2022 Paid Search Trends for Auto Dealers

Recently improved automation technologies present auto dealers with the opportunity to acquire more high-quality leads at a lower cost. Here are three paid search trends and tactics to outpace the competition and increase sales in 2022.

Google Smart Bidding

Manual bidding has performed well for our clients for a decade but is no longer the highest-performing paid search strategy available. A Google Smart Bidding strategy allows you to advertise on keywords that were previously too high-funnel to be effective. Smart Bidding employs machine learning to prioritize in-market shoppers over true high-funnel users.

Adpearance has always used a highly-granular account structure so that we could be really prescriptive about ad budgets and spending. Our enhanced approach to Smart Bidding provides purposeful room for the system to breathe and optimize our detailed work, leveraging all of the information it has about user behavior. Our new account structure is just the right combination of maximizing Google’s machine learning without letting the budget go unchecked. This enables us to generate a higher volume of conversions with a low cost per conversion.  

Measurement

Smart Bidding campaign success depends on high-quality data. The need for meaningful measurement systems will only increase in 2022 as automated ad campaigns like Smart Bidding require more high-quality information about what user behaviors influence ROI. 

Part of this involves leveraging user-level tracking and analytics software and improving how we calculate ROI. By sorting through large amounts of tracking data to filter out spam, wrong numbers, existing clients and refining the measurement systems to identify meaningful data that can then be fed back into Smart Bidding, machine learning can identify in-market users, who are ready to make a purchase, more quickly.

Transparency

Performance tracking data is critical to a dealership’s ability to understand what is working, what needs to be improved, and how to go about making adjustments. 

There has been a shift across the auto industry toward transparency in recent years that has been beneficial for our auto clients. Dealerships are getting better access to their own data and OEM programs are encouraging open relationships between vendors and dealer partners. This additional source of performance tracking helps to provide a clearer understanding of how things are going and is also another layer of data that can be used by AI to further optimize a dealership’s paid search campaigns.

Ready Jump Start Your Paid Search Strategy?

Get started with a free digital analysis from Adpearance. Our team of digital strategists will assess your market and current rankings to identify specific opportunities for your dealership to stay ahead of the competition.