SusanGivens
marketing solution
HOW TO TELL WHEN YOU’RE PAYING TOO MUCH MONEY FOR CLICKS
Most dealers are aware that relevance in search engine marketing is critical to winning more customers. However, what most dealers don’t know is how to determine if they are paying too much per click. This type of digital media captures consumers where they are. When in-market consumers aren’t in your store visiting, they are online making decisions about the car they’ll buy. For dealers, there are two key components to SEM that will allow you to maximize your investment in this form of marketing: raising quality score and minimizing lost impression share. Raise Quality Score
Google has an unrivaled, front-row spot in the online search market. Consumers turn to Google for everything they do. Google has a dynamic way of showing their appreciation to their pay-perclick advertisers who maximize the relevance and quality of the search results they deliver. This is referred to as Google’s quality score. A common misconception regarding cost per click is that the person willing to bid the highest takes the top spot. In reality, the top spot goes to the listing with the highest ad rank, which is influenced by quality score. Most dealers pay too much for clicks, and they have no idea. “The majority of the quality scores within a campaign should be from 6 to 10.” said Rich DeLancey, vice president of digital advertising for TeamVelocityMarketing.com. According to Google data, Team Velocity spends 94 percent of a customer’s budget on quality scores which Google determines to be rated “Good” to “Great.” “You will naturally have a few results that are in the 0 to 5 range; however, if the majority of your scores are below a 7, this indicates that dealers are not getting the most leads for the least amount of money,” he said. In addition to analyzing your campaign’s most common quality score, you need to analyze where the majority of your budget is spent. Good marketers are able to optimize budgets toward higherperforming campaigns. Google essentially provides a discount to businesses that have SEM campaigns correspond to their Website. In other words, SEM cannot operate independently of a dealer’s Website. Capitalizing on this marriage between PPC ads and Website pages will increase quality scores with Google and will, therefore, decrease your cost per click. For example, if you search “2015 Honda Civic” and an ad appears for Westside Honda that sends you to a page referring to an oil change special, Google rates this quality score low. Here’s why: Google doesn’t like consumers receiving irrelevant search results because that consumer may leave Google and go to a different search engine. Going back to that search phrase, if Eastside Honda’s ad links to a landing page displaying specials for a 2015 Honda Civic with a phone number to call, Google would rate this quality score very high. The “set it and forget it” approach, which involves setting up a PPC campaign and taking little time to observe and maintain it, will cost advertisers more. If a PPC campaign is driven by a bad quality score, that makes leads more expensive and the campaign will reach fewer people. If dealers send every clicker to the front page of their Website, this will generate a higher cost per click. Minimize Lost Impression Share
In addition to maximizing your existing SEM budget, dealers should minimize their lost impression share to avoid missing out on additional phone calls and leads. One common practice to controlling SEM budget is to limit spend in this area. This practice seems sensible, but is not necessarily the best way to utilize advertising dollars. If a dealer realizes that their digital marketing strategy has a positive return on investment, then maximizing spend in this area makes sense. Lost impression share is another formula that can elevate your marketing dollars. It is a simple calculation that indicates how many searches are being performed for your keyword where your ad is being missed because your budget is too low. For example, if your monthly PPC budget is capped at $20,000, this may bring about 400 phone calls and contain a lost impression share of 25 percent. The lost impression share calculation indicates that spending 25 percent more money each month will generate approximately 100 more phone calls and, similarly, more clicks, leads and other traffic. Successful dealerships see the value in capturing all customers who are shopping outside of your dealership, instead of a percentage of them. If demand is greater than what your digital budget is offering, a small increase in spend means more opportunities for leads. Susan Givens is the publisher of AutoSuccess. She can be contacted at 877.818.6620, or by email at sgivens1@autosuccessonline.com.
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