4 Tips to Shift Your Digital Advertising into Overdrive

The average car shopper spends more than 11 hours researching cars online, while approximately 3.5 hours are spent at the dealership. In today’s digital world, customers are able to learn more about car dealerships prior to visiting than ever before, thanks to the ability to compare makes and models with the click of a button, access and compare prices across dealerships, and view posted reviews of sales staff and services.

What does this mean for you? To ensure your dealership stands out in the crowd, you need to fully leverage your online presence. This means not only participating in digital advertising, but actively auditing its success.

As we know at Adpearance, auditing your digital presence is not an easy task. There are many aspects to online marketing, but in this post we will focus primarily on Search Engine Marketing, or PPC, with a follow-up post that elaborates on other aspects of digital marketing to make sure we fully cover the steps for success.

Here are four questions you should ask to audit your current SEM efforts, and get the ball rolling:

1. Do my campaigns adequately cover our maximum territory?

Geo-targeting, or where people are seeing your ads, is a crucial part of search marketing.  Do you know if you’re advertising in the right locations to reach your current and potential customers? By analyzing your sales information, targeting can be adapted to best utilize your budget.

For example, there is a significant difference in strategy between focusing on maximizing share of voice in your city versus allotting budget to reach customers in new markets. You should be aware of your geo-targeting strategy and make sure that it is aligned with your dealership’s strategy to help you reach your overall sales goals.

2. Do my ads rank on relevant keywords?

When auditing your current paid search campaigns you should be analyzing more than just the average cost-per-click.  Do you know where you’re ranking on each keyword or your average click-through-rate (CTR)? A recent study suggests that the average CTR for ads in the top position of Google Ads is 7.11%, while the CTR for ads in the second spot drops to 3.01%. Furthermore, if you’re below position six, it is most likely your CTR will be below 1.00%.

As you can see, paid search is more than just showing up in the ad rankings. Ad position and CTR can make a significant difference in your lead generation online. Review what keywords you are bidding on and understand your ad placement to see if you are missing out on significant opportunities.

3. Do my ads compel website visits?

This is arguably one of the most important parts of pay-per-click marketing. You might be showing for all the right keywords in all of the right areas, but if your ads aren’t compelling consumers to click, the ads are serving little to no value. The key to creating compelling ads is serving custom ads that are tailored to the individual, and relevant ads that are tailored to the keywords in the search query.

Begin with a simple test. When you search for a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee in your area, is the first ad you’re shown optimized with information about the 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee, or is it a generic ad that lacks detail?

While this may seem insignificant at first, our campaign data shows that in nearly every industry, customization in ads increases CTR and the overall success of the individual ads and campaigns.

Check your ads for customization, relevancy, and unique content among your competitors.

4. Do my landing pages engage consumers?

After all the work you’ve done to get potential customers to click on your ad, where are you landing them and how are you compelling them to act? Will users click “view inventory,” ask for an e-price, call your store, or pull up the directions to your dealership? Are your calls-to-action driving visitors to the actions you want them to take?

The final step in auditing your digital advertising is to analyze what consumers are doing after they click on an ad. This step will determine if the user will end up walking through your door or not, and you always want to make sure that they are.

Landing pages can be used to provide information that is relevant to individual ads and search queries. If you’re driving ad traffic to landing pages, these pages should directly relate to the keyword that was searched.

For example, a search for your dealership would land a customer on your homepage, while a search for a 2014 Ram 1500 would link to a landing page directly related to and optimized with information about this vehicle.

The key to successful landing pages is having unique content that will keep the user on your page, as well as strong calls-to-action that will encourage the user to act. Look at your online calls-to-action and Internet lead generation to see how your landing pages are currently converting your leads, and how you may be able to increase lead generation with a few targeted pages.

5. Can Adpearance help?

Lucky for you, audits are our specialty! Our digital advertising team recognizes the value of constantly auditing and improving key factors of search marketing. However, we also recognize that very few dealerships have the time and/or resources to be auditing their online efforts as much as they should, or would like to. So we are here to help!

If you’re interested in a complete audit and in-depth analysis for your dealership, contact us today.