with their attention occupied by their smartphones. A Pew research study found that 61 percent of adults now have smartphones and that number is expected to rise as the price of smartphones decreases.

A new way to reach these mobile users is through geo-fencing. Smartphones are GPS enabled devices and geo-fencing allows you to target your ads to users based on their location. Geo-fencing establishes a virtual perimeter around a location. The targeted location could be as small as a city block or as large as a couple miles. When a user breaches the virtual barrier your ads can be shown to them on their smartphone.

For the marketing savvy dealership there are several applications for geo-fencing. One application is upselling customers that enter your dealership. You could set up geo-fencing campaign to show ads featuring a coupon for 100K mileage service. A customer coming in for an oil change may possibly see that deal and decide to do the 100K mileage service as well.

Another application could be to set up a geo-fence around your competition. This way you could steal potential customers. Let’s say Joe Car Buyer is shopping at the Toyota dealership next door. He’s in the middle of negotiations and when the salesmen leaves to “talk to his manager” Joe Car Buyer kills some time on his smartphone. While on his smartphone Joe Car Buyer sees your geo-targeted ad that offers a 0% APR special offer. Joe Car Buyer is intrigued and crosses the street to your dealership.

Radio spots or TV advertising have been considered the go-to avenue for businesses to increase their brand awareness. Traditionally, search advertising brings its value through clicks, impressions, and conversions. However, a recent study by Google brings new insights into the effectiveness of search ads. The results may surprise you.

The Study
In 2013 Google ran over 60 search experiments to understand how search ads can affect brand awareness. The subjects of the study consisted of 800 US consumers who participated in the simulated search scenario. The participants were placed into either the control group who were shown a search engine results page (SERP) or the the experimental group who were shown a Test SERP spotlighting one of 12 categories: apparel and durables, auto, B2B, classified and local, consumer packaged goods, education, financial services, healthcare, media and entertainment, retail, tech, and travel.

Participants were asked to perform a search for a specific category keyword (for example, “used cars” or “bad credit loan”) on their desktop. They were then shown either the actual SERP or a Test SERP. Those in the Test SERP group would see the test brand’s search ad present at the top of the search results page.

The Results
According to the study results, search ads do in fact have a positive impact on brand awareness. When study participants were asked what was top of mind about a specific category, Google found the following results:

• 14.2% in the Test SERP group named the test brand
• 8.2% in the control group also named the same brand

Overall, there is a 6.6% increase in brand awareness when in the top search positions. Each of the categories studies got slightly different results in brand awareness increases. Most notably, the auto category saw a 9% lift in top-of-mind brand awareness.

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.

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.

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.

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]

Digital marketing is continuing to grow in all industries and now accounts for 1.5 out of every 4 dollars spent in the auto industry. That being said, we also know that 90% of all customers that enter dealerships have done some sort of browsing on the Internet before purchasing a car. Google is predicting that digital advertising in the auto industry will quadruple over the next few years.

Looking at the numbers, 50% of all visitors that come to ANY car dealer’s website from any source, click on the “Search Used Cars” button.  This is great information to know, but doesn’t necessarily tell the complete story when it comes to helping customers find the right car they are searching for. The story and question I would like to discuss is this; what is your “used car digital strategy” to get customers’ eyeballs on all of the different brands of inventory you carry? For example, when I look at most Chevrolet dealers’ inventories, I see that at least 40 to 60 % of the used cars on the ground are not Chevrolets! So again, my question is this; how do you plan on selling those 15 Fords, 9 Nissans, 8 GMCs, etc. from your inventory when most customers look at your dealership as a “Chevrolet Dealership? see the screenshot below for a typical dealership’s used car inventory (Chevrolet Dealer)

Please don’t tell me you are hoping that the 50% of the customers clicking on your “Search Used Cars” button is your strategy? Or let me guess, you have “a guy” who does search engine marketing for your dealership?

This is where strategy comes into play, and where NO dealership can pull off the feat that DIGITAL AMMP can. If I were to tell you that I could write 10 different ads per used car unit, start and stop these ads when cars leave or enter your inventory (or when too much is being spent per car), while only showing these ads to consumers on Google when looking for that exact vehicle, would you be interested? Of course you would!

Let’s put in perspective what this does for your dealership on numerous levels.

• 122 used cars in stock = 1220 new ads written daily on Google based on the data
• Know the dollars spent per used car until sold
• Know how may VDP views per car as a result of digital marketing
• Know how many leads,  calls & chats were generated per car as a result of Digital AMMP
• Maximize budget – stretch your dollar further than ever before
• Landing pages determined by inventory make, model, price, inventory count, age of vehicle

 Here’s the Tip:  If you want to move your used car inventory, let Digital AMMP do the heavy lifting. Displaying the right ad at the right time to the right person is the ONLY digital marketing used car strategy you should have! Your “guy” cant do that!

Dave Page
Owner of Dealer e Process