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- what are the basic metrics?

Posted on 14. Oct, 2008 by admin.

Automotive Marketing- what are the basic metrics to track?

Although this may be a “no brainer” for many dealers, we are time and time again reviewing the metrics and performance of automotive advertising. There are a few key elements when you want to understand how your advertising or automotive marketing is performing. The information you want to discover is “what is my cost per action” on each source of advertising or promotion, both online and through traditional means.

Before anyone can make judgment on the effectiveness of a message or campaign, or even make decisions about a specific media (is newspaper dead yet?) we need to see if you have the basic tracking in place. So, to keep it simple, here is a simple list of what you need to track in order to gauge whether or not your automotive marketing investment is working.

-Does it generate phone calls? How many? (track each source separately)

-Does it generate email leads? How many? (track each source separately)

-Does it generate floor traffic? How many? (track each source separately)

-Does it generate web traffic (How much, what is the quality, does it convert into a lead well?) Again, track each web property separately including your lead providers, websites, factory sites, microsites, dealer websites, etc. If it has a place for a phone number or form, TRACK IT.

The BIG and eventual question is, does it generate SALES? We cannot tackle that question until there is proper accountability in place to track all of the above. Let’s face it, this is a tough market and you need to get a handle on where every dollar is being spent. Therefore, to check your automotive ROI you need the proper tracking in place to:

Capture the Information (CRM, lead management, site analytics, call tracking logs, etc)

Report on the data (spit out reports on each source for the same time period)

Act on the data (Now that we know our $10,000 automotive ad budget in the Super Weekly press got us only 14 calls and zero walk in traffic, what do you do about it?)

In many recent meetings, face to face with dealers, who are facing one of the worst retail crunches in recent history, we have been asking these questions. Read our post on tracking in more detail here

We would be more than happy to share, free of charge, where you can get these tools or what information to track. For full disclosure, we offer many of these services but there are equally comparable services that you may already have in place that already do the same things.

As a good client of ours just recently said on Geraldo last week, when the wind isn’t blowing the sails, we get out the oars. Let’s figure out where the best wind is coming from, and where you can get the best oars for when the favorable winds do not blow your way.

To get more on Dominating the search engines, also see our article on search marketing domination

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Track your calls- you may be surprised!

Posted on 03. Sep, 2008 by admin.

A large Honda switched over to a new PureDealer website. Upon PD’s guidance, they added tracking phone numbers to their site. The data received back in just half a month showed that their website was receiving phone calls on a 2 to 1 basis over email leads. This is a very large number considering how many email leads that this dealer was already receiving.

The next step is to seperate sales from service, and then track these calls to specific sources to better understand ROI of each Internet investment.

Although we cannot take credit for the tripling of the leads, their organic traffic went through the roof and is climbing during a time when other dealers are dropping.

Automotive call tracking definitely pays and helps you understand how to get a better ROI.

Of course, you can sign up for an inexepensive call tracking service with PureDealer at any time.

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Automotive ePress releases sell more cars

Posted on 02. Sep, 2008 by admin.

Working on a tight deadline, with the launch of the new Mazda 6, PureDealer put together a robust automtive SEM, SEO, and ePR program to drive traffic and leads to a local Mazda dealer.

Of all of the investments for this dealer, the most inexpensive cost and highest ROI was the e Press Releases.

Not only did the dealership rank #1 on Google for both  “Mazda 6 dealer” and “mazda6 dealer” , but this automotive press release, coupled with properly optimized dealer website webpages, helped propel the dealership to also receive a #3 NATIONAL ranking for that phrase.

PureDealer also drove the press release and automotive search engine marketing right to a specially designed landing page complete with a simple contact form.

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