Auto Dealer PPC Agency

What is PPC Management for Car Dealerships?

Auto Dealer paid ads management consists of creating and optimizing paid advertisement campaigns for car dealerships. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let's dive a little deeper.

To provide expert PPC ads management, a paid advertising agency for auto dealers should get to know you and your goals. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach paid advertising for a localized car dealership is much different from how you'd handle it for nationwide auto dealer ecommerce site.

Local car dealerships, for example, are often only searching for contact form submissions or calls. To accomplish this, paid advertising can drive traffic to a landing page or sales funnel that is optimized. We recommend Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those pages/funnels don't exist or need to be reworked.

In contrast, ecommerce-focused car dealerships are most likely to be interested in online sales. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that gets traffic to an optimized product page or category page. You might even want to include Google Shopping Campaigns in some cases. We've even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.

To optimize and scale auto dealer PPC campaigns, it's important to understand what metrics will be used. For some car dealerships, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

To be successful with paid ads, your car dealership should utilize multiple advertising tactics and marketing tools. Pay-per-click campaigns for auto dealers should include plans like:

• Promote your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc.) via search engines, social media channels, and third parties.
• Make money online or through qualified leads for your car dealership.
• Utilize third-party attribution software to better understand ad attribution.
• Showcase social proof through case studies, white papers, video testimonials, and other factors.
• Engage users in story creation, email collection, and user generated content.
• Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.

Tips for Managing Paid Ads for Auto Dealers

Our team of paid ads experts is knowledgeable in the latest paid ads trends for auto dealers and other industries.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

In the context of paid advertising, you'll find keyword research for auto dealers mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, Bing and Google only show ads based on what people search for that your car dealership is targeting.

A search for "nearby auto dealer" on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a car dealership website in their area. It wouldn't be necessary to conduct extensive keyword research to target that exact phrase.

However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the car dealership needs to expand their advertising reach? The solution would require keyword research.

After discussing options, the next step might involve the paid ads manager talking with the car dealership about what products / services they want to target more often and where. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.

Suppose the PPC manager discovers that there is high traffic volume for "nearby car dealerships" or even "auto dealer services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. In the second phrase, a service is being targeted, which might result in a more lucrative conversion opportunity.

You can also benefit from keyword research when building out negative keyword lists. You can use negative keywords to prevent your paid advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more customers.

For example, an individual searching for "free services from car dealerships" or "when to advertise to auto dealers" is unlikely to convert. Your paid advertising may appear if you use broad keyword targeting without negative keywords such as "free" or "advertise".

Even if your keyword research needs are obvious when you start building out your campaign, they become more complex as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

2.) Audience Research Tips

Audience research is often mentioned as part of scaling social media ads on Facebook and Instagram for auto dealer paid advertising campaigns. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

In years past, auto dealer-focused PPC advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most attractive features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers for car dealerships eagerly took advantage of.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

In the iOS 14.5 update, Apple included a pop-up message that allowed users to opt out of tracking for personalized ads. The change negatively affected Facebook's ability to track user behavior. Even ad attribution reporting was affected.

Following that, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most advertising agencies for auto dealers. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.

Although many car dealership paid advertising firms still rely on custom audiences, the trend is shifting toward broad targeting. You can see it in every update within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

Interested in another take on audience targeting? Social Media Examiner's blog article does a good job of explaining recent changes.

This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. The targeting options within auto dealer ad campaigns will likely always be manageable to boost performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

It is important to focus on a high quality landing page when running paid advertisements for auto dealers.

Let's begin by examining the landing pages for your car dealership to make sure they follow best practices. Our review takes into account the following factors:

• Does the headline focus on benefits?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Does the content engage the reader?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Can you easily identify the call to action?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is social proof present?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

Quality landing pages are the result of many factors. Here is a great write-up about what makes a high converting landing page.

Until you have a landing page that follows best practices, don't spend money on paid advertising. If you want to create an effective landing page, you should never consider it finished. You can refine your sales pitch by running A/B tests on the landing page every few months.

4.) Sales Funnel Tips

Rather than a landing page, you might want to consider building out a sales funnel. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their digital marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your car dealership isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) Conversion Optimization Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your site.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in PPC advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most car dealerships, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising firm to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your PPC advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for auto dealers, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out good looking ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a good ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Pricing for Car Dealership PPC Management

If you want us to dedicate more time to your campaigns, the price of our PPC management services will be adjusted accordingly. Our PPC management packages start at the price listed below, however, we are open to discussing an increased budget if your ad spend or service requirements are higher.

Types of Paid Ads for Car Dealerships

For car dealerships, there are many ways to run paid advertising. Let's discuss some of the most common PPC advertising being run for car dealerships.

1.) Local Advertising

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run local area ads for your car dealership. One platform may be more effective for your local car dealership than another. To find out which option works best for you, you should try all of the options available. Now let's discuss some localized advertising options.

Google is going to offer two options.

The first is to run traditional Google Ads, potentially using their newer campaign type of Performance Max. The Google algorithm finds the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you local customers using this type of dynamic ad campaign. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.

Google's second option for qualifying businesses is their Local Service Ads. The Google Local Service Ads offers a pay-per-lead model, which means you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform provides you. Home service contractors, such as plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers, frequently use Google Local Service Ads.

You can also use Facebook Ads to target people in your local area. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. Local Facebook Ads are often used by car dealerships of all types.

2.) Social Ads

A social media ad is pretty much any online advertisement you see on a social networking site.

The trick to social media ads is keeping the ad creatives fresh. The performance of your campaign will gradually decline if you do not rotate your ad creatives every couple of weeks. For higher spending ad campaigns, you might need to look at weekly ad creative changes.

One of the best things about social media marketing is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. When running search engine marketing, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively looking for what your car dealership offers.

However, this benefit can also be a curse, since conversion rates are typically lower when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Engine Ads

You'll want to invest in search advertising if you know people are searching online for the products you offer.

In some circles, this is referred to as car dealership Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. There are different ways to explain search ads (not to be confused with SEO), which are advertisements displayed on search engines' search results pages.

You might consider copying your Google Ads campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform if you've had success with Google Ads. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local news stations), gossip websites, and more.

Bing Ads and Google Ads both offer these.

To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image sizes. Both ad platforms have algorithms that help you get results from your ad spend if you have an understanding of your target audience.

5.) Retargeting Ads

There is a good chance that not everyone will convert during their first experience with your car dealership website, landing page, or sales funnel.

To help people return to your site after they've thought through various options, retargeting ads are almost always recommended.

You can run retargeting ads on Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and many other platforms.

6.) Shopping Ads

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

If you want to promote your car dealership through Google Shopping, you'll need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), and a Google Merchant Center account.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. Using that information, they can determine what types of search queries to display your products at the top of search results.

7.) Video Ads

Social networking websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram allow you to advertise with video.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

Facebook Ads is required if you want to run video ads on Facebook or Instagram.

Video is an excellent ad creative in terms of conversion opportunities. It's not unusual for us to use video ads for product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

Your car dealership PPC advertising campaigns should definitely incorporate video creatives if you have the budget to support them.