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DealerOn

We Love SEO So Much, We Wrote a Book On It

 

We’ve been kinda busy. Doing what? Writing a book, of course. We asked our Director of Search and Social, Greg Gifford, what dealers needed to know most when it comes to digital marketing. His answer: “Dealers absolutely need local SEO, not just traditional SEO, to make it in today’s world of online searching.” Local SEO is a more complex subset of traditional SEO, and it’s what helps your dealership show up in Google’s search results for the people in your area who are looking online for a new car. Continue Reading

Is Your Digital Advertising Ready for the Holidays?

 

Winter is coming and so are large consumer appetites1. Consumer trends have always indicated a willingness for deal-hunting at the end of the year. Google’s own data in 2015 showed that mobile queries grew by 52% in the last three months of the year2.  This statistic is even more interesting when you compare it against actual car sales at the end of the year; and while co-relation is not causality, the last three years show a clear pattern of sales gains in the last quarter of the year3.

Given that consumer confidence is increasing and that search trends usually indicate a healthy consumer appetite; the question then becomes: “is your advertising ready to tackle the holiday season?”

Holiday advertising needs to be understood in the context of your store and your region. This article will aim to show you how to  craft a holiday strategy (with your agency) that works for your business. Your strategy needs to be focused on three key elements – Budget readiness, Account Structure Readiness and Seasonality Readiness.

Budget Readiness

Ensuring your regular campaigns aren’t swamped by high search volume

If you follow your search advertising closely and have been doing so for a few years, you will notice
that the holiday season usually creates a dip in impression share (assuming all things stayed constant). This isn’t a good thing for your dealership. The sharpest dealers usually get ahead of this by understanding that a decrease in impression share, assuming nothing changed in your account the previous month, only indicates a spike in search volume and therefore a spike in car-shopping interest. For the dealer who’s wondering how to predict or be ready for an increase, here are ways you can go about estimating how much more you’ll need in the months to come.

  • Check how many impressions you got in September along with your impression share. You or your agency partner should be able to calculate what the available volume of impressions was in your market. Let’s say you got 100 impressions and your impression share was 50%, the available sampled searches was 200.
  • Now, assume that search volume will grow by 20% – 30%. Your market now has 250 searches. Without adjusting your budget and assuming you were only able to get the same 100 impressions, your impression share is now 40%.
  • Now set a target impression share, say 70% or 80%, and calculate how much more you would need to achieve it.
  • If you spent $500 last month to get a 50% impression share – and that amount only gets you 40% assuming an increase in volume – you would need to add another $500 to get you to an 80% impression share.

PHEW! That’s certainly a good deal of math. Ideally, this should be done by your agency, on your behalf. If you’d like some help, we are glad to do so. Just holler at us using the form alongside this page.

 

Account Structure Readiness

People are looking for deals everywhere, are you ready?

We’ve always harped on account structure as a fundamental building block for successful, high-conversion volume campaigns. It is no different when it comes to holiday campaign planning.

Here are a few steps you need to take to be prepared.

  • Anticipate demand and find the right search terms. Car shoppers in the holiday season are in the general vortex of holiday shopping in general. So terms like thanksgiving car deals, year-end lease deals, Christmas car deals are common and should be something you buy. Ideally, create separate ad groups and shut off the relevant ad groups as the holiday passes.
  • Remember that people are looking for deals. If your ad copy has been generic through the year, this is the time to spice it up. Keeping with your OEM advertising rules, offer deals, leases, and APR offers as best as possible.
  • While trivial, this can be an easy miss – make sure your callout extensions reflect holiday deals and offers. Remember, that folks are looking to trade-in cars, if you have special offers like beating a certain used car-mega store’s offers, call those out too!
  • Depending on your budget, expand to display remarketing and YouTube. Especially YouTube. Take that TV commercial you’re just investing in as the election season dies out and prices come down to normal and get thousands of more completed views alongside TV on YouTube.

 

Seasonality and Regional Context

Winters are very different depending on the state in which you do business. Florida is not the same as Michigan or Connecticut. Consumer needs can differ. What we tend to find is that dealers often ignore the fact that winters, especially harsher ones, can be a boon for your parts and service business. This doesn’t often translate to advertising. Our advice is that it should. Here are a few things to  implement about seasonality and its impact on the parts & service business in colder parts of the country.

  • Tire sales nation-wide can bring in an estimated $9 Billion in the winter according to Google.
  • Winter storms usually create a need for tire and service demand.
  • If you work with DealerOn, we can automatically adjust bids to go up on bad weather days for service and parts related keywords to keep you front and center.
  • Assuming an increase in mobile search volume, ensure that you’re using mobile bids to capture the mobile winter-shopper.
  • If you’ve never focused on running service campaigns before, here is an article we wrote a while ago that can be a good starting point.

Wrap It Up…

In summary, here are the things you should focus on to ensure you have a wonderful holiday sales season:

  • Watch your budgets and ensure you have enough to prevent a drop in impression share as search volume increases.
  • Buy the right keywords, generate offer specific ads, and if possible, expand to channels like YouTube.
  • Keep seasonality in context and don’t ignore your fixed ops department!

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to us at ppc@dealeron.com or simply fill out the form alongside this article.

 

Happy Holidays,

The DealerOn Team

 

1. Retail and Consumer 2016 Holiday Outlook: Key Findings
2. Google Internal Data, 2015
3. Overall U.S. Auto Industry Sales Figures – Monthly And Yearly

You can still learn from our speakers…

The year’s almost over, but you’ve still got time to learn amazing tips from our expert speakers… In this week’s Wednesday Workshop, we list the remaining events we’ll be attending in November and December. You’ve still got several chances to learn the latest tips from several of our experts to help you finish out the year strong and roll in to 2017 with a head start.

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Click or Brick?

Do you “click” to buy things online? Or do you physically go to a “brick”-and-mortar store to do your shopping?

There’s no denying that e-commerce has been gaining momentum over the years, and in some areas, it’s completely eclipsed traditional storefront sales. GameStop is one of the largest video gaming retailers in the industry, and they’ve had to deal with the rise of digital technology in a unique way (think online gaming). But instead of putting up a white flag and shuttering their stores, GameStop did a full-court press and figured out how to loop their physical storefronts in on the digital revenue they were seeing. Essentially, they started selling access to online gaming in their stores.

That’s because the “Click or brick?” question is a little too simplistic for most retailers, automotive dealers included.

You Don’t Have to Choose

Not everyone is quite ready to buy cars online exclusively yet, and that’s okay. To be honest, it’d be a little strange to buy such a big-ticket item without at least looking at it in person. But, it’s been done before by online retail giant, Amazon. What most retailers don’t realize, though, is that digital technology doesn’t necessarily compete with in-store shopping. That is, just because Bed, Bath & Beyond sells candles online doesn’t mean people won’t still go to the store to sniff out the best one.

And car dealers ought to know this better than anyone. Digital technology probably isn’t stealing any business from your dealership’s lot (phew) in the same way it keeps people from going to the mall, because most everyone wants to at least drive their car before they buy it. At the same time, a recent survey from DealerSocket showed that 33% of people said they’d prefer an online-only car buying experience. However, those people tended to be in higher income brackets. Since most median-income customers are looking for decent prices and a dealership they can trust, it’s time to look at how the digital world can help here.

Because there’s no question that the new Internet age does influence the buyer’s journey. In fact, digital technology and smart devices have taken what used to be a linear, predictable buyer’s journey and broken it into tiny, tiny little “micro-moments” that are driven by your customers’ needs and desires. They have the means available to them, so they can answer their questions and research whatever and whenever they wish.

So your customers will always come to the lot to test drive that new Honda Civic, but they can research the specs & mileage on their phone. That’s what Google is for, and that’s why it’s more important than ever to have a strong presence online.

Where To?

How do you apply what you’ve learned? Well, look at GameStop again. They took something potentially devastating to their storefronts and found a way to boost digital sales in their brick-and-mortar stores. So, it’s wasn’t really “click or brick” with GameStop, it was more like “click and brick.”  Make the digital version of your dealership work towards pushing customers to your physical location.

That means focusing on things like website optimization (including mobile), Google AdWords campaigns, boosting your SEO signals, and even looking at metrics like page views, click-through-rates, and unique site visitors.

Your dealership isn’t going fully digital, at least not yet, and most of your customers still want come visit you. Only trouble is, your dealership needs to be able to reach your customers on their terms, using their smart devices and computers. How do we know all this? Well, we are wizards at digital advertising & marketing, after all.

We are curious, though, has anyone actually sold a car online yet, from start to finish? Let us know in the comments!

DealerOn Took Digital Dealer 21!

 

“Digital Dealers come and go, but the memories never fade.”

That was the quote that DD21 signed in our DealerOn summer yearbook. And they were right. It was a great show, we had amazing meetings with some top dealers and the booth was rockin’ all three days.

Event attendance seemed to be as strong as ever, with dealers running all over the MGM, hitting each session and enjoying their time in vendor village.

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