Monthly Archives: December 2013

It’s interesting how when we think about online advertising, we only think about text ads in search result pages and easily ignored display ads throughout the web. Google is also offering a more engaging form of advertising that makes use of javascript to create an engaging experience for the user: Engagement ads.

Engagement ads appear as a display ad at first, but after the user hovers their mouse over them for 2 seconds, it can expand into a larger ad or a lightbox filled with rich content to engage the user. Inside the lightbox, you can have anything from your youtube masthead to an interactive game.

Google claims users are ten times more likely to engage with these ads than to click on a standard display ad and users spend twice as much time engaging with them.

Google has added a feature to their display network advertising. The buzzword here is “Viewability.” When bidding on impressions (CPM) in the display network, you can now require that the ad is viewable before you’re charged for it. The qualifications for an ad to viewable is that at least 50% of the ad is on the user’s screen for at least 1 second. This is in an effort to prevent advertisers from being charged for ads that are below the fold on the publishers page. This isn’t especially applicable to us, since we currently bid on clicks, and in remarketing clicks are more important than impressions.

Today I’m going to share some interesting statistics on advertising and user engagement

90% of users connect with a company on multiple screens/devices in the same day when making a purchase
66% of those people use a smartphone and computer simultaneously.

65% start on a smartphone
25% start on a PC/Laptop
11% start on a tablet

Yet only 48% of advertisers rate multi-screen campaigns as “very important,” and only 20% of media spend is on integrated multi-screen campaigns. This figure is expected to rise to 50% by 2016.

Google has added a feature to their display network advertising. The buzzword here is “Viewability.” When bidding on impressions (CPM) in the display network, you can now require that the ad is viewable before you’re charged for it. The qualifications for an ad to viewable is that at least 50% of the ad is on the user’s screen for at least 1 second. This is in an effort to prevent advertisers from being charged for ads that are below the fold on the publishers page. This isn’t especially applicable to us, since we currently bid on clicks, and in remarketing clicks are more important than impressions.

source: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2013/12/just-in-time-for-holidays-viewability.html

To Your Success,
Kevin Drongowski
Senior Account Manager
Integrated PPC
Questions? 425-780-2774 Call or text

Another article had some interesting insight in the evolution on SEO strategy. The article below goes into much more detail, but the gist of it is that having a site that functions well for the end user will get an SEO boost over a site that focuses solely on keywords. Also social media plays a much bigger part now. Using social media to share relevant content that is useful to the reader, will drive traffic to your website. Share blog posts across social media platforms to increase your visibility.

source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2319176/From-Old-School-to-New-School-SEO-in-Transition

I had previously sent some news about a company called Anglo Rank being targeted by Google for their sale of backlinks in a link network. Google has ultimately penalized all sites that used their service.

source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2319130/Did-Anglo-Rank-Link-Network-Get-Websites-Penalized-by-Google-Short-Answer-YES

I wanted to gather a few thoughts about the 1st week in Craig’s List for the dealers.

This is a near-perfect ad:

2010 Acura MDX

1) Up to 24 photos per vehicle.

2) No HTML (so no links, color text, etc)

3) Formatted text is available (lists, bold, larger font, etc)

What would make this ad perfect (which we are working on as we speak):

Adding the state disclaimer (DOC fee, etc).

Adding a URL (can’t hotlink, so I have doubts about the value of this)

Inventory view:

http://bellingham.craigslist.org/search/ctd?userid=10808959

Notice that in the inventory view Craig’s List now identifies your dealer with an unique ID, in this case 10808959

Be careful having 2 companies or even an employee postings ads if you already have the entire inventory posted. Several dealers have called stating that their ads got put on hold for having the same VIN posted several times. The accounts (you as a dealer since they have your tax ID number) will be on hold for one year (this is the time that they have always used in the past to put an account on hold).

Make sure you don’t have employees posting ads in the by owner section. Craig’s List could just delete those ads but they could also identify the VIN or the name of the dealership and put it on hold. So far we don’t have news of this happening but the ‘by owner’ section has an exponential larger number of postings so I think there is a backlash coming.

Some of the people at PGI believe that based on current policies you can post a vehicle and re-post it (pay again the $5) 48 hours after the first posting. The advantage of this is that your new posting will make it to the top of the listings. First of all we don’t know if this is correct, Craig’s List may see your cars posted 8 times for the month and chose to delete your account. But secondly and most important the volume of postings is much less than half of what it was before deeming-in my opinion-the extra posting useless. If someone wants to push the envelope a little bit I would renew the ads on the 15th day mark.

New features:

Craig’s List just added yesterday the “see my other postings” feature (see the add above again and look at the top right corner). This feature indicates that they now feel about your cars as an “account” while before each posting was its own. This also shows the they are not done with changes and more updates to the system could be coming soon.

Steven Warren went as far as saying “Craig’s List is looking more and more like Backpage and adding all its features”. Only if Backpage had the same traffic Craig’s List has.

The cost of this:

$5 per ad and we charge $395/month flat to take care of everything (postings, deleting ads, updating ads, etc).

If you have 100 cars remember that you need to load all of them at once making the first month a little bit more expensive. After that we just post new cars as they renew or a new units come to the system on a daily basis.

If I was the new car manager I would put a $500/month budget towards new (we don’t charge more for managing that) and I will have at 100 units as a presence at all times.

Dealing with the CL account:

We can take care of the Craig’s List account for you or you can open the account yourself, manage the money (pre-load the account) and we will take it from there.

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

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.