Pay Per Click: Get Better Automotive Sales While Paying Less on Advertising

In this article we are going to explore a very common mistake that may hinder your auto dealership business growth. I have seen this mistake so often that I even encountered this problem with one of my friends.

My friend, who happens to own an auto dealership business, asked me to check his website and assess its performance. At the very first glance the numbers looked really good; about 50,000 visitors per day but the real problem was the bounce rate. Most of his visitors left the website in less than 1 minute; the bounce rate, was almost 85%.

This condition of high traffic, low engagement performance won't get you anywhere; that's what I told him. What was driving the low quality traffic? It's something that you've dabbled in.

o  Automotive pay-per-click advertising.

In the course of my career serving auto dealerships, I feel like I have seen it all. I've witnessed dealers who were spending way too much with low yield. Some of them have tried to do things on their own, while others have enlisted the “expertise” of billion-dollar providers.

From spending too much or too little all the way to relying too heavy on advertising, I've seen dealers in a variety of losing situations when it comes to automotive PPC advertising. In each situation, nearly every dealer (or provider) made the same fundamental mistake.

I want to reveal a time tested strategy that will help you get better results and decrease your spend. When it comes to doing anything on any of Google's platforms, the key point is relevancy. Relevancy should always be your focus. Whether through organic search or AdWords, Google wants to make sure that what you lead people to is relevant to what they're searching for.

One of the reasons that dealers spend more than they need is because the quality of the ads they run is too low. You must know that Google has something called a Quality Score which is like a grading system for your AdWords ads. When the quality score of the ad is low, you typically pay more for each click. This happens in order to compensate for the low quality of your ads.

So how can you turn this around? How can you get better results and not pay an arm and a leg for it? I'm going to show you a time tested strategy that will help increase your quality score and deliver a superior user experience. First, you need to identify what you want your ads to link to. Please, don't link them straight to your vehicle search results (VSR) page. Don't link them to your homepage. This is an absolute ridiculous practice that you need to stop immediately.

There is nothing worse than clicking an ad that you think will take you to relevant information, but doesn't. You need to focus on your objective with the ad campaign. What information do you want your site visitors to learn about? If you're running a make/model campaign, go one step above merely linking to the VSR or VDP page. Link the user to a page on your site dedicated to information about that particular make and model.

On the make/model page, make sure you reaffirm that the consumer is on the right page. Make sure your page heading clearly matches the ad that they clicked on. Google has something called “landing page scent” and it essentially checks to make sure that the page someone lands on from and ad matches the ad that they clicked on. When Google can't see enough relevancy, your quality score decreases and you'll end up spending more per click than if the relevancy was high.

In other words, it's not as simple as just running some ads and driving traffic to your site. There is a sequence to follow that requires ongoing effort. You need to clearly identify what your main objectives are and what the funnel looks like to get customers from point A (the ad click) to point B (the lead submission). When you follow the right sequence and come up with relevant content linked to from relevant ads, you will get better results and spend less.