Category Archives: Yago Paramo

We saw the potential of mega menus early in the year on sites like FireStone. The challenge was to replicate the code from a very expensive commercial site (that site services hundreds of Firestone retailers) into the systems that serve our individual dealers.

This is our first field test at BMW of Shereville.

Mouse over the menu and see how the information is displayed in a much better visual way than just drop down text.

I specially like the service and parts coupons so the customer can see the specials without having to click in the specials page. From a content point of view, something that I’m heavily involved, look at the blog section where the articles are presented by location.

This project should be finalized with in the next 30-60 days and we will implement on all websites.

The post WEBSITES-Check the mega menus appeared first on Paramo Group.

Selective Posting Interface

Auto Classified Solution’s new interface will allow the dealer to select which cars they want posted to Craigslist. It works for both new and used inventory.

This will useful for budget conscious dealers that want to select a group of used cars but also for new car managers that want to advertise just a small group of new cars.

I can think already about many scenarios where this will be useful to a new car manager:

You can run a 20 truck campaign ($100 for a month) on F-250′s diesel if you have a heavy rebate on those and compete with dealers selling ‘current -1 -2 models’.

I also see it very useful for VW running the $199 Jetta lease or Honda in the Civic.

Non Prepaid Areas

We now have the ability to post to any area within the United States whether you can buy prepaid blocks or not. 

For more information please contact Jim Gillen [email protected]

Chicago based Maria Espinoza will focus on what are the best conversion points in a website. After looking at over 1000 websites she analyzed the averaged sales leads per form and brought all this information into a powerful presentation about conversion. This is a great class for those of you that want to know what the best website KPA for and why. 

Don and Dennis are the 800 lbs gorilla in the room. Very interesting technology that they develop with our team. Let me give you my 30K feet view: 

You can now do a soft pull from every-single-form that is used in a website (soft pulls don’t require permission), and the data that you get has the customer’s current auto loan, with %, amount left, and monthly payment. So if the customer has a 2012 Toyota Corolla with a payment of $400/month at 15% rate and you can out him on a 2014 with a 6.99% therefore lowering the payment significantly, how is that for a conversation started with a simple lead that came to your site? 

If you have questions or comments don’t ask me, I know about 2% of what a person needs to know about financing in the automotive industry. Come to see Don and Dennis speak and view these new technology developed with DealerLab, Dealereprocess, and Transunion. 

As one of the nation’s leading BDC trainers, New Jersey based Sean Bradley will focusing on one of his latest dealer and the amazing transformation he was able to achieve. 

Last and least! Yago Paramo will focus on content but specifically for the financing side of the business. Generating finance leads and traffic. I will expose some knowledge on geo targeted financing content, location based ads, and some things that we have never shared before. I will not have a power point but a conversation about the possibilities and ideas that a dealer can develop with a content based strategy.

This is a free event to all PGI and Dealer Lab customers. 

Tuesday 24th–Car Dealers

Download Flyer: 6th PGI Training Seminar

SCHEDULED EVENTS

Breakfast at 8:30am, Presentations Begin at 9am

How To Build Your Dealership Around Social
– Gary May – Founder, IM@CS Doing The Basics Brilliantly

Dynamic PPC Integration & Analytics
– Nick Gorton – General Manager, Integrated PPC

Content and Organic SEO
– Yago Paramo – Founder, PGI Auto

Social Media Strategies
– JD Rucker – Founder, Dealer Authority

February 20th
Hilton Hotel
300 Lake Washington Blvd SE
Bellevue, WA

RSVP TODAY!
LIMITED SPACE AVAILABLE
ONLY 75 SPOTS AVAILABLE!

TO RSVP, Call Courtni at
(425) 379-0483 ext. 109

Congratulations to 2014 Automotive Pinnacle Website Awards Winner Dealer e-Process and Dealerlab.com

Dealer e-Process and Dealerlab.com has been recognized independently as a 2014 Automotive Website Awards recipient for the Pinnacle Platforms award in the Websites category. The well-known automotive website platform was well-deserving of the award, and PCG Consulting is thrilled to honor its hard work through 2013.

The Pinnacle Platform Automotive Website Award in the Websites category sets apart platforms that make it easy to create and manage high-ranking dealership websites. Pinnacle Platform Award winners are recognized for providing websites that have numerous integrated tools, are easy to optimize, are easy to customize and that are adaptable to the latest digital marketing musts.

Dealer e-Process has always been on the cutting-edge of website platform technologies and has been recognized by the AWAs since their launch. This year, Dealer e-Process was recognized for its dedicated customer service, its customized website solutions, its integrated digital marketing tools and its commitment to create original software.

Automotive Website Awards Announced January 24th

PCG Consulting celebrated the 2014 Automotive Website Awards Friday night at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans. During the awards, the best of the best in automotive marketing were honored, with awards across categories such as Websites, CRM Platforms, Mobile Apps, Social Media, Call Training & Tracking, and others. For an in-depth look at all of the 2014 Automotive Website Awards and their recipients, please check out the 2014 AWA Buyer’s Guide where a comprehensive list of all winners has been published. You can order your 2014 AWA Buyers Guide online now.

Dealer e-Process Presented with DrivingSales.com Top Rated Website Provider

Dealer e-Process receives a “Top Rated” Award for Dealer Satisfaction in SEM – PPC and Websites Categories

Downers Grove, Illinois – January 24, 2014 – Dealer e-Process is the recipient of “Top Rated” awards in the SEM – PPC and Websites categories in the fifth annual DrivingSales Dealer Satisfaction Awards. The awards were presented at a special event today in conjunction with the 2014 National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) Convention & Expo.

“It’s an honor to have received a DrivingSales Dealer Satisfaction award every year since its inception in the auto industry. I would really like to thank the team at Dealer e-Process for making this happen and keeping our focus where it needs to be – on great customer support and innovation for our dealers,” said Dave Page, Owner of Dealer e-Process.

Dealer e-Process’ search campaigns are designed to reach buyers in all different phases of the car buying funnel; from the highest level, exploratory purchaser, to the customer who has chosen a specific vehicle and is ready to buy. Dealer e-Process uses this knowledge to determine what ads are the most appropriate to show the user at the time of their search. This allows for a more engaging ad that will generate better click-through rates and greater results for the dealer.

“This is a big deal for us at Dealer e-Process. We recently launched “Digital AMMP”, an advanced search engine marketing strategy for dealers. This award should definitely increase our footprint. A special thanks goes out to our dealers for supporting our innovation and the industry we love so much,” said Megan Glick, Digital Marketing Director.

“You don’t work for the award, you work to be the best, but it feels good to be recognized for the efforts of the team”, said Yago Paramo.

“We congratulate Dealer e-Process on winning a ‘Top Rated’ Award in both the SEM – PPC and the Websites categories; and for being recognized by its dealer customers for high levels of excellence and customer satisfaction,” said DrivingSales CEO and Founder Jared Hamilton. “In our fifth year of presenting these awards, we feel especially proud that DrivingSales Vendor Ratings continues to help dealers make smart and informed decisions through thousands of peer reviews that lead them to service providers such as Dealer e-Process. We congratulate Dealer e-Process on being recognized for top notch performance by the people to whom their services count the most: the dealer community.”

The DrivingSales Dealer Satisfaction Awards measure dealer satisfaction with vendor products and services, and are based on cumulative ratings tallied and verified over the calendar year (January – December) at DrivingSales.com Vendor Ratings. DrivingSales.com Vendor Ratings is the industry’s only neutral, comprehensive vendor rating forum featuring real-time peer reviews and honest competitor comparisons, and provides dealerships with important information from actual customers who have hands-on experience using vendor products / solutions in their stores. Each rating is verified as coming from an actual dealership employee.

Full award results are available online at Dealer Satisfaction Awards. Award winners are showcased in the Q1 2014 issue of the DrivingSales Dealership Innovation Guide which, in addition to being distributed at the 2014 NADA Convention and Expo, is delivered to every new car dealership nationwide, as well as to the top 100 used car dealerships. For more information on the Dealership Innovation Guide, please visit: DrivingSales Innovation Guide.

Nick Gorton and Yago Paramo will be at NADA from Wednesday to Monday (I’ll be attending the AWA awards on Thursday). Call us or text us if you are going to be there.

Google announced yesterday on Google+ that they have added car/automobile results to the knowledge graph. So now when you search for [2013 ferrari ff] (hint, who is your favorite search blogger, would make for a nice holiday gift) you will get the knowledge graph at the top right of the page:

Google doesn’t say where the data comes from but there are plenty of free data sources out there for Google to use.

As you can see, it shows name of the car, type of car, image of the car, the make, price, miles per gallon, engine sizes, other models, other configurations with a link to other searches related to it. When you click on the other cars under this one, it brings up the carousel effect, which looks like this:

The sad part is that it will take away search traffic from Edmunds, Yahoo Autos and other car sites.

Here is the mobile result, as you can see, you need to scroll to get to the search results:

On Google Glass it is even harder to get to any search results, all you get is this and when you click on it, it shows a snippet of the data as you scroll:

Forum discussion at Google+.

Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-car-knowledge-graph-17770.html

Yesterday’s update to Google’s knowledge graph (The knowledge graph shows up on the right of search results and typically shows relevant information to the search such as a map for a location) makes it so when you search for a specific model, information about the car and its configurations and prices. It appears that the information is pulled from either an internal database or from the manufacturer’s site. There are free data sources that it could be pulling from as well. The images in the knowledge graph also seem like they come from the manufacturer’s site. Prices shown are the MSRP.

The important thing to take away from the update, in terms of strategy, is to make sure we target exact match keywords on individual models and year. Since google’s interface for this feature takes up valuable screen space it becomes very important to be in the first position in both paid search and organic search for specific models. If you do a more broad search for the make, or use an older year, this new feature is not activated.

To Your Success,

Kevin Drongowski
Integrated PPC

Source: https://plus.google.com/+google/posts/Fr1mdsWGhQE

The change is finally here, today is the first day of CraigsList charging for postings in the automotive by dealer section.

You have several choices for posting;

Post one car at a time; build the template, add the car, pay the $5. For this you don’t need one of the new accounts with Craigslist, you can post with the old accounts. The only change is that at the end of the process you need to pay the $5 fee.

PGI Auto offers a tool that will automate the ad creation and data pushing making the manual process as easy as possible. Our tool is $200/month and you can post as many cars as you want (still have to pay CL the $5 per car).

Your second option is to have a posting account with CraigsList. For this you will need to set up a credit card with them, add your tax ID number, address, etc and buy a bulk group of ads (lets say 100 ads for $500).

With this type of account we can semi-automate the process so for $395 PGI Auto will post your inventory and delete the vehicles as they get sold.

Recomendations:

I have seen several companies claim that they can post an ad for $5 and then use that ad as a car gets sold to update the photos and content therefore having a second car advertised without paying another fee to CraigsList.

I don’t know how much money you can save if this is possible (a couple hundred dollars) but at this point in time when CraigsList is identifying who post, how much, etc I wouldn’t risk getting my dealership blocked.

If there is one thing I can tell you about CraigsList is that they will not care that you are blocked, as a matter of fact there will be no one to talk to about it.

If budget allows, post your new cars too. 100 ads for $500 is cheap. We don’t intend to charge more for more ads, your $395 fee covers everything (counting that CL is not IP sensitive anymore).

Call Steven or Jim today at 425.379.0483 today to get started.

For how we understand the world a “charge” a tax or any new form of payment can’t be hardly justified as positive but I think we need to look at where is CraigsList today and what could possibly happen once the change is implemented.

The fact that CraigsList didn’t charge for postings made the flow of cars into their system a race for volume of postings. The dealers willing to invest the most time and or money seemed to have an advantage over the rest as their vehicles will show on the first 100 ads or they will take over a search. That race brought two problems; first it forced the rest of the dealers to either leave or also escalate their posting efforts. Dealers had to post more to remain relevant. But the resulting and second problem brought by this was that searches became less relevant and frustrating to consumers as a search for an “Audi A6″ will bring the same car from the sale dealer 45 times.

Escalation of postings created a problem for customers-poor search results, a problem for CraigsList-system overload, a problem for the dealers-increased cost to post volume, and a problem for companies building the systems to post-hard to keep up with volume of postings required.

In this case, for the most part, free access resulted in creating problems that only helped one person in this equation: A dealer willing to over spend.

The $5 fee will do a few very positive things right off the bat:

1) It will limit 3rd party lead companies from posting “fake” cars to create leads then sell them to you indirectly. It will limit 3rd party lead companies from posting your own cars (yeas, your own cars) to create leads then sell them to you directly.
2) It will limit low cost systems that for example were automatically posting one low quality ads (just one image). If you are going to pay $5 you better put a relevant ad.
3) It will stop systems posting on 24h cycles (easier to post at 4am for example) which only purpose was to show dealers that they had hundreds of ads. If you are going to pay, post during a relevant search time (business hours for example).
4) It will stop dealers from posting their inventory multiple times per day (this stops excavation of volume).
5) ++

What we are going to see on December is a leaner, easier to search, and more useful for customers CraigsList system.

A few things dealers should consider:

Positives:
Craislist still a great alternative or complement to Autotrader and Cars. I’m not saying is better or worse, each market is different for that. What I’m saying is that if you are already on Autotrader and Cars, where else can you advertise that has 50 million users?

This change will effectively eliminate half of the ads and make a better site, the customers remain the same. The dealers left advertising on CraigsList may see a vast increase in leads.

The cost will remain very affordable. For what I understand with the information we have today this is going to be $5 per car per month. 100 cars will cost $500 a month. You still have to pay (or invest the time/effort) posting the vehicles, but you have to post a lot less to be relevant. I believe the increase of cost on one end will offset the decrease of cost on the other end.

Negatives:
CraigsList now needs to be managed. If the cars remain posted for 30 days as the information they have released suggests, the cars need to be manually marked as sold from their site.

Cars may be reposted after 48 hours, so a dealer willing to spend some money could potentially still hog the system.

Ads don’t have links anymore which to me was a great value based on the traffic that I saw from CraigsList to the dealer’s websites. I hope they will reconsider this as the ads are now very HTML limited and car buyers want to see as much information as possible.

A note about payment:
In order to ay for the ads you need to use a credit card with CraigsList. You can buy one ad at a time or pre-pay bulk. This change makes this system similar to Google’s Pay-per-click. You pay for the ads and a management fee to the company managing this for you. One difference is that Google provides a great system to manage the ads, for CraigsList a vendor has to build a system and maintain it to do this. Be careful to whom you give your credit card to out ads on CraigsList and that the company you do so is registered in your state to do business.

I hope this helps with all the unknowns but we will know a lot more in a few weeks. Last here is some information that CraigsList has released about the changes:

$5 fee for “Cars/Trucks by Dealer” ads starting 12/3 – FAQ

Q. What is happening on 12/3?
A. Ads posted to “cars/trucks by dealer” for CL sites in the US will be charged $5 per ad.
Q. How long will paid car/truck ads last? Can they be edited? Renewed? Reposted?
A. 30 days. Live ads can be edited. No renewals. Reposts are $5.
Q. What forms of payments will be accepted?
A. VISA, Mastercard, Amex will be accepted as part of the posting process for car/truck ads.
Q. Are volume discounts, flat rate, or monthly “all you can eat” plans available?
A. No. $5 per posting. One vehicle per ad.
Q. Can I purchase a block of postings in advance?
A. Yes – blocks can be purchased by paid account holders. Sign up here
Q. Is monthly invoicing available?
A. Not at this time.
Q. Will a bulk posting interface be available?
A. Yes. Large volume posters can request bulk access ($5 per ad) at [email protected] (please include name and phone number)
Q. Is a paid posting account required?
A. No, but they can be helpful for volume posters. Sign up here.
Q. Can ads include hyper links, templates, and external images?
A. No. Please include all relevant information for the specific vehicle being sold in your craigslist ad.
Q. Will paid ads be subject to flagging?
A. Yes, but ads will be reviewed before any removals take place. TOU violations will not be refunded.
Q. What happens if a dealer posts in “by owner” to avoid the fee.
A. They will be subject to ad removal and other remedial actions. Please flag dealer ads you see in “by owner.”
Q. What will happen to ads in this category posted before 12/3?
A. Ads posted prior to 12/3 won’t be renewable (and will be subject to removal) after 12/3. Reposts will cost $5.
Q. What if I have additional questions or want to comment?
A. Please send questions and comments to [email protected]

Yago Paramo
CEO
PGIAuto.com / DealerLab.com
[email protected]

We will be attending Digital Dealer Conference on October 15th, 16th, and 17th.

Booth information:

PGI booth #232 under the name DealerLab
DealerEProcess booth #609

Speaker information:

Dave Page: 3:00pm – 3:50pm TUESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2013

You may find a complete agenda: Conference agenda

Party information:

Following what is now a tradition we will host 2 small parties/gatherings in the tower suite on the nights of the 15th and the 16th for those of you not willing to go clubbing, waiting in the lines, and bumping elbows with the young bucks in Las Vegas night.

We have an invitation but we never get the tower suite number until we arrive so text Nick, Geoff, or me or find us at the booth and we will get you set up. The suite towers usually require card access so make sure you find us.