What You Need Before Maximizing Your Automotive PPC Results

We have posted some incredible pay-per-click (PPC) numbers for our clients. Before we give 5 good tips on how to maximize your automotive internet marketing, there are a few things you need to have prepared in order to measure the results. You need good analytics and a lot of time. That’s it. If you work hard, you can get some results that look like this:

Chevy Dealer Automotive Marketing Sample

If you spend some time looking at your bounce rate, exit pages, new visitor ratio, and keyword list, you can quickly match that up to your keyword and PPC budget to help your dealership spend less per click and get more for your money. The top 5 list below already assumes you have run a campaign and have some background knowledge on search marketing. It also takes into account that you have a Google AdWords or similar campaign that has run for a month or so.

How to get more from your automotive pay-per-click budget:

1. Review your keywords in your Analytics and remove those with very high bounce rates. If you are getting click after click on some top automotive phrases and still get a high bounce rate, then remove that keyword to give other keywords a chance to run. Some people will argue that a high bounce rate is indicative that the dealership’s phone is ringing. This is possible, so make sure to track every sales call to see if you can find trends. There are more advanced methods to track the conversion, but we will save that for another article.
2. Remove the keywords that are not converting. Do you have a decent bounce rate, but they are not visiting any pages or filling out any forms? Remove it. There are usually some great hidden automotive keywords in your Adwords PPC account that have not had the chance to run and may convert better. Sometimes long keyphrases are good, sometimes they are not. No hard and fast rule can be applied to all automotive advertising online.
3. Change your ads constantly. Testing, testing, testing is what marketing is all about. If you are not testing your ads or automotive cop, then you are not maximizing your results. Just a few simple changes to your car copy or price of a vehicle in the small text ad can cause your automotive click-through rate or CTR to skyrocket. We have a small handbook that we may release to the automotive public on how to get the best click rates. Remember the phrase price sells cars? Well, that often works with “price makes clicks” as well. A word of caution: Deceptive ads can cause high bounce rates, plus the fact that it’s just shady.
4. Group your keywords into proper campaigns and make everything match. If you are marketing Hondas and trying to get clicks on Civics, Accords, and used Hondas, then set up a campaign for each. You can subdivide further, but this will enable you to match the keywords to the ad copy to the destination web address, which Google just loves when you are trying to sell more cars online. Google wants more clicks and will reward you with a high quality score, which leads to item 5.
5. Fix your AdWords quality score. What is Quality Score, you ask? In a nutshell, Google reads your keywords, campaigns,  URL, and destination page along with several other things, including your relevancy and CTR, and gives your keyword a “Poor, OK, or GREAT” score. The Greater the score, the less you pay per click and the more relevant the results to the customer. You want the car buyer that is seeking a used Honda Civic to see your used Civic ad, and be brought to a used Civic webpage filled with relevant offers. Google likes it when you do that, make Google happy, and pay less.

How is this for conversion rates? This does NOT even take into account the phone calls this dealer received from the online marketing or opay-per-clickcampaign we performed for them.