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I’ve read from a few sources in the last week that industry insiders believe that car dealers are investing heavily in Google adwords, because of this Key words are achieving high prices and car dealers are effectively bidding each other up.
Adwords is an advertising program on google where you effectively buy “keywords” ie the search terms that get entered into the search box. If you pay the right price for the right words then your company will pop up in front of peoples screens when they perform a search. You buy these keywords by bidding. It’s a closed auction where you set your budget and your price, and everytime one of your links is clicked Google debit your account. In its simplest form you can set a budget of say £100.00 and offer to pay 5p for the adword “golf” you log into your account later and find that you still have £100.00 and no clicks. This is because a couple of thousand others had the same idea as you, only they were not so cheap, therefore they got ranked up high and got traffic. The next day you might decide to offer £2 for the same word and find that you were the highest rank but your £100 credit was burned out in two minutes flat. And just because the traffic was driven to your site it does not mean they converted into sales, it’s up to you to have a killer site with a fantastic offer running thats going to get sales.
Now I am involved in a number of web companies and adwords is an intrinsic part of the business but its a very complicated system to play correctly. The example I gave above is just a starter view, in the real world if you wanted to have a succesful adwords campaign you would be bidding on hundreds of keywords, you would be studying the analytics to see which words you would be dropping,refining or raising and lowering your bid price.
Now in my experience of motor dealers and their IT skills, they come in several stages.
Stage 1: Is aware of the Internet, Knows that its an invaluable source of cat videos and teenage skateboarders losing their ability to reproduce in the future.
Stage 2:Is Using the Internet, advertises on-line with a 4 page Autotrader template which they kindly update for him every monday.
Stage 3: Has a pro website that is updated regularly, possibly outsources coding and graphics to a web company but is capable of rotating/adding stock to the system in-house.
Stage 4: Fully Automated Web enabled dealership, All design and architecture of the site is in-house or from a central station. Salespeople available online,shopping cart for parts and accessories all online.
I can Elaborate on those models further but as you can see It is really only very large multinationals or Supermarkets that would have the benefit of investing in adwords and as these companies invest so much money in Marketing in the first place that A: google adwords would be a small part of their programme and B: with such heavy investment in search engine optimisation and blanket advertising across available media you are going to pop up on search engines anyway.
Now if I had a particularly specialised niche in the industry, say for example I supplied hoods for MX5′s and nothing else, It might be in my interest to have a little adword account looking for the search term “mx5 hood” but even if that was working out too expensive to get into I would reduce it down to ” roadster+hood+south+west” this might bring me down the sort of money I want to pay and get me a few hits.
I am certain that the industry is using adwords but by the Industry, I mean from manufacturers to advertising groups down to car supermarkets.I cannot see how it would be an effective media plan for a common or garden car dealer. If there are any car dealers out there that are using this technique I would love to hear from you (in confidence) so that we can have a better analysis and run a further feature
Thanking you
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