The pay-per-click (PPC) world can be a dangerous place if you don’t know what you’re doing. It requires a level of knowledge to ensure your account is set up correctly, as well as dedicated time to monitor and ensure it is running effectively and delivering return on investment (ROI).
Check out our 8 fantastic PPC tips to help your campaign deliver the best results for your car dealership. Or, if you don’t fancy carrying these tasks out yourself, why not let us do it for you? Contact us to see exactly how we can help you drive targeted leads directly to your website using Google.
PPC top tips to rocket you to success
1. Structure your account properly
When setting up your PPC account getting the structure right isn’t rocket science, but it’s something so many people get wrong. When setting up Adwords accounts for our clients we like to stick to the KISS rule – Keep It Simple, Stupid.
As a car dealer and service centre you may have a few areas of your business you want to push, such as:
- New cars
Within this campaign you might split ad groups into the different models/makes of new car you wish to push - Used cars
Again, this could be broken further down into the different models/makes of used cars - Used car finance
- Servicing
These areas, which are likely to have their own areas on your website, will dictate the structure of your campaigns. Google themselves recommend that the structure of your Adwords should be built around a narrow theme.
Pick a narrow theme and create ad groups around that theme. For each ad group, use keywords related to that theme.
Setting up your campaigns in this way will mean you can really quickly and easily see which areas are performing well and which aren’t, making it easier to make any changes in the future.
2. Set your location targeting
As a car dealership your most important and relevant audience is going to be in the area surrounding your dealership. So it’s really important that, when setting up your PPC campaign, you set your location targeting options up correctly. Leaving it could mean you end up spending a huge chunk of your budget for clicks on your adverts from all over the country, when really you just want to appear for users searching in your county or city.
3. Create strong ads
People have short attention spans and are looking for instant gratification. Recent research shows that today we have an attention span of eight seconds – which is less than a goldfish. So you have eight seconds for your ad to speak to a user before they click somewhere else, this means your ads need to stand out above your competitors and grab the attention of a user.
To make sure you are nailing your adverts test out several different ads when you first start a new campaign. See which of these works the best for you, then test more. PPC involves constantly trying new things to ensure you are maximising the performance of your ads.
4. Use appropriate landing pages
Your adverts need to provide the user with the smoothest journey possible. This means making sure your landing page, the page you send a user to from your advert, matches the content on your advert. For example, if you create an advert which talks about the amazing range of used Ford cars you have for sale, then the page you send your users to should be one which lists the used Ford cars you have in stock rather than a general page which lists all of your used cars.
If Google feels your landing page isn’t relevant to the search you could end up paying more for your ad to appear. This is because Google decides what adverts to show according to their Quality Score, which is based on click-through rate (CTR), the relevance of your ad and keywords, and landing page experience. If your landing page isn’t up to scratch then your quality score is likely to be negatively impacted, which means you could end up paying more for a click than your competitors, but not appear above them. Read our beginner’s guide to PPC to find out why this happens.
5. Don’t pay for irrelevant clicks
If you haven’t discovered the negative keywords tool in Adwords then you could be paying for clicks that will never convert. For example if your dealership only sells used Fiat cars, but your ads are just optimised for the term ‘fiat cars’, then you could be appearing for users looking for ‘new fiat cars’. They are not going to find what they are looking for on your website, which is a wasted click and wasted budget.
By adding a term as a negative keyword you are telling Google not to show your ads when a user searches for that particular term. Meaning you can spend your budget on terms which are more likely to send converting users to your website.
6. Monitor keywords using search term reports
The key to a successful PPC campaign is constant monitoring, this includes your keywords. Simply picking a set of keywords to start your campaign with and leaving them is not going to help your campaign grow or continue to deliver good results.
You should be regularly checking your search term reports to identify any new opportunities, allowing your campaign to grow beyond your initial research and deliver further ROI, or spot any keywords which should be added to your negative keyword list (see point 5 above). The task of monitoring your keywords will be never ending, but this work will ensure you have a campaign which is delivering results without wasting valuable budget.
7. Use site links to your advantage
Site links are a great addition to your standard Adwords search campaigns. As you can see from the example below, adding site extensions to your search campaigns means you can highlight other pages within your site which you believe a user may find interesting or relative to their search. So instead of one link on your ad there is the potential for five links to appear within your one ad.
As a car dealership you could add sitelinks to your used car listings, your finance or part exchange pages and your contact page. By highlighting several key areas on your website to a user they now know they can browse your range of cars online, there is the option to buy on finance and part exchange their vehicle, and gives them a quick link so they can find a phone number or your address to pay a visit to your showroom in person. Best of all ads with sitelink extensions tend to see a higher CTR of up to 20% over standard search ads without sitelinks.
STAT: Adding sitelinks boosts the average click through rate on an ad by 10-20%.
As a car dealership you could add sitelinks to your used car listings, your finance or part exchange pages and your contact page. By highlighting several key areas on your website to a user they now know they can browse your range of cars online, there is the option to buy on finance and part exchange their vehicle, and gives them a quick link so they can find a phone number or your address to pay a visit to your showroom in person. Best of all ads with sitelink extensions tend to see a higher CTR of up to 20% over standard search ads without sitelinks.
You should be using your callout extensions to your advantage and highlighting your offers or anything that makes you different from your competitors here. Do you offer no deposit finance deals? Use a callout extension. Do you offer free warranty on your vehicles? Use a callout extension. Do you offer test drives at the weekend? Use a callout extension. You get the gist. These work so well at attracting clicks, increasing an ads CTR by as much as 32% in some instances.
That’s nearly all from us, but one more thing…
We hope that these tips will help any of you who decide to make the most of Pay Per Click advertising. It’s a fantastic, measurable marketing method that we feel all car dealers with a web presence should be utilising. As we mentioned previously we actually have an affordable PPC Package available to our dealers, allowing you to leave all of your PPC efforts in the hands of our experts. If you want more information be sure to contact us for help.