Tag Archives: ppc

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.

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.

For many brick-and-mortar businesses, such as car dealerships, conversion tracking is very important in measuring the success of a PPC campaign. In recent years Adwords has introduced various conversion types to give advertisers even more insight into the real impact of their paid search campaigns. The most recent conversion type to be released was cross-device conversions. Cross-device conversions addressed the nature of the multi-screen lifestyle that we currently live in where a user may see an advertisement on their mobile phone, but later complete the conversion on a different screen, such as their desktop PC.

Google is currently testing out a new conversion type to bridge the gap between online advertising and the cash register of a brick-and-mortar business. They launched a pilot program called “In-Store Attribution Transaction Reporting In Adwords” with six advertisers. Essentially, the pilot program tracked conversions from online activity to in-store sales by matching anonymous tracking cookies on users computers to in-store sales information collected by third party providers. Here’s a breakdown of how the process works:

A user clicks on an online ad > Google sends an anonymous “click ID” to the advertiser and that matches the cookie on the user’s computer > Days or weeks later that user may buy the product in the retailer’s store > The third party data company takes that purchase and links it back to the user’s cookie > The cookie is linked to Google’s click ID

With this new conversion tracking type, Google is able to tell Adwords advertisers which ads generated in-store sales and how much they generated. For those worried about Big Brother watching over your shoulder, the system is designed so that Google never knows the identity of the user.

So what does this mean for brick-and-mortar businesses, such as car dealerships, that do online advertising? Well, it means  greater insights into the effectiveness of their online advertising budget. A dealership will be able to get more accurate data on what brought their customers into the showroom floor.

In-store conversion tracking is currently in the testing phase and there’s no word on when it will be added to Adwords. When it is finally released, it’ll be an exciting game changer that will narrow the divide between online ads and the cash register.

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]