All Dealers and Internet Sales Managers want to grow their business and few will argue that the path to growth in dealerships today will come from new customers searching the Internet. Of course you want to nurture your existing customer base with thoughtful newsletters to keep your name in mind and make them aware of new specials, but the real growth comes from new customers. However, finding new customers can be difficult and expensive. So how do you find new customers interested in your vehicles without a significant investment?

One option is to take the traditional route, newspapers, radio, TV, Yellow Pages, or search engines such as Google® or Yahoo!®. A quicker and more cost-effective approach is Pay Per Click advertising. Integrating PPC into your dealership marketing plan can quickly and economically grow your dealership.

What Is Pay Per Click?

Pay-Per-Click, or PPC as it is commonly referred to, is advertising on search engines, advertising networks, and content web sites or blogs, where the dealer pays only when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit your dealer web site.

Pay Per Click advertising is a form of search engine marketing or SEM that requires your bidding on the keywords you expect your target market to use as search terms when looking for your brand or service. Using this technique, you pay to have your site appear in the “sponsored listings” section of search engines like Google® or Yahoo!®. You pay each time the visitor clicks on your ad, hence the name “Pay Per Click.”

Why Pay Per Click?

PPC is a powerful tool for improving your web site's presence and building your customer base. No Internet Sales Manager needs to be convinced that yellow pages ads are not as effective as online advertising and many dealerships have dropped yellow pages all together. A study by Piper Jaffray & Co. entitled, “The New eCommerce Decade: The Age of Micro Targeting,” showed the average Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) for search was $8.50, less than half the CPA for yellow pages at $20. Using online advertising techniques, like Pay Per Click, is an effective way to drive more targeted leads to your web site from Internet search engines.

PPC should be only part of a larger online marketing plan that includes several ways to increase the visibility of your Web site and drive more traffic to your dealership.

How does PPC differ from other online marketing efforts like SEO?

Pay Per Click advertising involves buying keywords you believe your prospects will use to find your brand. PPC is a fast-acting strategy that will yield increased traffic in less than a month.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), on the other hand, is the process of optimizing your Web site to receive traffic from natural search results. "Natural" or "organic" results are non-paid results the search engine believes is the best match to the query.

SEO involves adding content and keywords to your Web site and increasing links to other sites increase the number of times your site appears in search engines like Google® and Yahoo!®. Search engine optimization is an ongoing process that can take six months or more to bring increased traffic to your site.

SEO requires you to keep your web site’s content fresh to entice search engines to visit often. It requires you to adjust your approach to bring new visitors to your site through testing. The best way to keep your site interesting for users and search engines is to update your Web content often with keyword-dense articles, while acquiring links from web sites in your industry. SEO is a long term strategy that takes planning and significant commitment. This is problematic in the sale of cars, trucks, motorcycles, boats and so on because the bulk of our sites are generally pictures of what we sell and not a series of articles that can be content rich.

Pay Per Click offers a quick and effective way to increase hits on the first day your sponsored ad appears. So the best long-term strategy for promoting your dealership web site may be to use both paid and organic results. This way, you’ll see the quick results from the paid search campaigns while you wait for your search engine optimization results to grow. Make no mistake however. PPC is not a replacement for SEO and to approach it as such would be outrageously expensive, but over time you can continue to supplement your SEO with Pay Per Click campaigns as needed. Using PPC and SEO together may offer maximum results without great expense – the ultimate combination desired by every dealer.

Pay Per Click Advertising Pros and Cons

One of the major benefits of PPC is that it is operational within minutes of setup. You actually drive traffic to your dealership web site in the same hour that you open a PPC account – it’s that fast! Another benefit is that you pay only when someone clicks on your ad – you don’t pay per impression like most traditional forms of advertising. Here’s a quick rundown of the pros and cons of PPC:

PPC Pros
  • Calculation – PPC is easily measured. The dealer principal, GM, or ISM can get raw numbers within seconds. Return on investment (ROI) and cost per acquisition (CPA) are easier to calculate than traditional print and broadcast advertising.
  • Cost – You only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
  • Speed – Everything about PPC is quick. Your dealership can have a PPC campaign running in less than a day.
  • Timing – You can set up your ads to only run when you want them to.
  • Targeted – You can easily tap your target audience by using the proper keywords and ad copy.

PPC Cons
  • Expense – A PPC campaign can be expensive, even when it's monitored correctly.
  • Click Fraud – There is always the risk of getting unethical clicks.
  • Learning Curve – It takes time to optimize for the keywords that convert users to customers.

Should you pay someone to manage your PPC campaigns?

Pay Per Click advertising campaigns require management and oversight to maximize your return on investment. While the first inclination might be to have your Internet Sales Manager take on the responsibility, your dealership may benefit by hiring an employee to monitor the campaign on a daily basis. While this is manageable for some multi-point dealerships, others do not have the resources. Hiring an outside firm to oversee the campaign will allow you to utilize experts without increasing your overhead, but bear in mind that the outside firm needs to be managed too.

The two main benefits of having an outside company manage your PPC campaign is the time savings and potential results. They should oversee results on a daily basis, but be aware that many firms monitor your campaigns once a week for testing, oversight, and adjustments. Others manage your campaign using the set-it-and-forget-it philosophy focusing on generating new business instead.

What should you expect from a PPC provider?

The outside firm needs to be able to take care of all the details of your campaign so you can focus on selling vehicles. Investing the time and money to hire an outside firm should yield better results, but selecting a professional for the management of your Pay Per Click campaign can be daunting. After all, they are spending your money.

While optimizing online marketing results is truly an exercise in trial and error, following these guidelines might help make your decision simpler and possibly lead to a better outcome:
  1. Hire PPC account managers that are Google® certified.
  2. Insist on continuous testing and evaluation of your PPC ads to ensure you continue to improve click rates over time.
  3. Demand references and concrete examples of successful campaigns they have managed.
  4. Investigate their ability to generate more business for your dealership from multiple sources including targeted clicks, telephones calls, emails, and form submissions.
  5. An outside firm should be able to tell you which sources of traffic convert the most visitors into consumers, so when evaluating providers ask them if they have a multi-dimensional plan for your PPC campaign – more than just targeted clicks.
  6. They should provide all oversight for the campaign to protect against unnecessary expenses and even click fraud.
  7. Finally, make sure your provider has strong reporting tools so you can track the progress and success of your campaign. They should be able to customize these reports to fit your dealership’s needs.
Summary

Dealerships can’t afford to ignore new and profitable ways to sell more vehicles. Pay Per Click is a simple, cost-effective and quickly implemented strategy that can provide growth for your dealership when you need it. It does not take months or years to implement, doesn’t require in-house expertise or incur enormous overhead. A Pay Per Click campaign, when managed correctly, offers a winning strategy for any online marketing plan.