The figures (not just in the car trade) are being manipulated such that we are getting good and bad news concurrently from the same batch of numbers, with figures being down 5.2% of this, against 2.3% of that which equals a 7% gross ?  Frankly you are getting more sense out of the gross output of goat cheese from Uzbekistan. The facts are we are deep in a recession, money may be cheaper to borrow but it is more difficult to get. The knock on of this is finance deals that would have gone through unnoticed two years ago are getting kicked back. This is what’s keeping fresh used car prices up.

Companies have seen their car spend tip the balance, and they are now chasing lower to run, lower to tax, easier to fuel  low co2 cars as the major factors in their fleet purchasing decision process. This ultimately will be tomorrow’s expensive used car. The same effect is apparent with retail consumers struggling with fuel and running costs.  The only real winner in new car sales has to be contract lease companies,  and if you look at the top ten new car sold in May it is the usual perennials of the leasing industry  Fords, Vauxhalls and Volkswagens . The Nissan quashqai made it into the top ten but again it is available with good finance options and appears to be holding its value with launch models only now dipping below 10K  (this is from a man that once bought a murano!!).  Thankfully I placed £200 with Betfred for a twelve month slide in new car sales at 25/1  last year so one more month and I’m quids in !  I didn’t really, but until all this cheap money in the pot starts to get spent and the government can offer consumers the assurance to drop into their savings,  the figure will continue to slide for another while yet.

© 2011, MD. All rights reserved.

BCA currently runs European auction centres in Spain(4 Centres),Sweden(1),Portugal(3),Nederlands(1),Italy(1),Germany(8),France(3),Denmark(1), Belgium(1),Austria(1) Although it is telling that almost 80% of its 4 billion per year turnover comes from Its base in the U.K. Of its French operations Bonneuil remains the busiest, running auctions on Mondays and Tuesday with a Premium sale taking place twice monthly  on a Thursday. Lyon runs every Wednesday and Saturday and for the moment Nimes is scheduled for Tuesdays only. A visitor from the U.K would struggle to come to terms with amount of stock available, with European auctions regularly only fielding 50-80 units, however Closed Internet sales are proving popular with the bigger dealers. The tax free export sale in Barneveld in the Nederlands is targeted for and busy with Export buyers from eastern Europe. We are saving up for a trip abroad to see if we can find out more about the attitude amongst the trade in Europe. If anyone can update us with any first hand news for any European Auctions and save us a trip we would love to hear from you.

© 2011, MD. All rights reserved.

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

© 2011, MD. All rights reserved.