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Dynamic SEM ads for Used Cars - Is there a way to improve efficiency?

hondadealer

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Jan 1, 2013
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Greg
Our SEM provider creates dynamic ads for all used vehicles that link to the individual VDP as soon as they are posted on our website. While this is a fast and efficient way of getting ads quickly online, I'm wondering if there is a better way?

My dilemma is that those vehicles that are of most interest, lowest days supply, hottest in the market, etc obviously also attract the highest volume of views. Accordingly, the majority of our budget is spent on vehicles that probably don't need the help and are usually sold within 7 days of posting. My sense is that they would have sold just as quickly without the unnecessary adwords spend. I honestly feel that we could halve our adwords spend on Used vehicles, just by being able to control when and on which cars a campaign was created.

I would love the ability to set up parameters such that a dynamic SEM campaign would only engage based upon certain metrics - i.e. high market days supply vehicles, after 10 days in inventory, low SRP's or VDP/SRP conversion.

Anyone know a way of doing this, other than on a manual basis? Is there a software solution or vendor that can do this?
 
This is a conundrum...Firstly, you need to start weighing the impact your 3rd party listing sites are having on your inventory; views, calls, leads, etc. This may show you that no budget may be needed for some specific models and that organic, direct and 3rd party traffic is enough.

I would also take a look at your sales from the past few years and breakdown sales per model and type. This will probably provide you with a great overview of what sells when and how long specific models stay on your lot. It may also provide you with some great analytics on what vehicles need more assistance during what specific months of the year.

Now regarding your specific question, I personally am not aware of any vendor that does what you are asking outside of us. Unfortunately, this feature is only available to dealers that currently have our site. We have built our own AI and Analytics to look at data trends around model, used/new, make, radius, device type, etc. as well as site metrics (you mentioned above) to prioritize which vehicles should receive more allocation of funds for search and display marketing. Feel free to take a look at on of our Honda sites @ https://www.sunsethonda.com or https://www.spreenhonda.com

I hope I helped :2cents:
 
Just giving some thought to your question. This can be done. You'll need a few key items. Do you use Vauto?? I don't about other used car tools but with VAuto, you can build custom reports and email to yourself or ftp that report to your own server. That report can hold the bulk of the data that you need for adwords to make decisions (increase / decrease bid amounts based on your key items (DIS, VDP views, Provisioning grade, market days supply, price rank, v rank, etc..)). You can include these items in the report and send it to yourself multiple times a day. If your using homenet, you can have Homenet to drop your inventory file onto your server as well(multiple times a day). You would need a script in adwords to fetch your inventory file. On the first fetch, the script can build out your campaigns (ad copy, keywords, base bid amounts, etc..) and delete campaigns if the vehicle is no longer available. Name the individual campaign by the vin number. Then on your next file fetch, get the VAuto file and use it to make bid adjustments and you can identify the campaign you want to target by the Vin #. You would need to put some logic into how your want your bids adjusted but, you can do this. Just sitting here thinking, you could even build a google spreadsheet with your parameters. The second fetch would fetch the spreadsheet first and take all your parameters from the spreadsheet and then it would fetch the VAuto file and apply the parameters you set up from the spreadsheet to the campaigns and base the decisions off the data in the VAuto file. It can be done. This sounds like a cool project!!!
 
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