Adword Agencies - Why are Dealers SO UNTRUSTING?

[joe.pistell]

....Most dealership's feel change is always better with their online vendors when sales aren't going well, so it's a endless loop of fail. How important is the sales floor/desk in that equation? What if we're really dropping the ball in the showroom?

Mike brings up a great point. Managers are asked the impossible, is SEM spending creating ups? If so, how so? If not, why not?

SEM is a highly technical business -AND- managers are busy. Managers need vendors to assist in the managers business goals... and therein lies the billion dollar problem. SEM vendors can't connect their work to an up.

Result?
Managers are forced to make "gut calls' on SEM decisions.

 

[kevinfrye]

I am looking to put together a session for Digital Dealer called "SEM made Simple". There is no reason why a GM or other decision maker cannot see whether their SEM spend is effective - I think most just need a better understanding of how to interpret the reporting data to make the best marketing decisions..

 

[mwpistell]

The lack of transparency and dealer control is the reason why I got into starting my own boutique agency. I've been navigating the choppy waters of automotive SEM for the last 6 years and I know what dealerships hate, and I know how to avoid hitting the rocks.

Hidden markups are common headache large Vendors cause, and that pain is compounded when the Vendor lays out no PPC strategy before taking command of your dealership's digital marketing fate. So at the end of the day the dealer has a SEM provider taking ridiculous commissions (often 40%+ of total ad spend), no strategy (just some plug-and-play campaigns), and no transparency or ownership of your own data. Not to mention your account manager will have 50 or 60 other clients to attend to, but that's another story.

I avoid all this by charging a flat fee, and giving full access of all marketing platforms to the dealer. Also, I remove the middle man by having the dealer pay Google directly so every dollar they give actually goes to 100% advertising efforts.

This may seem like a thinly veil advertisement, but it's just what I've been hearing from GM's/IMM's for a half decade. I don't mean to play therapist but I can feel the stress in their voice when they discuss a poorly managed SEM account, this affects their life and those around them. It's personally motivating to me to dig someone out of a hole and it's why I'll keep doing this my way.

 

[mikesayre]

Mike brings up a great point. Managers are asked the impossible, is SEM spending creating ups? If so, how so? If not, why not?

SEM is a highly technical business -AND- managers are busy. Managers need vendors to assist in the managers business goals... and therein lies the billion dollar problem. SEM vendors can't connect their work to an up.

Result?
Managers are forced to make "gut calls' on SEM decisions.

SEM is important, but it's just one spoke in the wheel of success. There's so much more that goes into a well operated dealership for sales (& fixed-ops) that manager's have to worry about every month.

How much value does a monthly online-meeting with a SEM vendor covering campaign stats & metrics provide a DP or GM? Probably not much, that's why most keep re-scheduling or avoid the meetings all-together after about the first two. There's just too many more-pressing things to handle every day.

So at the end of the day the dealer has a SEM provider taking ridiculous commissions (often 40%+ of total ad spend), no strategy (just some plug-and-play campaigns), and no transparency or ownership of your own data.

I don't mean to play therapist but I can feel the stress in their voice when they discuss a poorly managed SEM account, this affects their life and those around them. It's personally motivating to me to dig someone out of a hole and it's why I'll keep doing this my way.

Nailed it. Big commissions, no strategy, no transparency, eventually that will equal no real value. The other issue is the templated, scale-able approach vendors take. It's not easy running SEM campaigns the right way for car dealers. There's a lot of custom work involved, investigating, and research that takes time.

 

[Caleb Twito]

There is a lack of trust with the dealer - agency relationship because there is only 1 way transparency. Creating 2 way transparency creates trust but bad agencies would rather leave the dealer completely out of the performance process all together.

On the other hand, it's hard for even the best agency as well because unless they have a system to track results (that they are willing to share with the dealer), they are asking dealers to give them insight into how they performed. Good agencies love using our data dashboard as a 2 way street of communication. It empowers a dealer to see what's really going on while protecting the agency when their campaigns are providing traffic that the store isn't closing so they can work together.

 

[Alex Vetter]

Anyone else see Alex Vetter from Cars.com comment on AdWords at Driving Sales?
Something along the lines of "why spend your ad budget somewhere customers spend an average of 20 seconds"?
#disconnected

Happy to discuss more with you. Ping me @ Alex@cars.com. Probably spent well over a billion in paid search over my career and think we've learned a lot. It may not be a popular opinion but to me google is like the federal government with taxation for traffic that is already headed your way. Would like to see dealers make more investments in SEO tactics than SEM in 2017.

 

[craigh]

Happy to discuss more with you. Ping me @ Alex@cars.com. Probably spent well over a billion in paid search over my career and think we've learned a lot. It may not be a popular opinion but to me google is like the federal government with taxation for traffic that is already headed your way. Would like to see dealers make more investments in SEO tactics than SEM in 2017.

I may take you up on that. I certainly am not in a position to say it's right or wrong, but it's certainly disconnected from everything else we're seeing in the industry - maybe it's disconnected in all the right ways.

 

[ed.brooks]

It may not be a popular opinion but to me google is like the federal government with taxation for traffic that is already headed your way.

From a brand new blog post* by Steve White, Founder & CEO of Clarivoy;

“Consider the following scenario. A customer first discovers your dealership via a third-party auto listing site. Then they come back to your site later by searching your dealer name on Google and clicking on an AdWords listing, which perhaps was right above a free Google organic listing for your website. By default, in Google Analytics, that AdWords click took 100% credit for that visitor, assuming as a fact that it was incredibly valuable, when it may have had no impact at all on whether or not that sale was made.”​

*"The True Cost of Google Analytics"