Gauging Your Dealership’s Market Opportunity This Summer - Adpearance

Gauging Your Dealership’s Market Opportunity This Summer

To make the most of the summer months, lead generation efforts need to work efficiently and effectively alongside your business. Here are a few ways to measure the opportunity in your market and pivot your digital advertising to take advantage of seasonal demand.

Each year we expect to see heightened interest from car buyers during the summer and holiday months. This year, due to shelter-in-place orders and other hurdles, buyer's interest and vehicle sales stumbled in March and April for the first time in years. However, as states have begun to reopen, sales have risen and the seasonal increase we typically see each summer is expected to begin now and continue through late fall. 

To take advantage of this return in demand, it’s important to understand exactly what opportunity exists in your market and align your strategy accordingly. Here are two questions that can help you assess market opportunity for your dealership, as well as five digital advertising tactics that can help you target interested buyers and make the most of your ad spend this summer.

Gauging Your Car Dealership’s Market Opportunity

Start by reviewing your current digital advertising strategy and targeting. Ask yourself the following questions:

Q.) How Much of Your Current Market Are You Capturing?​

Search Impression Share (SIS), also called Market Share, is a measure of how often your ads appear. By looking at the percentage of your market that is searching but not seeing your ads, you can determine how much of your market you’re currently capturing and calculate the budget necessary to reach missed lead generation opportunities by expanding your market coverage.

Q.) How Expansive is Your Current Geo-Targeting?

Assess the difference between your current and desired geo-targeting. Circle the areas you want to target on a map to see how much you’re covering vs. what you’re missing. This can help you determine geo-targeting priorities and understand the budget adjustment that may be necessary to effectively cover your ideal geography. To determine the exact ad spend needed to expand your geo-targeting, remember to take into account population density, current active budget, SIS, and overall digital traffic.

Digital Marketing Tactics for Auto Dealers to Leverage This Summer

Because search interest is on the rise and expected to peak over the coming months, now is the time to leverage digital advertising to reach interested buyers. Once you’ve assessed the opportunity in your market and understand the budget needed to expand coverage, prioritize these digital advertising tactics to maximize clicks and sales this summer:

1. Inventory-Specific Advertising

Today’s car shoppers expect ease and personalization. They’re well-researched, well-informed and tend to have numerous digital touchpoints across multiple platforms before finally contacting a dealership to purchase a vehicle. With the buyer's journey being as long as it is, it’s important that your ads always feature up-to-date pricing and inventory details. Get specific—run ads for individual vehicles and target ready-to-buy shoppers with relevant messaging that features pricing and incentive-based ad copy and creative. In our experience, not only will this yield higher click-through-rates and better conversion rates, but it will provide a quicker and easier path to purchase for shoppers.

2. Microsoft Advertising

According to Microsoft’s 2019 data, there are approximately 17.6 million automotive shoppers actively searching across the Bing search engine each month. Ad space across Microsoft's search network is far less competitive, and in our experience, auto dealers average a less expensive cost-per-click (CPC) compared to Google. Nearly half of the U.S. uses Bing as a search engine—don’t miss out on an opportunity to reach interested buyers at a lower CPC. Duplicate your advertising strategy from Google on Bing to capture full-funnel coverage while still prioritizing low-funnel searches.

3. Google Dynamic Display Remarketing

While remarketing allows you to show ads to people who have previously visited your website, dynamic remarketing takes it one step further. Dynamic display remarketing enables you to show previous visitors ads that contain the exact inventory they viewed. With HTML5 interactive display ads, users can even scroll through multiple vehicles of interest. When a user clicks on the ad, they will arrive on the exact vehicle detail page. 

Dynamic display remarketing can dramatically impact the performance of your ad campaigns. In our work with auto dealers, dynamic remarketing has led to a 108% improvement in conversion rate and an 18% reduction in cost per conversion compared to standard remarketing.

4. Facebook Dynamic Inventory Ads

Dynamic inventory campaigns on Facebook allow you to target users with VIN-specific ads that directly link them to the appropriate vehicle detail pages on your website. Dynamic inventory ads significantly outperform brand awareness-focused ads in relevancy, efficiency and lead generation; in fact, we typically see a 2x higher click-through-rate( CTR), 47.17% lower CPC, and 3.4x more conversions.

Make sure you're targeting a healthy mix of previous website visitors and net-new in-market shoppers. This will ensure you’re maximizing full-funnel coverage and leveraging Facebook as a lead generation channel. 

5. YouTube Dynamic Inventory Ads

Dynamic technology can help you engage in-market shoppers with inventory-specific videos, effortlessly. To make the content creation process painless, use a system that analyzes your inventory daily to generate unique, model-specific videos for key in-stock nameplates with pricing and stock information. Focus on low-funnel shoppers and target both previous website visitors and net-new ready-to-buy shoppers.

In our experience, dynamic video viewers who then perform high-funnel keyword searches in search engines have a 30.31% higher CTR. And, when stacked up against branding-focused creative, these videos will generate more views and higher-quality website traffic. 

Get Started Today

With summer in full swing, it’s time to hit the ground running. Reach out to learn how seasonal digital advertising adjustments can help your business make the most of the coming months. We’ll start with a free digital analysis to provide custom recommendations based on an analysis of your market and share how you can get more from your marketing dollars through fall.

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About the Author

Ben Neal

Ben drives success for auto dealers as the senior digital advertising specialist. He stays on the cutting edge of GoogleAds so to ensure that buyers can find you at the right moment and immediately convert.

Adpearance is the digital marketing company obsessed with generating quality leads. Our solutions combine cutting-edge technology, premium tracking, and an expert team to transform business results.

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