Category Archives: Sok Khann

How Car Dealers Can Target In-Market Car Shoppers Using Facebook

In the Fourth Quarter of 2015 Facebook had $5.6 billion in ad revenue. Mobile advertising made up a huge portion of their revenue, accounting for 80% of it. If you want to reach out to your customers on mobile devices then Facebook advertising needs to be a part of your dealership’s digital marketing strategy. There are multiple ways you can target your ads in Facebook. You can set up a custom audience (Facebook’s version of retargeting), demographic targeting,  financial resources, interest-based targeting and in-market targeting. In this post we’re going to be discussing Facebook’s In-Market targeting capabilities and how it can be utilized by your dealership.

What Is Facebook In-Market Targeting?

Our online behavior says a lot about our buying intentions. Utilizing data from a variety of sources that may include websites you’ve visited, Facebook is able to tell who is in process or considering buying a specific product. This is a powerful digital marketing tool that will allow you to show ads to people who is interested in or actively looking for your specific product.

How Dealerships Can Utilize In-Market Audience in Facebook

Facebook behavior targeting allows you to target people in-market for specific vehicle brands such as Honda, Toyota, Chevrolet or Ford. You can even target people who are in-market for certain vehicle types such as SUVs or trucks. Below is a table showing the potential reach for various in-market target audiences within a 30 mile radius around the Seattle market.

There are multiple ways a dealer can utilize in-market audiences to target potential car shoppers. Here are some potential ideas:

Target Competing Brands. Show your ads to people interesting in competing brands to try to sway them into your sales funnel. Example: A Honda dealership could target ads to people who are in-market for Ford, Hyundai, or Kia cars.

Combine In-Market Audience for competing brands with people who have liked your page. As a dealership brand loyalty plays a big part in your bottom line. You don’t want past customers to switch over to a different car brand when it’s time for them to get a new car. By targeting people who have liked your page with In-Market competing brands you can target past customers who may be thinking of jumping ship from your brand.

Target your own brand. This one is rather straight forward. Target people who are actually interested in your product.

Target In-Market off brand interest. Target high sales funnel shoppers who are interested in a specific type of vehicle, but haven’t quite decided which brand yet.

These are only just a few ideas to get you started in targeting potential car shoppers using in-market Facebook audiences. It’ll definitely get you started in the right track in targeting the right people with your Facebook ad campaign.

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.

Terrestrial radio ad spots have long been a foundation of many car dealerships marketing efforts. In the past couple of years digital radio, on platforms such as Pandora and Spotify, has increased in popularity and taken listeners away from terrestrial radio. With that shift comes a shift in ad dollars as dealerships look to reach their target audience on the new frontier of digital radio. Before dealers sign up for a digital radio campaign they need to be aware of the returns that they’ll most likely get from the campaign.

In the past, a couple of dealerships have reached out to us to investigate a rise in bounce rate on their site. In more than a few occasions I’ve poked into their analytics account to find that the culprit of the rise in bounce rate was a digital radio campaign that the dealership was running. In one case, I saw a site’s bounce rate nearly double on the days that their digital radio campaign ran.

In the analytics accounts that I’ve seen, the engagement metrics for digital radio advertising leaves a lot to be desired. You may expect to see these kinds of results:
• Bounce rate in the low 90’s
• Time on site less than 40 seconds
• Pages/Session less than 1.5

Also, you’ll see very little goal conversions, if any. With these dismal engagement metrics you’ve got to really question the quality of traffic that these campaigns are bringing to your site.

The majority of digital radio users are on mobile devices. With mobile banner ads comes the peril of the accidental clicks from fat finger syndrome. The accidental click rate on mobile banner ads is typically 65%. For digital radio campaigns I expect the accidental click rate to be much higher when you consider that oftentimes the banner ad placement is typically above the radio navigation buttons. A person who accidentally clicked on your ad when they intended to ‘Skip’ that One Direction song on their Taylor Swift Pandora station is not a likely car shopper and will most likely bounce from your site faster than Taylor Swift goes through boyfriends.

Digital radio campaigns aren’t without its benefits. The campaigns will yield lots of impressions at a pretty decent CPM (cost per thousand impressions), which has its benefits when it comes to branding. As a dealership you’ll have to weigh on whether this benefits outweighs the bounce rate hit that your site will take.

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.

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.

Earlier in the month Google announced the roll out of Callouts, a new ad extension in Adwords that allows you to highlight unique benefits and offers of your dealership with an additional line of text. The Callout extension joins Sitelink extensions, Call extensions, and Location extensions to Adwords ad extension family.

Car dealerships can use Callout extensions to promote special offers, price matching guarantees, award-winning customer service, and more. You can easily add Callout extensions at the campaign and ad group level and even schedule the dates that they’ll run. On the campaign level you can add general Callout extensions that highlight your award-winning sales staff or your no hassle sales policy. On the ad group level you can get more specific and highlight special promotion and offers for specific vehicles. Is your dealership running a 0.9% APR on 2014 car models until the end of the month? If so, that’s a perfect opportunity to use Callout extensions.

Callouts appear below the standard ad copy and, most importantly, they can be displayed along with other ad extensions. You can feature up to four Callouts in your ad, each limited to 25 characters each. This means that your ad can utilize even more real estate on search results page if they’re utilizing numerous ad extensions.

If you’re not using Callout extensions in your ads then you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to increase your CTR and highlight what makes your dealership unique. Is your dealership PPC campaign using Callout extensions.

Contrary to initial thoughts, Google doesn’t always have the Midas touch. Over its entire history the mammoth tech giant has demonstrated that no product or feature is immune to the chopping block. Just ask Google Base, Google Squared or Google Buzz. Never heard of them? Exactly. Google is constantly testing and evaluating everything. That latest thing that Google is shutting down is Google Authorship. Google authorship allowed web content creators to link their content with their Google+ profile. After three years the Google Authorship experiment is coming to an end. A moment of silence, please…

One of the reasons that Google Authorship fell short of expectations was a low adoption rate by authors and webmasters. Participation with Authorship was at best spotty. This was partly due to the fact that many non-tech-savvy site owners or authors found the markup and linking to be too complex. Another reason for the demise of Authorship was the low value it provided to searchers. Some experts in the industry saw very little difference in “click behavior” on search results containing Authorship snippets compared to those without.

The demise of Google Authorship is just another glaring example of the changing landscape of SEO. You can count on Content Motive to be on top of all things SEO. Find out now if this Google Authorship news has any affect on your website by contacting your Content Motive Representative.

The post Google Says Good-Bye To Google Authorship appeared first on Paramo Group.

Contrary to initial thoughts, Google doesn’t always have the Midas touch. Over its entire history the mammoth tech giant has demonstrated that no product or feature is immune to the chopping block. Just ask Google Base, Google Squared or Google Buzz. Never heard of them? Exactly. Google is constantly testing and evaluating everything. That latest thing that Google is shutting down is Google Authorship. Google authorship allowed web content creators to link their content with their Google+ profile. After three years the Google Authorship experiment is coming to an end. A moment of silence, please…

One of the reasons that Google Authorship fell short of expectations was a low adoption rate by authors and webmasters. Participation with Authorship was at best spotty. This was partly due to the fact that many non-tech-savvy site owners or authors found the markup and linking to be too complex. Another reason for the demise of Authorship was the low value it provided to searchers. Some experts in the industry saw very little difference in “click behavior” on search results containing Authorship snippets compared to those without.

The demise of Google Authorship is just another glaring example of the changing landscape of SEO. You can count on Content Motive to be on top of all things SEO. Find out now if this Google Authorship news has any affect on your website by contacting your Content Motive Representative.

The post Google Says Good-Bye To Google Authorship appeared first on Paramo Group.

Contrary to initial thoughts, Google doesn’t always have the Midas touch. Over its entire history the mammoth tech giant has demonstrated that no product or feature is immune to the chopping block. Just ask Google Base, Google Squared or Google Buzz. Never heard of them? Exactly. Google is constantly testing and evaluating everything. That latest thing that Google is shutting down is Google Authorship. Google authorship allowed web content creators to link their content with their Google+ profile. After three years the Google Authorship experiment is coming to an end. A moment of silence, please…

One of the reasons that Google Authorship fell short of expectations was a low adoption rate by authors and webmasters. Participation with Authorship was at best spotty. This was partly due to the fact that many non-tech-savvy site owners or authors found the markup and linking to be too complex. Another reason for the demise of Authorship was the low value it provided to searchers. Some experts in the industry saw very little difference in “click behavior” on search results containing Authorship snippets compared to those without.

The demise of Google Authorship is just another glaring example of the changing landscape of SEO. You can count on Content Motive to be on top of all things SEO. Find out now if this Google Authorship news has any affect on your website by contacting your Content Motive Representative.

The post Google Says Good-Bye To Google Authorship appeared first on Paramo Group.

Contrary to initial thoughts, Google doesn’t always have the Midas touch. Over its entire history the mammoth tech giant has demonstrated that no product or feature is immune to the chopping block. Just ask Google Base, Google Squared or Google Buzz. Never heard of them? Exactly. Google is constantly testing and evaluating everything. That latest thing that Google is shutting down is Google Authorship. Google authorship allowed web content creators to link their content with their Google+ profile. After three years the Google Authorship experiment is coming to an end. A moment of silence, please…

One of the reasons that Google Authorship fell short of expectations was a low adoption rate by authors and webmasters. Participation with Authorship was at best spotty. This was partly due to the fact that many non-tech-savvy site owners or authors found the markup and linking to be too complex. Another reason for the demise of Authorship was the low value it provided to searchers. Some experts in the industry saw very little difference in “click behavior” on search results containing Authorship snippets compared to those without.

The demise of Google Authorship is just another glaring example of the changing landscape of SEO. You can count on Content Motive to be on top of all things SEO. Find out now if this Google Authorship news has any affect on your website by contacting your Content Motive Representative.

The post Google Says Good-Bye To Google Authorship appeared first on Paramo Group.

Contrary to initial thoughts, Google doesn’t always have the Midas touch. Over its entire history the mammoth tech giant has demonstrated that no product or feature is immune to the chopping block. Just ask Google Base, Google Squared or Google Buzz. Never heard of them? Exactly. Google is constantly testing and evaluating everything. That latest thing that Google is shutting down is Google Authorship. Google authorship allowed web content creators to link their content with their Google+ profile. After three years the Google Authorship experiment is coming to an end. A moment of silence, please…

One of the reasons that Google Authorship fell short of expectations was a low adoption rate by authors and webmasters. Participation with Authorship was at best spotty. This was partly due to the fact that many non-tech-savvy site owners or authors found the markup and linking to be too complex. Another reason for the demise of Authorship was the low value it provided to searchers. Some experts in the industry saw very little difference in “click behavior” on search results containing Authorship snippets compared to those without.

The demise of Google Authorship is just another glaring example of the changing landscape of SEO. You can count on Content Motive to be on top of all things SEO. Find out now if this Google Authorship news has any affect on your website by contacting your Content Motive Representative.

The post Google Says Good-Bye To Google Authorship appeared first on Paramo Group.

Contrary to initial thoughts, Google doesn’t always have the Midas touch. Over its entire history the mammoth tech giant has demonstrated that no product or feature is immune to the chopping block. Just ask Google Base, Google Squared or Google Buzz. Never heard of them? Exactly. Google is constantly testing and evaluating everything. That latest thing that Google is shutting down is Google Authorship. Google authorship allowed web content creators to link their content with their Google+ profile. After three years the Google Authorship experiment is coming to an end. A moment of silence, please…

One of the reasons that Google Authorship fell short of expectations was a low adoption rate by authors and webmasters. Participation with Authorship was at best spotty. This was partly due to the fact that many non-tech-savvy site owners or authors found the markup and linking to be too complex. Another reason for the demise of Authorship was the low value it provided to searchers. Some experts in the industry saw very little difference in “click behavior” on search results containing Authorship snippets compared to those without.

The demise of Google Authorship is just another glaring example of the changing landscape of SEO. You can count on Content Motive to be on top of all things SEO. Find out now if this Google Authorship news has any affect on your website by contacting your Content Motive Representative.

The post Google Says Good-Bye To Google Authorship appeared first on Paramo Group.