Concerns with local digital marketing company...am I missing something?

[mbloom19]

I believe it was 34% management fee and $1900 "technology" fee...on a $5k per month plan.

 

[Alexander Lau]

Gannett currently has a partnership with ReachLocal and all of their PPC campaigns are managed by their team. They employ proxy sites, which is a mirrored version of your site, autodealer.co, so they can control consumers and monitor leads from your consumers. We recently took on a new client that was working with Gannett. We asked them to do one simple task, connect Adwords to Analytics. They replied with a three paragraph email explaining how as a Google Preferred Partner their technology was proprietary and their tracking system, "ReachEdge, was better given that there is often a discrepancy in the way AdWords and Analytics present data."

Ask them if they'll connect Adwords to Analytics? I'm sure you'll get the same line of bullshit.

Run...run away...fast.

The use of proxy sites is an ancient technique. No offense, but that is nothing new. At least 10 years ago, I worked for a company that outsourced their paid search to https://www.aimediagroup.com and they had that type of system in place. That said, I find it hilarious that you get that line about not being able to connect AW to GA. It's a crock of shit. I see it all of the time in my line of work. Automotive Web Traffic Attribution (WTA) in GA. Agencies deny it and hurt the dealer, a lot of the time the agency controls the SEO and PPC and do not want to be held accountable for their wares, because they know damn well their paid search Cost Per Acquistion (Goals) crap performance knows no bounds.

 

[Alexander Lau]

I believe it was 34% management fee and $1900 "technology" fee...on a $5k per month plan.

That's highway robbery. The highest I have seen is 25% and that's crazy too. I'll not mention any of the automotive corporate entities (you know who I mean), but they tend to charge a fee per month and then a crazy high %. Dealers go for it, being that the expense is coop-able.

 

[craigh]

I believe it was 34% management fee and $1900 "technology" fee...on a $5k per month plan.

That's highway robbery. The highest I have seen is 25% and that's crazy too. I'll not mention any of the automotive corporate entities (you know who I mean), but they tend to charge a fee per month and then a crazy high %. Dealers go for it, being that the expense is coop-able.

Pfft. Knowing those guys, the 34% is probably the first company, then it gets watered down again by the next.
I've seen companies go 50/50 and still try and rationalize it.
The best part is the 50% that goes to ad spend is spent 75% on protecting the dealership name.
Might as well just buy a billboard right in front of your dealership.

 

[Chris Cachor]

@MirageVR excellent troubleshooting skills. I would talk to your boss and ask if you could help out more with the digital side. You just saved the dealership a lot of money and future headaches. Very nice work! Also sorry you and your dealership had to even experience this. I've made note of Gannet and ReachLocal.

 

[MirageVR]

@Chris Cachor Thanks, I actually have a very strong background in Computer Science and do a lot of full-stack software development. Problem solving via data analysis is my jam. It's so disappointing seeing what's going on in the automotive industry. People getting taken advantage of left and right, shitty reporting tools, bloated/poorly written software and CRM's, mismanaged budgets..sad state of affairs.

 

[Chris Cachor]

@Chris Cachor Thanks, I actually have a very strong background in Computer Science and do a lot of full-stack software development. Problem solving via data analysis is my jam. It's so disappointing seeing what's going on in the automotive industry. People getting taken advantage of left and right, shitty reporting tools, bloated/poorly written software and CRM's, mismanaged budgets..sad state of affairs.

Very cool, I'm a full stack dev as well. It is disappointing. There are some big marketing budgets and unfortunately some bad actors take advantage of companies that don't know any better. I will say reporting among vendors has come a long way, though. I think areas where competition is pretty strong (CRM's, website vendors) you don't see as much of this (AFAIK). I think a lot of these problems can be solved by bringing the digital marketing in-house. PPC, SEM, etc isn't rocket science, it's very competitive, and needs constant monitoring. I think having someone fairly well versed in this isn't too hard to find, especially since it's just focused on one vertical. Dealers usually have an internet team fielding leads that I think could manage this quite easily.

 

[Steve Stauning]

As often happens, this forum string inspired a DealerRefresh Blog Post: https://www.dealerrefresh.com/nine-dirty-little-secrets-automotive-seo-sem/#

 

[Alexander Lau]

Very cool, I'm a full stack dev as well. It is disappointing. There are some big marketing budgets and unfortunately some bad actors take advantage of companies that don't know any better. I will say reporting among vendors has come a long way, though. I think areas where competition is pretty strong (CRM's, website vendors) you don't see as much of this (AFAIK). I think a lot of these problems can be solved by bringing the digital marketing in-house. PPC, SEM, etc isn't rocket science, it's very competitive, and needs constant monitoring. I think having someone fairly well versed in this isn't too hard to find, especially since it's just focused on one vertical. Dealers usually have an internet team fielding leads that I think could manage this quite easily.

@Chris Cachor @MirageVR
A better question, why in the hell are you guys mucking about with frickin' automotive SEM with those kinds of bad-ass skills?

Sheesh dudes...!

 

[Ryan Everson]

As often happens, this forum string inspired a DealerRefresh Blog Post: https://www.dealerrefresh.com/nine-dirty-little-secrets-automotive-seo-sem/#

Ask your vendor to tell you how many cars you sold last month from your SEM efforts and which keywords drove those sales.

How exactly would one go about doing this? This suggestion seems to be setting vendors up for failure as I don't know of anyway to achieve this and am afraid it will give dealers unrealistic expectations.

Sure you can track lead conversions but that's typically 2% to maybe 5% of traffic so it wouldn't really give a dealership an accurate picture.

I tend to view Google's store visit conversion as the best metric available but that still doesn't tell us if they bought a car or not. Facebook has far superior attribution in comparison.