Automotive Pay Per Click (PPC) A No Brainer For Dealerships July 28, 2010

Check out a recent post on my employer’s website that I wrote!  Great information on Automotive Pay Per Click as it compares to traditional mediums (such as Newspaper, Radio, etc).

I had the wonderful privilege to work for a large Chicagoland Newspaper (Chicago Tribune), a large Chicagoland Radio Station (97.1 The Drive) and now I work for a company (L2T Media) that works on Digital Marketing primarily for Automotive Dealerships.  This blog post is somewhat of a quick summary of how I see Pay Per Click fitting into Automotive Dealerships budgets.  It’s a No Brainer!

Check it out!  And thanks as always for visiting!

http://www.l2tmedia.com/blog/post/pay-per-click_is_a_no-brainer_for_car_dealerships/

Automotive Pay Per Click (PPC) or Banner Advertising? December 30, 2009

Banner ads or Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising?

With over 220 Million internet users or 74% of the population in the United States alone, Automotive Dealers have increasingly sought out online advertising.  The question that I frequently get from dealers is what should I focus on Banner ads or Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising?

Since I received this question so often from my automotive dealers, I thought I would post some information about the difference between the two.  What they are, how they differ, etc.  Hopefully this will allow you to make the decision on which one to use or evaluate where to spend more of your budget.

What is Banner Advertising?

Banner advertising is simply the process of purchasing banner space on other websites for you to display a banner about the product or service you wish to advertise.

There are millions of websites to choose from when placing a banner advertisement.  You should ultimately consider the website’s: traffic, page views, impressions, demographics, the CPM (cost per thousand impressions), monthly fee or CPA (cost per action).

The easiest comparison to a banner ad on a website would be a billboard.  When considering a billboard, would you choose the busiest highway where your billboard will receive plenty of unique viewers or a side street?  The more traffic on a highway would drive more unique users seeing your billboard, which is ideally what you want.  You would also pay more for that premium ad space.

You can either do the research yourself, by identifying the right websites to make banner ad placements on, or you can advertise through an ad network which have a network of websites who will publish your banner ad on their sites.  Utilizing a network can be more cost effective and it allows you to have a larger audience because of the number of websites on which these ad networks place you.

What is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising?

PPC is the process of advertising on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing within the sponsored results. Google is the #1 site in the United States and as of today has 65% of the Search share, so I’ll focus on Google.

Google AdWords allows you two different advertising options, Search Network or the Content Network – I’m going to discuss the Search Network because it typically delivers the best conversions.

On Google’s Search Network, you bid on a keyword and your ad will appear higher or lower within the results based on bid price and quality score.

The nice thing about Google’s Search Network is your ad appears only when a keyword you are bidding on is searched within the market area parameters you set.  It’s extremely targeted.  The difference is your ad is in text format as opposed to a banner advertisement.  And of course, you only get billed by Google if someone clicks your ad, hence pay per click, and you only pay the amount you’re bidding.

What is similar for both banner ads and pay per click ads is that, when the viewer clicks the ad, the viewer/clicker is taken to your website.  Both of these forms of advertising are designed to drive traffic to your website.

The biggest difference between these two forms of advertising is the PPC ads only appear when a search engine user types in specific keywords, presenting itself only when there is a demand. So if you’re a Toyota dealer and someone types in “Toyota Camry,” your ad would appear within the sponsored results.  With banner advertising, it’s not always that easy.  Although there are behavioral targeting formats to banner advertising, your ad is going to show up for users that may not be interested in your product.

This might lead one to quickly believe that PPC advertising would then be more effective than banner ads, but banner ads can actually serve a different purpose.  Banner ads can work well for branding purposes with higher volume websites.  While it’ is not as targeted as a pay per click, the banner ad may be served to someone who is in the research phase of the car buying process.

Banner advertising is more appropriate if your goal is to brand because banner advertising will not deliver as high of a conversion percentage  (meaning submitting an lead form or phone call) as delivered by pay per click ads.

At the end of the day, any automotive dealership owner is after one thing, return of investment. The medium that delivers that ROI is going to be the best medium to use in advertising your automotive dealership.

Automotive PPC

Automotive PPC vs Banner Advertising

Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy? December 1, 2009

Great article on the way to form policy for Automotive Social Media.  I found very interesting.

Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy?

Posted using ShareThis

Automotive Social Media Article – The Soft Sell November 23, 2009

Ironically, I just wrote a blog post last Wednesday on Automotive Social Media.  Automotive News now has a great article reiterating the proper use of Social Media for Automotive dealerships.  I’ve linked to it below, but here’s a quick summary of the article.

The article provides a nice case example of a dealership, Safeway Chevrolet, and how they are effectively using social media, specifically with Twitter, @SafewayChevy, and Facebook Fan Page.  This article makes some similar points to what I made last week.  In reading the comments below the article, my favorite comment was posted by: lifetime car guy – and I believe he said it best when he warned:

“When presented with the option of training your staff or starting a blog/facebook page/etc. for your store, train your people. A blog or facebook page done 1/2 way right will do more harm than good.”

I find that the core issues are never to be ignored.  If you do not have your internal structure running well when it comes to the internet, then you should not start a blog / facebook page / twitter account.  A couple of questions you should ask yourself:

• How promptly is my dealership answering email leads?  23% of lead response time is greater than 12 hours  Are you in that 23%? (2009 JD Power AIR 2009)
• How is my staff handling the internet leads that come through the phone?  Are they asking the right questions, are they getting them to come in and test drive the car?
• What is my closing percentage on my internet leads?  Is it where I would like it to be?
• Am I updating my specials page regularly with content that is appealing to my customers?  If you’re not updating a specials page, then how can you possibly keep up with Twitter!

In my opinion, these are some important points to consider before you get into the social media arena.  Social Media is certainly valuable, but make sure you have the basics down before taking the plunge into Automotive Social Media.

For the full article from Automotive News, click here: http://tinyurl.com/yauzvp9

How Google Wave is Changing the News

Interesting story about how Red Eye Chicago is utilizing Google Wave.

How Google Wave is Changing the News

Posted using ShareThis

How Automotive Dealerships can use Linked In November 17, 2009

I recently sent this article out to one of my dealerships when he asked the question: how can I effectively use Linked In to help my automotive dealership with social media?

Linked In is another way that automotive dealerships can increase their visibility online.  Linked in is a great social networking tool.  See this article for more information on the basics of Linked In.

How LinkedIn Can Help Your Local Business.

Automotive Social Media

This page is purely a reference for automotive dealers on the use of Social Media.  I’ve found that there are countless opinions on this subject, so this page will summarize what I believe is the first step to understanding automotive social media.

First of all, what is Social Media?  Wikipedia says it best when they say:

“Primarily, social media depend on interactions between people as the discussion and integration of words to build shared-meaning, using technology as a conduit. Social media has been touted as presenting a fresh direction for marketing by allowing companies to talk with consumers, as opposed to talking at them.”

My favorite part of this sentence is “talk with consumers, as opposed to talking at them.”  This is the primary focus of automotive social media – it’s just a conversation.  The most important thing that a dealer needs to know is…it is NOT a sales pitch.

Throwing out pricing and cars with social media is like going to a party and telling your friend, ‘hey, I have a new Honda Pilot for under $30k, stop by the dealership to check it out!’  You wouldn’t say that to your friend unless you KNEW that they were looking for a Honda Pilot, right?  So don’t Tweet pricing or sales all the time otherwise, people will stop following you (just like your friend at the party would probably walk away from you).

Now one of my favorite ways of learning is simply following those that do it the best.  So here’s a great example of a automotive dealership that is using Social Media effectively.

1. Twitter: @cfwinners
2. Checkered Flag Facebook Page
3. Checkered Flag Blog

Put in the most simple terms, they update their social media accounts regularly, they don’t spam with useless information about a ‘big sale’ that they have going on, they simply provide information that is useful to the public – and they do it often and they do it right.

Automotive Social Media