Top 5 pay per click marketing optimization techniques

Posted on 29. Dec, 2008 by admin.

We have posted some incredible pay per click (PPC) numbers for our clients. Before we give 5 good tips on how to maximize your automotive internet marketing, there are a few things you need to have prepared in order to measure the results. You need good analytics and a lot of time. That’s really it. If you work hard, you can get some results that look like this:

Chevy dealer automotive marketing sample

If you spend some time look at your bounce rate, exit pages, new visitor ratio, and keyword list, you can quickly match that up to your keyword and PPC budget to help your dealership spend less per click and get more for your money. The top 5 list below already assumes you have run a campaign and have some background knowledge on search marketing. It also takes into account that you have a Google adwords or similar campaign that has run for a month or so.

How to get more from your automotive pay per click budget:

1. Review your keywords in your Analytics and remove those with very high bounce rates. If you are getting click after click on some top automotive phrases and still get a high bounce rate, then remove that keyword to give other keywords a chance to run. Some people will argue that a high bounce rate is indiciative that the dealership’s phone is ringing. This is possible so make sure to track every sales call to see if you can find trends. There are more advanced methods to track to phone conversion but we will save that for another article.
2. Remove the keywords that are not converting. Do you have a decent bounce rate but they are not visiting any pages or filling out any forms? Remove it. There are usually some great hidden automotive keywords in your Adwords PPC account that have not had the chance to run that may convert better. Sometimes long keyphrases are good, sometimes they are not. There is no hard and fast rule that can be applied to all automotive advertsing online.
3. Change your ads constantly. Testing testing testing is what marketing is all about. If you are not testing your ads or automotive copy then you are not maximizing your results. Just a few simple changes to your car copy or price of a vehicle in the small text ad can cause your automotive click through rate or CTR to skyrocket. We have a small handbook that we just may release to the automotive public on how to get the best click rates. Remember the phrase price sells cars? Well that often works with “price makes clicks” as well. A word of caution: Deceptive ads can cause high bounce rates, plus the fact that it’s just shady.
4. Group your keywords into proper campaigns and make everything match. If you are marketing Hondas and trying to get clicks on Civics, Accords, and used Honda’s, then setup a campaign for each. You can subdivide further, but this will enable you to match the keywords to the ad copy to the destination web address which Google just loves when you are trying to sell more cars online. Google wants more clicks and will reward you will a high quality score, which leads to item 5.
5. Fix your Adwords quality score. What is Quality Score you ask? In a nutshell, Google reads your keywords, campaigns, url, and destination page along with several other things including your relevancy and CTR, and gives your keyword a “Poor, OK, or GREAT” score. The Greater the score, the less you pay per click and the more relevant the results to the customer. You want the car buyer that is seeking a used Honda Civic to see your used Civic ad, and be brought to a used Civic webpage filled with relevant offers. Google likes when you do that, make Google happy and pay less.

How is this for conversion rates? This does NOT even take into account the phone calls this dealer received from the online marketing or pay per click campaign we performed for them.

automotive marketing conversion rates

There are many other tactics and techniques but let’s talk results. I challenge any automotive marketing expert or PPC specialist or so called automotive internet marketing company to beat these numbers:

Conversion Rates: Over 30% conversion rates on some keywords (you want more of these and less of the rest)

Bounce Rates: We have some clients receiving bounce rates in the single digits. What this means is that the shoppers are clicking around your website, microsite, or your ad. You want a low bounce rate. See graphic below for a real dealer from the past 30 days.

automotive marketing bounce rate

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Automotive Internet Marketing with Bad Data

Posted on 13. Dec, 2008 by admin.

Last week we discovered that one of our automotive search marketing dealers was making decisions on how to spend their internet marketing money off of bad website Analytic data. We do not handle the website, but we help them review their analytics and uncover the piles of waste and reallocate that to the proper areas. After months of question and answer Pure dealer.com discovered that this major web company was counting all website management and setup time as part of the site visitation, page visit, bounce rate, and page views. This may sound like a small thing, but the data was off by nearly half since it accounted for the entire time that this developer spent setting up and configuring the website.

When you are trying to determine where you automotive marketing internet investment should go, you need to track it and rely on good data. The fact that the data was based off of a web providers “home grown” version of Google Analytics was enough for us to smell something fishy from day one.

This web provider also took credit for all automotive pay per click traffic we generated and renamed it “Organic” which is a very deceiving tactic, although they will not admit it. Requests for raw log files to analyze the data have gone unanswered. They also did not properly track the search engine optimization we did nor recognize the sources of traffic that we know were brought to specific pages on the dealer’s website.

It’s tough enough being a car dealer right now without having your automotive internet marketing arm fighting against your dealer website provider. Do yourself a favor and get an unbiased Analytic tool in your site like Google Analytics.

We have put this into dealer.com websites as well as bzresults websites, tkcarsites, and numerous others or have been given access to read what is already in some of these sites.

Take charge of your advertising budget and do not get bullied by providers that refuse to comply. We would be happy to give you free advise on your statistics and your marketing budget. Give us a call and bring your marketing and advertising to a new level.

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Automotive marketing case study-15% click rates

Posted on 11. Dec, 2008 by admin.

Our automotive services are vast and we are often asked what a good click through rate is on a pay per click ad. We have taken over campaigns that have less than .01% click through rate.

If you want to get the most for your pay per click then read on or give us a call.

Pure Dealer.com website design and marketing need to work hand in hand to make sure you maximize your click results. Many dealers believe that the click through rate is solely based upon writing a good ad. We have helped dealers completely dominate their competitors in Internet search marketing. We are conquering Internet Marketing through cunning tactics, ideas, and techniques that will help you get more automotive leads in this competitive automotive market.

As automotive SEO, SEM, and PPC experts, we look at the whole picture to help you get a lower click cost. Proper selection of keywords, with better written copy and aggressive offers, driven to a landing page or microsite will help your dealership leads increase.

Our Internet marketing strategies have helped increase dealership leads as much as 200% but not at the cost of low conversions. Sell more cars and demand high click rates of your pay per click provider. If you do not know what your marketing is doing, ask us to help you figure it out.

If you are in in the automotive marketing industry, learn more about how car dealerships can get quality leads from an automotive expert. If you would like to see a screen capture of sites and Google campaigns that are converting at 15% or higher, just email us and we will be happy to show you.

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Automotive Search Engine Marketing - keep it simple

Posted on 04. Dec, 2008 by admin.

Automotive Search Engine Marketing is a complex concept for some, but can be simplified into various components to make it more easily digestible. Here are the two main categories of search engine marketing for automotive dealers. These are not all the variations of it and do not account for services such as automotive blogs, automotive epress releases, car dealer social networking or other automotive marketing ideas.

Automotive Search Marketing

This is also known as pay per click or in some cases Google Adwords. This is in nutshell, paying for placement or online advertising.

Automotive Search Engine Optimization

This is what many dealers call the “free Google listings” or what appears as the search results on a search engine. It is often called Automotive SEO or car dealer search engine placement, or you may ask Google to tell you some “car dealer search engine ideas“.

Marketing your dealership to the search engines is a very important concept but also, and often, involves a good dealer web site design to make sure that the automotive search traffic you receive will vonvert. Your goal is to become your own automotive lead provider through proper automotive search engine optimization and marketing.

If you want a Free Automotive Marketing Analysis contact us and we will review your site, your search optimization visibility and provide you with some great reporting at no charge.

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Automotive Search Marketing or Advertising?

Posted on 25. Nov, 2008 by admin.

Automotive Advertising or Marketing

You will find many automotive dealers confuse marketing with advertising or vice versa. While both are important they are vastly different. If you do your homework, you can help your dealership grow through some great advertising and marketing strategies.

Here are the main differences when it pertains to the automotive sector:

Automotive Advertising: Paid announcements with a message or offer from an dealer; the presentation or promotion by an automotive dealership of its products to its existing and potential customers.

Automotive Marketing: The planning, implementation and control of a mix of business activities intended to bring together buyers and sellers for the mutually advantageous exchange or transfer of products.

Looking at the above definitions, with some slight modifications to fit the dealership market, you can quickly see where you fit. Some dealers are straight advertisers, but think they are marketers. Other’s take a more systematic approach that involve a semblance of some marketing plan and variety of activities. (Planning a weekend sale does not really fall into this category, although you want it to)

It is easy to see the confusion to the point that automotive dealers think of them as one-in-the same, so let’s drill it down.

Automotive Advertising is just one single part of the marketing process. It involves spreading the word about your special car sale, weekend event, clearance, or the services you are offering such as oil changes, extended warranties, and the like. This often includes strategies such as ad placement, medium, frequency, automotive budget, etc. Automotive Advertising also includes the ad placement whether through traditional means or through Automotive Internet advertsing methods.

Automotive marketing is a large painting, and within that painting you have a variety of images which may include advertising, research, planning, ePR, sales, pricing, distribution, support, strategy, service, development or production, website hosting, community involvement and much more.

Advertising is just one section of the overall painting. The entire picture should take the form of something that works as both individual images and towards the bigger goal of a work of art.

Dealership Marketing is often mistakenly identified as advertising, and often confused when you throw in additional terms like search engine marketing (sem) and search engine optimization (seo). Both are really forms of advertising since they are not necessarily part of an overlying strategy.

The best automotive strategies contain solid dealership marketing plans that address the needs of the entire dealership. If you only look at it as “advertising” then you are truly, missing the picture.

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Automotive video marketing - 54,000 FREE ad views

Posted on 24. Nov, 2008 by admin.

We recently took a video for our client, which was a simple Toyota Factory spot (Saved by Zero Event) and it went VIRAL. Big time. Yes, that is 54,000 (thousand) views of this video in less than two months.

There was no trick, no gimmick, nothing that required an advanced degree of any sort. This is the modern day guerilla marketing.
Here are the results: 54,000 views of this video, and links from Esquire, Maxim, Edmunds, Ford, and other sites both nationally and Internationally.

This automotive video marketing idea helped also proper the dealership to #1 status nationwide for Toyota’s factory campaign, catapulting past Toyota and every dealer in the world. In fact, I would go so far as saying that we have marketed Toyota’s campaign on Google perhaps better than Toyota themselves.

Do a Google search for nearly any variation of the following:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=toyota+saved+by+zero+event&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=

The dealership website, Toyota of Allentown, Pennsylvania’s best Toyota dealer is here

If you want more information on how to optimize your automotive marketing, or just want to learn how video advertising can help your dealership, email or contact us today.

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Automotive Waste Management is the new Automotive Marketing

Posted on 21. Oct, 2008 by admin.

With the slow Economy, sluggish car sales, gas prices going up and down, what is a dealer to do?

Do you need a hatchet or a scalpel to fix things? Will the market come around and if so, when?

Tough questions, tough times.

These times are when a dealer and their automotive marketing partner needs to get into the Waste Management business. No, not the Sopranos “dump the body” waste management, but identifying the waste in your advertising and making hard decisions.

We have recently begin re-coining ourselves as Automotive Waste Management specialists, and it is a big part of what we do (and we looove doing it)

It’s simple really-

We look at your budget for all of your advertising (nothing held back) including phone calls, emails, CRM, walk-in traffic logs.

We identify the cost per action (call, email, walk in, etc)

We turn everything into a formula that shows us the true cost of your automotive marketing budget.

Then, we back up the dumpster and dump in the all of the advertising that is costing you way too much money. It may feel at times like you are getting rid of some “old friends” and in many cases that is what happens. If the old friends are costing you $300 per call from that newspaper ad, or your radio spot on that expensive station is creating a cost per sale of $3000, then it’s time to say goodbye to old friends.

You have to know what advertising is creating true and measurable action. You have no more choice to wait around watching your sales reps play solitaire because that direct mail piece will “hit any time now” even though you know it hit a few days ago.

Hold your agency, your media, even your message accountable for every single dollar and believe me you will see drastic reduction in budget and fast shifts to areas that are successful. Put a tracking number on everything and track all calls, emails, walkins. Be vigilant about it and accept no excuses from any staff member or agency (internet or traditional). Toll free numbers are cheap (purecalling.com offers single numbers or packages as low as $10) and tracking can begin nearly immediately.

If you do not start really analyzing your results, you can just fuggetabout it and continue to throw your automotive marketing budget right in the dumpster. Which would you rather have? All of your money in random unnacountable advertising, or your money in trackable results-driven marketing?

Two recent examples came from “domestic” dealers in the Northeast.

One of them spent nearly $1000 per phone call on a direct mail piece (no walkins were verified)

Another spent $800 per contact from their postyourvehiclesforsaleonourwebsite.com advertising.

One received a large amount of calls from a print campaign which was a “special buy” and it worked out to be around $30 per call. This we deemed as a “keeper” and recommended that the dealer try this again when the opportunity arose. However, at “regular price” this would ad would have worked out to be over $120 per call.

Another dealer was getting tremendous ROI with their email blasts, selling cars every month with no cost other than the time to create the offer.

The biggest kicker of them all, was the dealers websites, which were producing phone calls under $2.00 per call (yes, two American dollars) Weight the options then- free sales from email blasts and two dollar website leads, or one thousand dollar direct mail leads, two dollars leads, one thousand dollar leads…hmm not much of a choice there. Ooh I hear the truck backing up with the dumpster- what goes in first?

Of course closing ratios account for something and cheap leads are not always good, right? Again, track it all to a sale. A good CRM will allow you to know the exact cost per sale on all of your advertising.

We can do it wrong all day long, doing it right takes a little bit more work, but it is well worth it. Put on you Automotive Waste Management gloves and let’s get started. If anyone would like a free analysis of their call reports, leads, and analytics, just let us know and we can give you a report on your wasted budget.

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Firing On All Cylinders With Your Automotive marketing

Posted on 09. Oct, 2008 by admin.

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10 surefire ways to waste your Automotive search marketing budget

Posted on 29. Sep, 2008 by admin.

Top 10 ways to Waste your Automotive search marketing budget

We have handled millions of ad impressions on our automotive marketing (pay per click) accounts for our clients, and have taken over our share of mismanaged accounts from other automotive web developers, mom and pop shops, and even major companies that state they are experts in search marketing for automotive dealers. Here is a quick top ten list of no-no’s, along with some great examples of how bad things can get when a car dealer just throws money at search marketing

10:  Buy outside of your dealership’s geographic area:

Every car dealer wants their customers, their competitors customers, and will go to great lengths to buy zones or marketing areas well outside of any reasonable area. Often, it’s a naive marketer that buys a 100 mile radius on new car leads. What’s the REAL CHANCE you will sell a NEW Chevy when a customer will have to drive past 53 other Chevrolet dealers on the way down? Used cars is another story. We have some great success stories of selling cars outside of the state, region, even country.

9:Buy keywords for models you do not sell:

Of course people are cross shopping vehicles. Yes you may put a Cayenne buyer into an FX45 but first and foremost, get the proper keywords before you even think about buying any other automotive keywords. Then, if and when you do buy competing models, closely watch the clicks, conversion rates to see if these are even turning into automotive leads or are just a wasted effort.

8:Buy generic phrases:

If you are buying phrases like “cars” and “used” then you have purchased a one way ticket to spend budget quickly. You will attract all sorts of crazy requests especially if you buy a “broad match” which may include such wonderful phrases as “cars for demolition derbies” and “used jeans just like Madonna”.  Automotive marketers beware but a click is a click to Google and they will charge you if you are not smart enough to prevent it.

7:Don’t match your ad to your destination page:

You ad says “Toyota Camry’s for $199/mo” and your landing page is a homepage that is still 3 clicks away from finding the Camry inventory. As a special bonus to your customer, they can’t find this $199 special because someone forgot to load it into your special offer section of your dealership’s website. Talk about a time waster. Another one-way ticket to find another dealer on Google is coming to a customer near you. Could you envision a situation where a customer walked into your showroom, asked about a Camry, and you walked him around your entire dealership, showed them the service department, F&I, and led them to a few doors which may or may not lead to a price on that car?

6: Make crappy boring generic ads

This is an automotive marketing staple. Boring, generic ads with no compelling reason to click on them. Sure it’s great you are on top of Google but that will not last long if you have a low click through rate, and customer’s are going to click on the ad that excites them. We run many automotive ads simultaneously and constantly make them compete to beat the next ad. This is why we can see a 15% or more click through rate on some ads and other dealers say that pay per click just does not work.

5: Spend too much on “gotta have it” keywords

I was at a dealership the other day, who shall remain nameless, who said “I have to win the word Honda”. I don’t care how much it costs, but anything Honda, I need to be #1 in paid search.”. This dealership would have put together a pay per click campaign that resulted in clicks on Honda motorcycles, Honda outboards, Honda used, Honda jet planes (yes take a look at them) and anything else. Plus he may end up paying $10 per click on competitive words. Insane.

4:Ignore Analytic reports and focus on traffic:

90% bounce rates on pay per click ads mean that 90% of your customers are leaving almost immediately. If you are not looking at analytic reports then you are spending money on the wrong keywords, ads, sites, etc. We just left a dealer who was buying the word “free” in their PPC campaign. Sure, tons of clicks. Duh. Bounce rate near 100%. Duh. I can’t even imagine how much they paid per click. Factor in the exit rates (what pages people are leaving from) and the new visitor ratio, and you can get a good idea of the best sources of traffic. Buy more good, buy less bad.

3:Let Google run your campaign

Sure it is easy and may be good to get you started, but Google suggestions will often just give you irrelevant phrases, or provide you with odd budgets. Buy what you need, leave the rest. Remember, Google wants to spend your automotive budget.

2:Spend too much per click

Sometimes, coming in 2nd is a good thing! When the price between being a first place listing and second place listing is $2.00 per click, it pays to let go of first sometimes. Often, we can buy several times as many clicks for our clients just by avoiding the “bid to win 1st” mentality. Sometimes, the “long tail” philosophy can lead to a boatload of clicks at a low price.

1. Buy your own name

Here is our favorite one of all, bidding on your own name. There is a very popular and well known automotive marketing company who can get dealers a ton of clicks and “phone calls” as well. It’s easy when you buy the dealers name. If you are already #1 with your own name (most dealers are) and there is no competition, the DO NOT buy your own name. They will find you for free. That is buying the cow, AND paying for the milk. It’s insane that a major, well funded business has built a business model around redirecting a dealers own traffic back to the dealer, and getting full credit for it. There are cases where you do want and need to buy your own name but in most cases, it is not necessary.

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Automotive SEO - get top Google listing in less than 3 hours

Posted on 26. Sep, 2008 by admin.

The Ultimate automotive marketing Test

Can you “win” an automotive keyword on Google in just a few hours. The answer is yes.

Automotive SEO is what all dealers want to know about.

Not being known for beating around the bush, we are going to give away a little dealer SEO secret. OK, it’s not a secret but a useful tool to help get both listed and linked to from some major sites on the Internet. These links turn into visits, visits turn into leads, and then your sales staff doesn’t call the client (kidding on the last part, we all know you call every lead within 15 mintes)

Automotive SEO and electronic Press Releases

Google likes fresh info. Write a press release, focus on a specific key phrase, and you can end up with a number 1 spot in Google. Better yet, add some clickable links on the press release (not all services allow this) and you can track the traffic. We recently had a dealer get over 300 visits on a very relevant phrase in Google using this automotive search optimization technique.

Optimize your automotive press release for search engines and humans

What? But isn’t a press release about press? Shouldn’t it be a 3 page story that builds the brand in the customers mind? Sure, if you don’t want to rank in Google. We aren’t suggesting you post a bunch of junk or keyword spam Google. But with the right release, sent to the right places, you can end up #1 in just a few hours. Don’t stick a release out there that says “Nissan dealer, Nissan Dealer, get your Nissan dealer info here”. It just won’t work, and even if it did, it would not last long. SEO isn’t just a quick trick. Write for both Google and your customers.

Just like this article has a specific purpose, to inform you about a great dealership search optimization technique, it does not mean you should over do it by repeating automotive seo over and over.

We run ePR campaigns for dealers 5 days a week. If you want to try one, let us know and you can do one at a low introductory rate.

Try this search for an example: automotive seo specialist

or this one Mazda6 Dealer (it’s nice when you beat the manufacturer)

or certified honda PA

or Certified Honda Quote (several Google listings if you count the blog)

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