Category Archives: PPC

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about how Google AdWords was forcing all advertisers to use close variants on exact matches by removing the opt out option. As is usually the case, BingAds is following AdWords leads. BingAds announced that they are making close variants on exact matches a permanent feature on BingAds — they had been testing the feature earlier in the month.

If you didn’t read my earlier post, here’s a refresher on close variants. Close variants include search queries that are close to, but not exact matches to the keywords. This includes misspellings, plurals and abbreviations. Here are some examples.

Google’s controversial decision to remove any ability to opt out of close variants in AdWords rubbed some advertisers thee wrong way. BingAds took notice and is maintaining the advertisers choice to opt out of close variants on exact match keywords. You can make that change at the campaign level by going to Advanced Settings > Keyword Matching Options.

This past week Google made an announcement that close variant keyword matching will be applied to all ‘Exact’ and ‘Phrase’ match keywords. Starting in late September, Google will be removing the option to opt out of close variant matching. This isn’t an earth shattering announcement on the scale of Panda or Hummingbird, but it’s still noteworthy nonetheless.

Close variant matching was introduced in 2012 and according to Google advertisers have seen strong results from it with advertisers receiving an average of 7 percent more exact and phrase match clicks. For most campaigns this change will have no effect as the default setting for campaigns is to include close variant matching.

An example of close variant would be an advertiser targeting the exact match keyword [car dealer]. The ad would show up for these additional terms:
– car dealers
– car daeler
– car da ler
– car dealer’s
– car dealership

This move to force close variant matching could be a sign of a general trend towards mobile and voice search. These search platforms have much higher instances of misspellings and typos due to garbled voice recognition or cumbersome typing on mobile devices.

There benefits of close variant matching is that it takes away the need to create an extensive keyword list of misspellings and increases overall traffic volume for exact and phrase match keywords. The downside to it is that the inability to truly control exactly what words trigger an ad does take some control away from the advertiser. However, there is a work around this issue. You can build a list of negative keywords of misspellings for variant terms that you don’t want to show up for.

To learn more about how close variant matching might effect your campaign you can contact your Integrated PPC strategist. You can depend on us to stay on top of changes in the digital marketing landscape.

I look at a lot of car dealership websites everyday and have a weird habit of peeking into their source code to see if they have Google’s remarketing code embedded into their site – such odd behavior is a hazard of my occupation. I’m often really surprised at how many dealerships aren’t doing remarketing.

If your car dealership isn’t doing remarketing, then I can guarantee that you’re missing out on potential customers. Here are some reasons why you should be doing remarketing.

Increase Conversions
On average, only 5% of first-time visitors will convert on your website. There are a variety of factors that play into this conversion rate such as the general user experience of your site. Another reason is that people like do do research before they make purchase. The average car shopper will visit multiple car sites during their shopping process. Don’t you want to grab some of that other 95% that didn’t originally convert on your site?

Remarketing Is Cost Effective
In general, the CPC’s for remarketing can be much lower than paid search ads. Let’s say your average CPC to bring in a car shopper to your site the first time around is $3, and the CPC for your remarketing ad is only $1. With remarketing your can reel them back to your site the second time around at a fraction of the costs.

Timing Is Everything
When a customer first comes to your site they may just not be ready to buy. No matter how great your landing page is or how convincing your site’s content is, if a customer is in the initial stages of the sales funnel you’re going to have a hard time making the conversion. A remarketing ad will follow a customer as they traverse down the sales funnel, so when they’re ready to make the conversion your ad will be shown to bring them back to your site.

Cheap Branding
Remarketing is a really cost effective way to brand your dealership. Your ad will be seen thousands of times. However, you’ll only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

If you’re not doing remarketing right now then talk to an Integrated PPC representative to start your remarketing campaign.

Social PPC on a platform such as Facebook won’t replace advertising on Google anytime soon. However, with nearly 699 million users on Facebook – many who visit the site multiple times a day – social media PPC is becoming harder to ignore from any digital marketing strategy. Social PPC makes a great complement to a search campaign to increase the reach of your car dealership. Here’s what you need to know about advertising of Facebook.

How are ads targeted?
Facebook has advanced targeting options that allows you to target your audience based on location, gender, age, likes and interests, education, workplace location, relationship status, and more. Such a comprehensive targeting option allows you to exactly pinpoint who sees your ad. So you can show specifically relevant ads to a narrow targeted audience.

You can even target your ads to people who you are already connected to you. Bring back return customers by advertising people who have already ‘liked’ your company page. You can even target audiences based on an email address lists from your CRM. The email address targeting option can be utilized to show car service based ads to someone who just bought a car from your dealership. Thus, allowing you to increase profits by ‘double-dipping’ on a sale and creating customer loyalty.

Where on the page can Facebook ads be seen?
Facebook ads will either be shown directly in the news feed or on Facebook’s right hand column.

What is the average cost per click for Facebook ads?
Overall the average cost per click for a Facebook ad is $0.80 – much lower than Adwords. it’s also important to note that there’s a discrepancy between ads that lead to a Facebook page and ads that lead off-site of Facebook. For ads that direct to a Facebook page the average CPC is $0.70. For ads that lead off-Facebook the average CPC is $1.08.

What is the average CTR for Facebook Ads?
The average click-through-rate for Facebook ads is 0.041 percent. This average CTR is comparable to the average for display ads on the Google Display Network.

If you’d like to learn more about advertising on Facebook, then contact an Integrated PPC representative.

In the fantastic Spike Jonze film “Her” a lonely man falls deeply in love with his smartphone’s operating system. We’re not at that point where love could blossom from conversations with a smartphone. Human to computer conversation isn’t quite a two-way street yet. However, with an increase emphasis on hands-free voice search on mobile devices that conversation channel is definitely a one-way street — with us doing all the talking.

Google recently announced that all Andoid powered devices will now respond to the hot word ‘Ok, Google’. Users can initiate a search, control, and carry out any device function by saying the magic words ‘Ok, Google’ first and then asking a question or command such as “Call mom” or “Find the nearest Honda dealership open past 7pm”.

It’s not out of the question to think that voice control/search will soon be the primary way users interact with their mobile devices. With mobile search consuming a larger part of the search traffic pie every year it’s important to prepare your paid search campaigns to deal with this new paradigm shift of how we interact with mobile devices.

Voice control conversational search is very different from traditional typed search queries. With a typed search query a user may search for something like this: “like new 2011 Chevy Malibu”. This same search query as a voice control search may sound very different, but have the same intention: “find me a 2011 Chevy Malibu with leather seats and less than 30,000 miles”.

With type searches we omit various keywords and the ordering of the words may not always have a natural, cognitive flow. The opposite is true for voice search with additional words such as “a”, “for”, and “me” inserted into the search query.

In paid search campaigns this can lead to misses on exact and phrase match keywords. The broad match keywords may cover this , but you may be missing additional context of the search query and may not present the best ad copy or landing page for the voice search query. This could affect metrics such as CTR, conversion rates, and onsite engagement for voice search query searchers. To target for mobile devices it’s important to take into account voice search queries. This mean creating specific ad groups and campaigns for long tail keyword terms that are conversational.

As our interaction with devices continue to evolve it’s important that our PPC strategies evolve along with it.

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.

We made a great effort last month to get all our websites to integrate with our dealer’s phone, chat, and form systems.

The result is a back end system that gives you data like what you see here with deeper view on a daily basis on where your leads come from.

Phone systems integration:

You can now listed to your phone tracking system straight from the website’s back end (no need to log in another system to check calls).

PPC mobile tracking update:

We wrote a new new script that modifies an existing PPC tracking.

Anything that was showing up as just a “call button” was not swapping out to the call tracking number on mobile sites. Thus, not giving credit to the PPC call tracking number for the lead from mobile sites with “call buttons”. The updated script fills in that gap so both “call buttons” and text based phone numbers are swapped out properly on mobile sites.

This will allow dealers to better track their mobile PPC campaigns and to see the tracking in the website’s back end.

For more information about PPC integration please email Sok [email protected]

When deciding to invest in PPC marketing, one of the first questions that needs to be answered is, “How much should I spend?” Since most car dealers know that they need to get involved in PPC since nearly 90 percent of people us the internet when shopping for cars. However, most people don’t have a clue when it comes to deciding how much of their marketing budget should be allocated to PPC advertising. Here are some things that you should consider when determining your PPC ad budget.

Your advertising target radius
First, determine what areas you want your ads to target. Are you going to be advertising your product locally? regionally? nationally? Or globally? The wider you cast your advertising net the more traffic you’ll be bringing in and the larger your budget to be. Having a $5,000 dollar monthly budget may be adequate for a business with a 20-mile target radius around their business, but that same amount would be spread quite thin on a state or national level. In fact, that amount probably wouldn’t last before your first coffee in advertised on a national level.

What is the monthly search volume on your keywords
Do a little bit of keyword research and compile a list of the keywords you want to target and also the most popular keywords in your specific industry. Use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to find out what the monthly search volumes are for the keywords you want to target. Set the target ad targeting in the keyword planner to get the most relevant search volume information. If there are a lot of high volume keywords on your list then you’re probably going to need a larger budget.

What is the CPC of the keywords on your list?
In the same Keyword Planner tool you can also find the CPC (cost-per-click) for the keywords on your list. The CPCs can vary depending on the keyword match type, type of keyword, and your specific advertising niche. Your branded keywords such as your dealership name will be much cheaper than general industry terms such as “used cars”. Exact match keywords are cheaper than high volume broad match keywords. Dealerships that want to bid on terms such as “bad credit car loan” may need to pay a premium to compete in this highly competitive finance niche.

Now do some math

Monthly Search Volume x Average CPC x 3% CTR = Your Suggest Monthly Budget

The 3% CTR is just an estimate. The CTR will vary depending on the specific industry and the quality of your ad copy.

If you’re finding that the suggested monthly budget is way more than you can afford then you may want to consider some things such as weeding out some keywords or decreasing your target radius until you find a number that you’re comfortable with.

In the dashboard you will now notice that leads can be classified as a paid PPC lead.

These leads will have a dollar sign $ indicating that those are not organic to the website.

Our goal is to further integrate assets like Google PPC that are external but related to your web presence.

With one quick look you will be able to see how many leads and what type of leads you get every day in the website. The different icons show where the leads originate and in some cases they can have several sources of information. In the attached screenshot you can see that the PPC click resulted in a chat lead. There are 2 other instances in this example where you can see how the system differentiates from submissions from the dealer’s mobile site.

Google runs a monopoly on the search engine marketing industry. That’s evident by the fact that over here at Integrated PPC nearly 98 percent of our clients ad spend is spent on Google. Yup, a paltry 2 percent of the budget that is managed here is spent on Bingads. Apparently, Bing’s marketing blitz of “Don’t get scroogled”, a few years back, fell on deaf ears.

With 70 percent of all search traffic going through them, Google is definitely the alpha dog in the search engine marketing industry. Any business that does PPC advertising needs to be advertising on Google — such a large portion of internet traffic is too significant to ignore. Accounting for nearly 20 percent of search traffic, Bing comes in at a very distant second. Twenty percent is still quite significant and could account for millions of potential customers, so Bing shouldn’t be ignored either. Here are three reasons why you should also consider advertising on Bingads, even if you’re already advertising on Google.

Lower CPC On Bing
The cost per click to advertise on Bing is significantly cheaper than Google. The cheaper CPCs can be advantageous for those advertising in expensive niches such as the auto loan sector, where each $12 click can quickly deplete your daily budget in Google. The downside to Bing is that fewer people will see your ads. However, you may end up with a better ROI if those who do click on your ads are converting.

Bing Has More Top Page Sponsored Ads
Studies have shown that more people pay attention to the ads at the top of the page than those that appear on the sidebar. The advantage Bing has over Google is that they display more ads on the top page than Google. If you conduct the same keyword search on Google and Bing, you’ll find that at least one more ad appears above Bing organic search results than Google. This means that a fourth position placement on Bing is not only cheaper, but it also has better ad placement on the top of the organic search results.

Easy Import To Bingads
For someone looking to advertise on both Bing and Google, Bingads makes it very effortless to import your Adwords campaigns to Bingads with an import to Adwords function. With just a couple clicks you could be advertising in both advertising platforms and maximizing your search engine traffic — no tedious rebuilding of your campaign involved here.

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.