If your dealership is running pay per click campaigns as a part of your online marketing mix, one of your main goals is probably to maximize the number of sales or service leads for the dealership. The potential complexity of running numerous, simultaneous PPC campaigns can be overwhelming, even if you have an expert managing your efforts.
Whether or not your dealership is running your own PPC campaigns, it’s important to continuously optimize and improve them. However, testing (whether it’s a simple A/B split test or a complex multi-variate scenario) can be even more overwhelming. Here are some fairly simple tips to dramatically increase your PPC conversion rates.
Match Landing Page Content Headings to Ad Copy: Make it clear to customers who click through on your ads that they have landed on the right page by matching your landing page headings to your ad copy. Mirror the message and goals of your ads on the landing page to help drive up conversion rates.
Use Dynamic Phone Number Call-Tracking: Google will provide you with call tracking within all of your ads (make sure you include that data in making your optimization decisions), but you also want to track the calls that come through from visitors AFTER they click through to your site. Make sure that you have Dynamic Phone Number Replacement Call tracking; this replaces the phone numbers on your site with a unique tracking phone number each time someone clicks through on your ad, so you can track the call back to the ad (including campaign, keyword, creative, etc). You will typically receive 4 calls or more for every lead form submission from an AdWords campaign, so you are missing the forest for the trees if you are only optimizing your ads based on lead form submissions.
Run Tests Long Enough: When testing any of these factors (preferably in A/B format), make sure you don’t cut the test short. For example, if you declare a winner before the length of your typical sales cycle, you can’t accurately determine which test is more successful. You have to make it through a sales cycle to truly test the effectiveness of your tests. Use the “winner” to continue to test what works best for your dealership.
One User Intent Per Ad: Make sure you (or your PPC provider) are creating ads for each segment of consumer you’re trying to reach. PPC is not a one size fits all endeavor. And yes, this leads us directly into the landing page conversation…
Effective Landing Pages: This is huge for PPC. Having effective and relevant landing pages will not only make your ad campaigns convert at a higher rate, but can also decrease your costs (Google rewards ads with a high quality score) – start with these Landing Page Best Practices to get started:
- Start With A Goal: What do you want people to do once they click on your PPC ad? Answer that question and build your landing page to help visitors accomplish that goal. Anything that doesn’t help visitors reach the goal you started with may not be necessary.
- Use One CTA (Call to Action): Try not to confuse visitors with multiple CTAs. Your ad copy should explain what visitors are looking for when they reach your landing page, so make that the CTA on the page a logical next step for someone clicking through on the ad.
Combining all of these best practices can increase the overall conversion rates of your PPC campaigns, save your dealership money, and help sell more cars.
