PUREDEALER | Automotive Internet Marketing | SEO | PPC | Custom Dealer Websites

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:

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.

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.

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Automotive Search Marketing or Advertising?

Posted on 25. Nov, 2008 by admin.

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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