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:

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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Dealer.com Search Marketing Challenge Article

Posted on 12. Dec, 2008 by admin.

I recently followed an article written on a blog site by a popular blogger and SEO consultant regarding the merits of dealer.com and search marketing versus pay per click and search optimization. Many automotive marketing experts do not realize how quickly a blog post or search content can be picked up on the Internet.

The lesson that this blogger was teaching was to try to prove that dealer.com search engine marketing did not spend enough focus on search optimization and spent more efforts on pay per click or SEM. Pure Dealer.com agrees that good SEO can beat PPC any day of the week, and sometimes it takes a long time and some dedicated marketing efforts to win the search engine battle.

Then again, did dealer.com speak too soon when they opened up a public challenge to test the power of search marketing? Dealer.com is a very well respected company that has experience huge growth and obviously is well versed on how to market themselves so I guess that Google will decide who wins this battle.

If you google “dealer.com search marketing” or “dealer.com search engine marketing” we will all know the answers to that question.

Here is the full repost of the article, with recognition to the author and full post here:

Search engine marketing is a great way to generate immediate traffic.  What is often overlooked by by car dealers is the real value of a well optimized site and an aggressive SEO campaign.  A recent post I did about dealership web traffic I referenced another post from Dealer.com on Drivingsales.com and feel that it was misconstrued based on the replies by Dealer.com.

Pay Per Click advertising has it’s place like for special promotions or a fresh site.  However at the end of the day there are so many studies out there that show that SEO provides better value than Seach Engine Marketing or PPC.  One of the best explanations was from Hubspot.com.

Their simple study showed that ranking number nine generates the same amout of leads and traffic as the number two paid listing.

From the post at Hubspot:

Here are the key takeaways from the data and the images above:

1) Organic results get 75%+ of the attention. People don’t click on the ads nearly as much as the organic results.

2) The first organic result gets over 25% of all clicks. Within the organic results, the first result gets the most clicks by far - more than double the second result.

3) Within the ads, the first ad also gets the most clicks. But, since you pay per click for the ads, you should care less about volume and more about if the traffic will actually convert and what your cost per lead and cost per sale will be.

4) There are a good number of clicks on all top 10 organic results. Even the last result gets about 3% of people to click on it - this is about the same rate as the second pay per click ad, and unlike the ad, its free!

SEO wins day in and day out.  Search engine marketing is an expensive way to drive traffic.  Contrary to popular belief SEO can be almost instant and that is the real purpose of this post to show how fast I can get it to rank for certain terms.  I bet it will be faster than the time it takes to set up a pay per click campaign.  Should see results in minutes not in ages, the term used to denigrate SEO.  I took it as a challenge from Dealer.com

I’ll report back with results.

• Published at : 12:45 pm Decemember 12, 2008
• Ranking #1 for : “Dealer.com Challenge - SEO vs Search Engine Marketing” 2:00 pm 12/12/08 < low value but indexed.
• Ranking Number #6 for “dealer.com seo vs search engine marketing” 3:45 pm 12/12/08
• Ranking #1 for “Dealer.com Search Engine Marketing” 7:00 pm 12/12/08

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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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