All Posts By

Shaun Raines

NADA 2016 – Man on the Street Interviews

For this week’s Wednesday Workshop video, we’re taking you back to the NADA convention The Hair and The Beard shot a bunch of man on the street interviews that will make you smile. We asked some hard-hitting questions, and hopefully the answers we uncovered will help your dealership thrive in 2016. We want to extend a big thank you to all the dealers and industry friends that helped make what you’re about to see AWESOME! Enjoy!

Are you using mobile preferred ads? [VIDEO]

This week’s Wednesday Workshop video covers mobile ads for PPC. IF you handle your own AdWords account at the dealership, you’ll definitely want to watch and make sure you’re using these incredibly effective ad types. If you use a vendor instead, you’ll still want to watch, because you’ll want to be sure your vendor is using the most up to date tactics.

With so many people using their phones to browse the Internet (and the number continues to increase), it’s important to target your customers with the right ad types. Mobile preferred ads and call only ads specifically target users on their mobile devices, and convert like hotcakes.

As always, if you have questions or want to know more, just leave something down below in the comments, and we’ll get back to you shortly!

PPC Presentation From Digital Dealer 20 [VIDEO]

Download the slides here,

This week’s Wednesday Workshop video is a recording of my rockin’ presentation from Digital Dealer 20 in Orlando. As always, we wanted to share it here on our blog so everyone could have access to the info.

The presentation’s about 25 minutes long, and it’s filled with awesome tips to help you take your PPC up to 11 – yes, that’s totally a Spinal Tap reference. In fact, I was inspired by “the Beard” and his movie themed presentations, so this one is chock-full of 80’s heavy metal references.

Kick back, enjoy, and rock out your dealership’s PPC strategy. If you’ve got questions, leave ’em in the comments and I’ll get back to you…

Car Dealers Should Stop Running SEM Campaigns Right Now

 

If you’re just going to let a machine do all the work, you might as well stop. The majority of SEM campaigns running for car dealers today are machine-based programs. Is this all bad? No, but there are consequences that come with “set it and forget it” SEM platforms.

Honestly, some dealers can afford to run SEM campaigns through automated systems that miss critical components for optimal results, but why would you want to? Let’s be fair… most dealers are not going to take the time to know how every digital marketing detail affects their bottom line. With that in mind, here are a few tips to fill the knowledge gap that will at least help you keep an eye on areas of importance.
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How to Use PPC Impression Share

If Google AdWords were a piece of juicy pie, your impression share would be the size of your dealership’s slice… Tracking impression share is important, since it shows exactly how much you’re showing up in local searches. If you’re not measuring how big your slice of pie is, you won’t know if it could (or should) be bigger! Watch our latest video to learn more about PPC impression share and how you can use it to boost your dealership’s performance online.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another DealerOn Wednesday Workshop. This week, we’re talking about impressions in SEM campaigns. Impressions are not achievements, so how important is impression share to your SEM campaigns?

The answer is – VERY important… but you might not know why.

Impression share is basically the comparison of opportunity and reality. Google defines it as the number of impressions you’ve received, divided by the estimated number of impressions you were able to receive. Pretty simple – but why is it important?

Think of the automotive online advertising landscape as a delicious apple pie. You and your competitors are all trying to grab the biggest slice. When you track your impression share metrics, you’re keeping tabs on the size of your slice compared to the whole.

The most important factor regarding your impression share is your ad rank and quality score. If your quality score is poor, your ads will not show – regardless of what you’re willing to spend.

Tracking your impression share is a great way to determine when budget increases are necessary. If your piece of the pie isn’t as big as you want, increasing your budget can help grab more pie. Plus, maximizing your impression share helps your campaigns generate more traffic and leads.

How do you track impression share? Here’s a couple of tips:

Sign in to your AdWords account and click the campaigns tab. Then, click the columns button above your statistics table and choose “Modify Columns” from the drop down. Click competitive metrics and then add the impression share columns you’re interested in.

Another way to view impression share data for specific ad groups and keywords is to enable the “impression share” column in the Ad Groups and Keywords tabs.

Decreasing your targets can increase your impression share, but comes with the trade off of reducing the size of the pie. The fastest and most effective way to grow your impression share is by increasing your campaign budgets and bids.

If you want a serious competitive advantage, be sure you’re chasing the largest impression share in your market.

If you have questions about impression share or SEM in general, jump down to the comments section and leave your questions there. We’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.

Thanks for stopping by to watch – we’ll see you next week with another DealerOn Wednesday workshop!

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