My entire dealer group just canceled Cars.com. More lead providers to come!

[Manny Luna]

I would like to say, if you decide to replace ATC, Cars, or TrueCar have a plan of action! There's no guessing on anything, if you spend the time to research, research, and research how the users are searching and write the content around it, your traffic will convert into a lead or phone call.

The dealer Doug mentioned above has one of the best internet directors doing a great job and he's needing some help building up his department. The hardest thing is not creating organic leads, it's implementing a process and managing them with proper follow up, that's the key!


If your're using auto trader we have strategic ways to market cars in their portal where a dealer can own their markets with every brand. "NO Pitching or Self Promoting"


As far as PPC, here is a great read by HubSpot: You are more likely to birth twins than click a banner ad.

Don't get me wrong I'm not a hater of PPC, It's the set and forget of 1000 keywords and phrases when only 150 are preforming that dealers are paying for. The top preforming key words and key phrases dealers should be working on optimizing on their own websites with onsite, offsite seo and content marketing.

Here's a video I recommend all GMs should watch.

"The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing"

 

[Manny Luna]

Joe,

Looking at the search shows the dealers site is not optimized under "used cts portland" and I see lots of duplicate content on the site, also that search term landed me on the dealers home page. This is not relevant to the search term:best price on a used Cadillac CTS near portland OR just my $0.02.

 

[Alex.Lemoing]

As far as PPC, here is a great read by HubSpot: You are more likely to birth twins than click a banner ad.

Don't get me wrong I'm not a hater of PPC, It's the set and forget of 1000 keywords and phrases when only 150 are preforming that dealers are paying for. The top preforming key words and key phrases dealers should be working on optimizing on their own websites with onsite, offsite seo and content marketing.

Many, Our executive manager and myself were talking about that yesterday. A few month back, Subaru of America strongly recommended that we start using the Display ad campaign through Dealer.com, in 6 months we have had about 2,612,866 impression but our click through rates is only 0,050% which really is quite ridiculous. it sure gets the dealership exposure but in the end is it really worth it ?

We've decided to lower our budget on the Display advertisement and place the budget on our adword campaign.
I believe that customer actively shopping on Google and Bing are more likely to click your link than click a banner ad. (our click through rate on adwords is about 5%, we still need to tweak it but it's going in the right direction)
We are also pushing our SEO on our websites, results should start showing in a few months.

 

[mattsoocool]

Marketing to online can get costly with adwords and tracking click thrus. Then you want to figure out conversion rates of those that click through your ads that continue to a prospect. To do that you have heat maps which show you what the prospects are clicking on the most when they get to your site.

If a full time commitment is made to SEO and online marketing, it can be done, with a considerable amount of investment.

Keep in mind social media is free, but requires consistent content to be provided.

 

[Aussiewebmaster]

Marketing to online can get costly with adwords and tracking click thrus. Then you want to figure out conversion rates of those that click through your ads that continue to a prospect. To do that you have heat maps which show you what the prospects are clicking on the most when they get to your site.

If a full time commitment is made to SEO and online marketing, it can be done, with a considerable amount of investment.

Keep in mind social media is free, but requires consistent content to be provided.

The major problem with SEO work today is the numerous different layouts for the SERPs (search engine results pages) - localization and personalization play havoc and the insertion of video, product and news results as well as the new in depth articles spots all require different methods to rank.

Author tags, Google Plus for Business and reviews all impact - have fun with them. And don't forget accurate listings in Google Maps.

 

[joe.pistell]

... Subaru of America strongly recommended that we start using the Display ad campaign through Dealer.com, in 6 months we have had about 2,612,866 impression but our click through rates is only 0,050% which really is quite ridiculous. it sure gets the dealership exposure but in the end is it really worth it ? ...

Alex,

IMO, display ad campaigns are branding campaigns. The concept is to put your name out there and fight with all the other ads in the hope that your name sticks with a few of them (a classical broadcast marketing model). The CTR is pathetic because of banner blindness and lack of context (i.e. I'm on ESPN to see the NFL draft results, not look for a car).

But, there is an attribution stat that may interest you, it's called "viewed thru conversions". The idea is simple. "how many visitors to my site, saw my banner ads?". This is additional visibility into the "branding message reaching shoppers".

In my old position at usedcarking.com, I got my PPC & SEO campaigns running on all cylinders, then, I went upstream to work the display ad universe.

HTH
Joe
p.s. look for "view thru data" to be avail around June/July. Reach out to me anytime.
p.p.s. The industry calls it "viewed thru conversions", IMO, it should be called "viewed thru visits" and from that group you get "viewed thru conversions".

 

[yagoparamo]

I think the discussion shouldn't be "I'm happy I cancelled 3rd party leads" but "I'm happy I found a better ROI by investing in my business". Money needs to move from one resource to another to maintain the number of leads and business.


The problem is that in the past dealers didn't do digital advertising, they just spent money in digital companies that others owned. There has been a lack of creativity in digital like it used to be in the news paper, magazines, bill boards, TV, radio, etc. Dealers thought of unique ways to make the ads stick, in digital we just pay. Most dealers digital creativity is translated into the monthly banners in the front of the website. Dealers were also in general adverse to build content (whether that is videos or text) that they owned to build their own web presence.


This whole dilemma is not new, Jerry Tibeau had a great webinar last year about this and many other vendors have encouraged dealers to invest on organic content, articles, videos, etc but few do. It is actually extremely hard to get dealers to do it. I've been building blogs for dealers Barrier Volvo – Bellevue Volvo Dealer - since 2005 with unique content for $200 and I've nothing but negative reviews from other vendors when I show them, everyone seems to have an opinion on how they should be done but no one else actually does them (they shouldn't have inventory, they should have more community blogs, they shouldn't be make key worded, you shouldn't have links back to the dealer's website, don't use content from the manufacturer because that us duplicate, you need to use better key words , etc). I'm not saying I build the best blogs out there nor that you need a blog as the ultimate content strategy, but it is a good start. If you are not willing to invest $200 in a platform that creates content and that allows your employees to add their own content... we are going to have a hard start.


To Joe's and Manny's previous points and without getting into PPC (because most people already know what PPC is). We have been creating long tail search content for years. See the examples below. Magic Toyota ranks pretty well on those Corolla searches in the city of Everett, you should know that Magic Toyota IS NOT located in Everett. The Toyota dealer in Everett is Rodland Toyota).


'toyota corolla for sale everett' Custom content #1 https://www.google.com/#q=toyota+corolla+for+sale+everett

'toyota corolla everett' Custom content #2 https://www.google.com/#q=toyota+corolla+everett

'2014 toyota corolla everett' Custom content #1 and #2 https://www.google.com/#q=2014+toyota+corolla+everett


Tip: to see how content pages do for the dealership use webmaster tools and not analytics.


Besides the SEO purpose, I like to re-use those pages to build inventory knowledge and resource pages for the dealers like this one, notice that we used Toyota corporate Youtube videos, on there other hand in this case the dealer created their own videos. We decided to add text for indexing to the Toyota Corporate pages but leave the custom videos alone since they are very high quality.


I hope my examples help some of the people here get in the right direction, as I stated before:


1) Don't cancel without an alternative plan
2) SEM alone will not cut it when everyone else gets on it
3) SEO takes time to index and produce, plan ahead
4) Don't forget service and parts!

 

[cmjerry4531]

Google has hard coded the auto dealers out of many SEO results. This is not new, I've tracked this for years, Google allowed one dealer in the top5 and they're always in position 3 or 4 or 5. It was just a few months ago Google pushed dealers down to below 5. Dealers need new SEO tactics (like Manny's video SEO) to counter this horsesh*t.

Hard coded would be the wrong term to use. It is still completely possible for a dealership site to rank for these terms. Ranking is just far more difficult now. Cars.com, Autotrader.com, Cargurus.com, Edmunds.com and many others have invested tons into their SEO. They are getting better links, writing better content and building better websites. For example, Autotrader went and no-indexed a good portion of their inventory, and pushed a greater number of internal links to category level landing pages. They knew that they had hundreds of thousands of pages with duplicate content from having the same exact vehicles as many other websites, and that this could eventually lead to problems.

I've personally only explored two different auto dealerships that were hit by the first Panda, but the fact stands that they were hit. It's not just the duplicate content, it's many other factors within the framework of many websites. Beyond a few top level pages they aren't optimized. Now, hopping off my soapbox and joining the heard, it's just not scalable to provide dealers with exceptional websites at $699/month. It takes money to create unique content for every single one of those websites, and having 15 sites trying to rank for the same term will leave 12 sites being very unhappy. It just doesn't make any sense to get into that game for a vendor serving thousands of dealers.

That's why services like Yago's exist. He can effectively create the content you need at a decent price because he is only serving hundreds (making a big assumption).

Going back to the main point, it's not that they are hard coded out of the search results. The problem is that all these bigger companies are doing it better. Better websites, higher authority, higher brand signals and better content.

Going back to your example "best price on a used Cadillac CTS near Mesa AZ." How often is this searched? Even breaking it apart the only volume I can find are on terms like "Cadillac CTS price" and "price Cadillac CTS." A more common term would be something like "used Cadillac CTS" which has 4400 nationally.

Setting my user stats to Mesa, AZ, and searching for "used Cadillac CTS" I still end up with the big names, with Cargurus.com being #1 and #2 because they have a high level category page optimized for it, and a locally oriented Phoenix page. How many car dealers in that area are optimized for that specific search, probably a handful at best. Combine that with a poor internal linking structure and no external links, and of course a page with a page authority of 10 will not compete against the big boys.

Finding an actual local term, let's consider "Honda Civic Miami." This search term gets searched an estimated 40 times per month. There's probably some buying intent within that search. Going to the SERPs, with my location set to Miami, I have a dealer at the 4th spot. Again, this dealer is not optimized at all for that search, but they have enough authority and relevance to get them to rank.

Point being, I agree that there is a positive correlation of the SERPs being controlled by the big brands. However, we can't ignore the gigantic variable that every one of these companies has done a lot to improve their websites, and have gotten a lot more high quality links over the past few years. You average dealer won't be able to rank for those terms, but a select few can utilize their current authority to at least jump up to the middle of a page.

 

[joe.pistell]

Yago, best post eva'!!

 

[yagoparamo]

Now, hopping off my soapbox and joining the heard, it's just not scalable to provide dealers with exceptional websites at $699/month. It takes money to create unique content for every single one of those websites, and having 15 sites trying to rank for the same term will leave 12 sites being very unhappy. It just doesn't make any sense to get into that game for a vendor serving thousands of dealers.

That's why services like Yago's exist. He can effectively create the content you need at a decent price because he is only serving hundreds (making a big assumption).

Jerry,

Great point.

If you notice the websites that I showed are build by DealerLab.com and the content (text, blogs, etc) is built by ContentMotive.com. The DealerLab.com team has to be concerned with compliance, site performance, inventory feeds, VDP, SRP, video integration, etc. ContentMotive.com team has to be concerned with content uniqueness, bounce rate, index ability, SEO form VS readable, etc.

Creating website platforms for the automotive industry and customer/SEO content are two different things and for that we divided the companies long time ago.

We rarely work with dealers with touching DMAs unless they are huge (like 30-40 miles in between them, which that has happened to us). So while content can't be mass produced there is also a knowledge base learned over the years about what to do, how to do it, etc. Don't buy content from your wife's cousin Bill because he can't find a job and he speaks English.