If your on a tight SEM budget, why does this seem like a good idea?????

[Ryan Everson]

If the dealer is on a tight SEM budget, why would the SEM provider think it's a good idea to keep the freaking campaigns on an accelerated spend? Especially if your trying to actively and accurately measure your search impression share!!!! Curious minds want to know!! Can anyone give me a good answer??? Please don't pull a Forrest Gump and say "Because you to me to Drill Sergeant"!

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Rick at least you have one thing going for you - you have access to the Adwords account. That's more than most can say.

Accelerated delivery is not a bad idea if there's a strategy behind it. Let me explain...

I try to never let my campaigns be limited by budget. I design my campaigns to be as high converting as possible so I want my ads to show up every time they're eligible to.

Standard delivery is designed to show your ads every 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc time that someone searches when you're limited by budget instead of every single time to conserve money.

I don't like when this happens because it means I'm missing out on a lot of opportunities, so I would do one or a combination of the following:

1) Increase my daily budget for the limited campaigns (I know this isn't always possible)
2) Pause poor performing parts of my account (campaigns, ad groups, keywords, etc)
3) Reduce my location targeting to the best performing areas
4) Reduce CPC bids

If you employ this strategy, accelerated delivery can make sense. I also like to use dayparting to prioritize spend and higher bids on my best performing days / times.

Essentially if you're on a tight budget, focus on the best converting traffic with a rifle approach instead of a shotgun approach where you have to utilize standard ad delivery to make your budget last throughout the day.

Sure the shotgun approach with standard delivery makes you feel good because you're targeting everything you want to, but in reality you're missing out on better converting traffic.

With all that said, I'm guessing your provider does not have a strategy behind this except to make sure you hit your daily budget everyday so they can collect their maximum management fee %. lol

 

[Ryan Everson]

Below is another optimization tactic I employ that few automotive ppc vendors seem to use.

I found that Google was a little too liberal in identifying people "who show interest in my targeted locations" and I ended up reaching a bunch of people way outside of my targeted area.

Switching to the non Google recommended targeting option boosted our performance significantly (and saved us money).

 

[Jason@nabthat]

@reverson - Great Campaign! Really impressive numbers and set-up, well done.

I agree that you should only target people in the locations you are going after.

Lets not forget about Display...it can be a great cost effective way to bring those customers back to the site. It has to be relevant and specific. I cannot stand those remarketing campaigns that just show some generic ad with the name of the dealership as if most users are NFL players, have amnesia or alzheimer.



Our Display campaigns can pull over a 1% CTR especially on Facebook where we are seeing 2%. We have our own analytics platform that feeds Google/Facebook data on who to target (for example we can tell Google/FB to target people who looked only at a VDP of a new Accord within a radius and did not submit a lead or call the dealership). Example user from our analytics platform:

 

[Ryan Everson]

@reverson - Great Campaign! Really impressive numbers and set-up, well done.

I agree that you should only target people in the locations you are going after.

Lets not forget about Display...it can be a great cost effective way to bring those customers back to the site. It has to be relevant and specific. I cannot stand those remarketing campaigns that just show some generic ad with the name of the dealership as if most users are NFL players, have amnesia or alzheimer.

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Our Display campaigns can pull over a 1% CTR especially on Facebook where we are seeing 2%. We have our own analytics platform that feeds Google/Facebook data on who to target (for example we can tell Google/FB to target people who looked only at a VDP of a new Accord within a radius and did not submit a lead or call the dealership). Example user from our analytics platform:

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Thanks!

And yeah we definitely use display for both remarketing and in-market customers.

We use Google Sheets to input our monthly deals each month then our search ads auto-update through ad customizers, and display ads through Google Web Designer. Makes it much easier to scale vs doing manually for as many stores as we have. It also provides a consistent experience between display, paid search, and our website.

We find that a customer being exposed to a display ad of ours influences future paid search traffic, resulting in higher CTR and more engaged traffic. So it's an ancillary benefit to the impressions and clicks from the actual display campaign.

We also use RLSA to make sure our past sales / service customers and prior website visitors don't get conquested by a competitor after our significant investment in initially acquiring them.

Next up for us is tying it all together with consistent video messaging through Youtube Trueview and Facebook!

 

[joe.pistell]

We've found all of our metrics have went up by running them in-house though. We're driving much more relevant traffic and wasting less money through more highly targeted ad group segmentation and keyword targeting which is generating us more leads, calls, and showroom traffic.

@jon.berna heads up, your platform can help dealer's score SEM vendors! Jon, to add to @reverson comments, I just completed a study of 4 PPC vendors over a 3yr span for a group and the results blew me away! There are PPC vendors that have ZERO interest in a dealer's performance. Then, I created an engagement score (similar to your Qweb) and the wasted spending became 100x more visible!

SEM buyers beware!

 

[Steve Stauning]

As often happens, this forum string prompted a DealerRefresh blog post: https://www.dealerrefresh.com/toyota-dealer-108-million-dollar-spend-fight-ford/

 

[Ryan Everson]

@brianpasch posed the below scenario on Facebook a couple days ago.

DEALERS & AGENCIES - Imagine this future scenario. Google convinces auto manufacturers that the best way to optimize sales is to run all co-op digital advertising for local dealers (Tier 3) through Google directly or through a single agent for the OEM? In this scenario, outcomes could include the elimination of commissions Google pays to the largest agencies (good for Google profits) and it would reduce the net profits of website platform providers in co-op programs that rely on digital ad campaigns to fund innovation. It would also allow Google to more directly influence YOY increases in digital spend by the OEMs instead of plateaued revenue that moves across different agency partners. Do you think that this could happen or not? Would dealers embrace this top-down strategy? (It may be coming sooner than you think!)

I know Toyota tried this with Performics / Saatchi & Saatchi managing paid search for every tier but reversed course last year.

I think it can be done with the right person managing it and buy-in from all parties (which is probably the most difficult to achieve). I hope it doesn't come to fruition though because right now I have a huge competitive advantage managing everything in-house while every other dealer uses sucky providers. I not only get better performance but I also save significant money which allows me to use that saved money towards additional advertising mediums.

 

[Chris Leslie]

Yeah if you don't have the right person you can end up wasting even more money than if you used a vendor so it's not something I'd recommend to everyone.

We've found all of our metrics have went up by running them in-house though. We're driving much more relevant traffic and wasting less money through more highly targeted ad group segmentation and keyword targeting which is generating us more leads, calls, and showroom traffic.

I think it's pretty rare in the auto space for a new car dealer to have an average account CTR of 15-25%. The only thing that is ever that high is a vendor's 30-35% management fee.

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Curious what adgroups you are running in those campaigns.

 

[jon.berna]

@jon.berna heads up, your platform can help dealer's score SEM vendors! Jon, to add to @reverson comments, I just completed a study of 4 PPC vendors over a 3yr span for a group and the results blew me away! There are PPC vendors that have ZERO interest in a dealer's performance. Then, I created an engagement score (similar to your Qweb) and the wasted spending became 100x more visible!

SEM buyers beware!

We have a view that we can enable that evaluates qweb by channel my month

 

[Alexander Lau]

Thanks!

And yeah we definitely use display for both remarketing and in-market customers.

We use Google Sheets to input our monthly deals each month then our search ads auto-update through ad customizers, and display ads through Google Web Designer. Makes it much easier to scale vs doing manually for as many stores as we have. It also provides a consistent experience between display, paid search, and our website.

We find that a customer being exposed to a display ad of ours influences future paid search traffic, resulting in higher CTR and more engaged traffic. So it's an ancillary benefit to the impressions and clicks from the actual display campaign.

We also use RLSA to make sure our past sales / service customers and prior website visitors don't get conquested by a competitor after our significant investment in initially acquiring them.

Next up for us is tying it all together with consistent video messaging through Youtube Trueview and Facebook!

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Display (and Pre-Roll) CTR and Conversion Rate results tend to scare the living hell out of me. When I was a paid search slave, the results were terrible. Now, you might find that it increases your brand awareness and over reach (I would agree with that), but I have never witnessed great conversion numbers and limited CTR numbers.