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.

Continue Reading

Automotive Search Optimization

Posted on 08. Dec, 2008 by admin.

Many Automotive Internet marketing companies have shown that Organic search engine optimization is far more reliable in long-term, whereas PPC is reliable for companies who want to achieve top rankings on the natural ranking of organic search engine optimization, which helps to generate more traffic, and more revenues from your dealership web page.

Automotive PPC is emerging as a powerful form of Internet Marketing as Search Engine Optimization can be achieved over a period of time. Search Engine Marketing is a paid service offered for short term solutions. Many successful Car dealers and other automotive Business services are becoming aware of the recent years, and rest are focusing on the long term benefits of going through Organic Search OR SEO.

Automotive Internet Marketing uses both the power of Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, and other tools to help get more automotive leads.

Studies have emerged, helping business owners to kickstart their business from Google, yahoo, and other search engines. Search engine optimization is emerging as a new era of Online Business science, which can generate 60% of your traffic alone from search engines like google, and is bound to increase in the coming few years.

In the broader perception it has helped to build several successful automotive business portals online including such Powerhouses as Autotrader or CarsDirect or cars.com.

Search engine optimization is farther categorized into other categories including organic search, blog marketing, and ePress releases. Some would say social networking is a form of Automotive SEO. Organic Search engine optimization depends on major search engines either and the labour of your efforts and automotive search optmization (SEO) experts.

Continue Reading