In Aug-mid Jan I ran a decent manual SEM campaign. 3 markets, St. Joseph, MO, Lincoln, NE, and Grand Island, NE. We have Ford, Lincoln at all locations, Kia at St. Joe and GI, and Mazda and Pre-owned store in Lincoln. I set up campaigns for new and pre-owned in each market.
What I found was:
Lincoln market (our biggest) was cheapest PPC and users searched more new vehicle search terms and very generic (new ford dealership, new f-150, etc.)
St. Joseph market was searching more pre-owned and very specific sets of keywords (ex. used Ford F-150 for sale in St. Joe)
Grand Island market was nearly 1.5x cost PPC over Lincoln and users search a mixed of new and pre-owned.
Conclusions From Analytics:
Depends on you unique market if SEM approach is best. Our markets showed different levels results and I cannot track exact sales or leads on SEM traffic, I can only do a comparison traffic to sold or website lead chart and website solds and leads trended up with the the search engine increased traffic. Website conversion rate and website solds remained consistent (within 2% of previous month). With that data I can say or assume sales increased based on increased traffic, due to SEM - to what degree, it is not measurable.
Looking at the Total Search Traffic column you can say that it appears the traffic remained somewhat consistent with a small bump in July/Aug. But if you take out monthly trends and compare it previous year, we saw substantial increase in total search engine traffic over the previous year. SEM took away from some Organic visitors, but still show increased in total shoppers over previous year.
From what we experienced we decided to go to an all or nothing managed SEM approach with Haystak in March as an AutoTrader replacement. This will be able to give us better numbers and stats of if a SEM approach works for us. Does this really work? We will see within a few months. We didn't stop or tv, direct mail, or other marketing avenues, just took AutoTrader out of equation and inserted paid SEM. All-in approach is never good, we still wanted a good mix of marketing avenues.
Analytics (we increased budget in late Oct):
Month | Paid Visitor Total | Organic Search Traffic | Total Search Traffic | Search Traffic Increase Over Previous Year |
May | 0 | 9,300 | 9,300 | 2,661 |
June | 0 | 11,864 | 11,864 | 4,913 |
July | 0 | 13,189 | 13,189 | 4,924 |
Aug (28 days paid) | 1,158 | 12,868 | 14,026 | 6,246 |
Sept | 1,253 | 10,560 | 11,813 | 6,801 |
Oct | 1,723 | 10,951 | 12,674 | 6,400 |
Nov | 3,369 | 8,362 | 11,731 | 6,032 |
Dec | 4,391 | 7,991 | 12,382 | 6,577 |
Jan (12 days paid) | 2,600 | 9,761 | 12,361 | 4,352 |
Feb | 0 | 10,079 | 10,079 | 3,587 |