Google Adwords Deep Linking VDPs In-House

[Chris Leslie]

Like a Fancy Spreadsheet

 

[craigh]

Not to break the excel spreadsheet party here... but a system that will automatically do this, and pretty well too, cost next to nothing nowadays.

That's not very helpful if you don't mention it by name...

 

[Rick Buffkin]

@craigh I called up the folks at Mystery Incorporated to figure out the tool @yagoparamo is talking about! They're hot on his trail!!!

LOL...

 

[Gayle Rogers]

@Nick Spolec I just started a discussion about VDP's as landing pages...How did your experiment go?

 

[craigh]

@craigh I called up the folks at Mystery Incorporated to figure out the tool @yagoparamo is talking about! They're hot on his trail!!!

LOL...

Still waiting!!

 

[Gayle Rogers]

Still waiting!!

Hahahah!

 

[Rick Buffkin]

@craigh LOL
The last I heard from Mystery Inc. as they were chasing @yago down is they were crossing the state line heading into Colorado. That was over 6 months ago!! I did accidentally get a pic sent to me. Not really sure what it means though!

 

[Tallcool1]

Showroom Logic does this.

I was Showroom Logic's first dealer in my state (which is pretty ironic considering I am an Independent selling 300 units a year!). Great company, my account manager was awesome, and I actually felt like I had someone on the other end studying my market and trying to help us figure out how to sell more cars.

@skutchhenks made a post to this thread on the first page, and his observations were nearly a mirror image of what I found. Bounce was extremely high due to the fact that some of the most simple information couldn't be shared in the ad. Color, Miles, Equipment etc., resulted in a whole lot of clicks and session durations that wouldn't even register in Clicky, much less Google Analytics. That means that many customers were not staying on the VDP for even 15 seconds.

@Gayle Rogers has a thread going about VDP's being used as Landing Pages, and I found that the problem with my VDP format is that so much of my message wasn't on the VDP. There was no content there to encourage a customer to buy a vehicle from me. None of our Core Values were there, no reviews, no "why buy here" stuff. It was all about the car. I compared it to a car dealership that has a sign posted at the entrance that says "The keys are in them, the prices are on the window, help yourself". It just didn't work. So, we overhauled the VDP in order to share some information about the store and what is different about us. Of course some of this information had to go below the fold. Heat and scroll mapping showed me that customers didn't look at it.

Bottom line for me, it didn't work. It was damn expensive, and as @skutchhenks stated...if someone is using Google to run a very specific vehicle search (excluding specialty vehicles) they most likely have not found that car on AT, C.com, CG, etc..

I just couldn't make it work, but that is not to say anything bad about Showroom Logic. They did exactly what they told me they would do...they drove traffic to my VDP's. I just couldn't do anything with it.

 

[Nick Spolec]

Showroom Logic does this.

I was Showroom Logic's first dealer in my state (which is pretty ironic considering I am an Independent selling 300 units a year!). Great company, my account manager was awesome, and I actually felt like I had someone on the other end studying my market and trying to help us figure out how to sell more cars.

@skutchhenks made a post to this thread on the first page, and his observations were nearly a mirror image of what I found. Bounce was extremely high due to the fact that some of the most simple information couldn't be shared in the ad. Color, Miles, Equipment etc., resulted in a whole lot of clicks and session durations that wouldn't even register in Clicky, much less Google Analytics. That means that many customers were not staying on the VDP for even 15 seconds.

@Gayle Rogers has a thread going about VDP's being used as Landing Pages, and I found that the problem with my VDP format is that so much of my message wasn't on the VDP. There was no content there to encourage a customer to buy a vehicle from me. None of our Core Values were there, no reviews, no "why buy here" stuff. It was all about the car. I compared it to a car dealership that has a sign posted at the entrance that says "The keys are in them, the prices are on the window, help yourself". It just didn't work. So, we overhauled the VDP in order to share some information about the store and what is different about us. Of course some of this information had to go below the fold. Heat and scroll mapping showed me that customers didn't look at it.

Bottom line for me, it didn't work. It was damn expensive, and as @skutchhenks stated...if someone is using Google to run a very specific vehicle search (excluding specialty vehicles) they most likely have not found that car on AT, C.com, CG, etc..

I just couldn't make it work, but that is not to say anything bad about Showroom Logic. They did exactly what they told me they would do...they drove traffic to my VDP's. I just couldn't do anything with it.

So, I did a small trial with some more unique vehicles --- I pretty much can confirm the same results. Traffic to the VDP, but no significant (or any) increase in Leads/Calls/Request for more info.

I ended up just ending the campaigns and focusing the Google Ad spends on "Car Dealership Near Me" and "Used Cars" :/

 

[Gayle Rogers]

@Nick Spolec Thanks for the update!

However, still no word on @yago...The search continues.