POLL Do you manage your own SEM?

[BHavican]

I'm 6 days into a position with a new dealership and was in a marketing meeting. We were discussing options on who to partner with to do our PPC and retargeting for us. As I was discussing the trouble I had at another group finding a competent partner, an associate asked "why don't you do it?"

I never really gave it much thought because I always assumed it would be too time consuming. However, it's an interesting question. I feel as though I'm analytical and savvy enough to do it, but there's a lot on my plate and I'm not sure if I'd have the time.

So...does/has anyone manage their dealership's SEM? If so, how much time would you say you devote to it each week? Is it worth it?

 

[craigh]

I manage this service on behalf of my clients (as a vendor), but without software automation - it's actually me managing the campaigns.
I will say a few things:

• Human doing it is better than automation most of the time. There are exceptions, but a good AdWords campaign should be tailored to the dealership
• We couldn't find any great partners to resell. I've worked with Showroom Logic and I'm a big fan, but beyond their display ads we've never found a vendor that can do the rest of the AdWords very well
• It's not as time consuming once it's all setup. We have different campaigns that are more "auto-pilot" and then some that change every month and then even others that are inventory stock specific. Monitoring, updating, tweaking and pulling reports is not that time consuming - the nature of AdWords is that it moves slowly. I always give any medium to large changes at least 7 days before I can even tell if they're working or not.

 

[BHavican]

Thanks Craig! I appreciate the feedback.

 

[KevinO]

I was thinking of starting my own PPC business to service dealer's (as a vendor), but I don't feel that most DP/GM really knows that a human adding keywords & ads is better than automation? Yes, I've worked at a dealership W/ quality scores low and made them high. Over the course of 6 months or so I created an awesome negative keyword list and cut the Cost Per Click in half. (after my tweaking dealership got twice as much traffic with the same budget), Sure I could do this for like $30/hr but they would rather spend it with the dealerships website provider or CRM/DMS vendor.

 

[joe.pistell]

I was thinking of starting my own PPC business to service dealer's (as a vendor)....

You can do it Kevin. My son has a successful PPC management biz for car dealers. He's his story...

I built my own enormous PPC system with Umer of Autojini. It worked wonderfully but I never had time to make improvements. My son graduated from college right into the 'great recession of 2008-10 and found no work. I asked my son for help, taught him what I knew and handed it over to him. BAM! He totally got it! He became Google Cert'd in 6 months and opened his own PPC boutique for car dealers. Everything is done manually, and he's no longer taking on any new dealers.


So... it can be done, you'll need to be prepared to demonstrate why your better (not how your better).

HTH
Joe