Automotive Internet Media

Archives for May 2020

Did Your Dealership Pause Your Ad Campaigns?

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Dealership Must Seize the Marketplace Opportunity

Dealership Must Seize the Marketplace Opportunity

As many dealerships scale back, it’s time for aggressive dealerships to seize the opportunity.

For those of you in retail automotive marketing, you have likely seen ad budgets paused or dramatically reduced. Having been on every side of the automotive industry, these moves don’t surprise me.

For savvy dealerships it’s time to quickly act in order to take advantage of dealers in your market that may not be as visible online in the current state of affairs. It reminds me of one of my favorite sayings in advertising.

“A man who stops advertising to save money, is like a man who stops the clock to save time.”  Henry Ford

I’m painfully aware that when things get tight for dealerships, one of the first things the management is tempted to cut is the advertising. It’s like a survival tactic that kicks in and all they want to do is shore up resources to make it to the other side. I understand, but it’s important not make the mistake of sabotaging your short- and long-term success.

When dealerships advertise, in addition to generating immediate sales, they bolster consumer confidence in the future of their business. Consumer confidence builds market share. Market share leads to profit. Those that continue to advertise in tougher or slower times will actually gain a bigger piece of the pie when business starts back on the upswing…leaving their competitors (who cut way back on their advertising efforts) cleaning up the crumbs at the bottom of the pie tin.

Adjust Your Marketing Strategy

Perhaps the most powerful way to keep generating sales is to rethink your marketing strategy. Maybe it’s time to stop spending on expensive ads and rethink where you’re putting your marketing efforts.

It’s time to move to CarClicks Inventory Marketing to drive high quality traffic to your website while lowering your overall advertising costs. The CarClicks platform is easy to use and an excellent way to promote your inventory to shoppers that are most likely to purchase them. It’s time to reboot and restart the momentum to seize the sales opportunity in your market.

Hotter Than Search

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What's the Marketing Platform Hotter Than Paid Search?

Platform Hotter Than Paid Search

What's the Marketing Platform Hotter Than Paid Search?

Platform Hotter Than Paid Search

A Proven Marketing Platform 

For eight years, savvy and forward-thinking dealers have relied on CarClicks Inventory Marketing programs to deliver serious, highly engaged auto shoppers to their dealership.

A CarClicks strategy creates an integrated and cohesive approach to inventory marketing. We seamlessly promote your inventory to auto shoppers across multiple channels, while factoring in the different devices that auto shoppers are using to shop for your inventory. It’s all about driving the auto shopper to your website!

Lower Your Marketing Cost

As dealers and managers struggle to offset the reduction in gross profit, marketing costs have come under intense scrutiny. For many dealerships, reducing the customer acquisition cost is a smart way forward to improving margins. Unfortunately, the cost of one of the most popular marketing tools available to dealerships continue to rise.

Surges in search engine marketing costs, especially in Google, are burning holes in dealerships budgets. Pay per click (PPC) advertising has become standard for most dealers and often consumes a large part of a dealership’s advertising expense.

It varies by market, but dealers in metro markets are paying over $10 per click for keywords like “Chevy Equinox” and “Ford Explorer”. Their “average” cost per click (CPC) is lower because PPC companies offset the high click costs by buying the dealership name and less expensive keywords like the OEM brand and city of the dealership. Inventory keywords continue to increase because there are so many companies bidding for your customer. Try searching “cars for sale” and you find companies like Autotrader.com, Cars.com, CarGurus.com and others in your market bidding up the keywords. It’s no wonder that I recently saw a Ford dealer pay $17.65 a click for the “Ford Escape” keyword (which had a 100% bounce rate).

Why do dealerships leverage pay per click advertising? Because they believe they are reaching the people they need to reach and when they want to reach them.

What if dealers can reach those same people for a third of the cost? Wouldn’t that be savvy?

Using good judgement, practical knowledge of your options and most importantly data when managing your advertising budget is important to get optimal results.
It’s no secret that good operators are leveraging CarClicks Inventory Marketing Products to get lower their advertising costs while increasing the number of auto shoppers to their website.

Premium “Omni-Channel” Network

CarClicks has created a Premium “Omni-Channel” Network that promotes a dealership’s inventory with priority within our network of 3rd party automotive sites, premium publishers, search engines, social sites…everywhere.

A CarClicks strategy creates an integrated and cohesive approach to inventory marketing. We seamlessly promote your inventory to auto shoppers across multiple channels, while factoring in the different devices that auto shoppers are using to shop for your inventory.

Our fully integrated approach provides dealerships an effective and efficient way to market their inventory across multiple devices and touchpoints within the CarClicks automotive advertising ecosystem.  to deliver high quality traffic to the dealership websites.

The main function of the product is to promote vehicles to auto shoppers that are most likely to purchase them.

The linchpin of CarClicks success

Not all internet traffic is created equal. Both quantity and quality of traffic are important for high-performing dealerships. High quantities of traffic mean brand awareness and online visibility. High-quality traffic, however, can mean a higher ratio of conversions and vehicle sales.

Providing high quality traffic is the most notable CarClicks’ feature because that’s what gets you customers and sells cars.

Being smart with data is how the CarClicks team produces great results. We found that the effective use of machine learning, coupled with expert team members​ optimizing campaigns, is what sets CarClicks apart from competitors. Our custom software program provides actionable insights for making real-time adjustments to ensure our campaigns produce the best return on investment for our clients.

Diversifying and activating CarClicks

Just as marketing channels like paid search have established themselves as valuable customer acquisition channels, CarClicks Inventory Marketing Platform is doing the same for growth-oriented dealerships.

Well-run marketing teams know that there are options for reaching people and acquiring new customers. Dealers can choose marketing models that best align with their business and acquisition strategy.

By diversifying and adding CarClicks to your marketing strategy, dealerships will have more highly engaged auto shoppers on their websites, lower their marketing costs and create more sustainable sales opportunities.

​About CarClicks

CarClicks Inventory Marketing products provides dealerships an integrated solution for marketing their inventory to serious, highly engaged auto shoppers that are most likely to purchase them. ​

To learn more about our proven platform – sales@aimyes.com or 312-473-0024

CarClicks Comparative Case Study

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CarClicks 
Challenge

Inventory Marketing 
Comparative Case Study

A Midwest auto dealer needed to increase the number of in-market auto shoppers to their website to help them sell more vehicles.

Their Challenge?

Getting the right shoppers that are interested in their brand and inventory.

Companies

How a Midwest auto dealer compared two inventory marketing companies to drive more traffic to their website to help them sell more vehicles.

 

CarClicks promotes dealership inventory
to auto shoppers that are most likely to purchase them.

A CarClicks strategy creates an integrated and cohesive approach to inventory marketing.
We seamlessly promote dealership inventory to auto shoppers across multiple channels, while factoring in thedifferent devices that auto shoppers are using to shop for your inventory. It’s all about driving the auto shopper to the inventory on the website!

LotLinx Inventory Marketing Platform provides several channels to merchandise inventory at the VIN level.

These channels include third party inventory listings sites, ad placement on key consumer sites, Facebook, SEM and retargeting.

Over the past few years, dealerships have moved a significant part of their advertising budget to digital marketing. It is critical to properly measure the returns on investments spent on digital. Google Analytics offers the dealership the medium to do so.

Google Analytics have features to collect click-stream data and processing and presenting the website data as meaningful information to help dealers and managers make informed decisions.
As most dealerships aim to outperform their competitors, website analytics helps them proactively optimize their ad spend to ensure they are getting the best returns.

This case study is a good way for dealerships to understand the basics of Google Analytics and provide them guidelines to facilitate the informed decision making in using technology to improve the sales and marketing function of their dealership.

Both companies were given the same ad budget for one month
to drive traffic to the website by promoting the dealership inventory within their ad networks. Getting auto shoppers to the website is an important part of any dealership’s marketing strategy.

The goal was to determine which product, CarClicks or LotLinx produced better results.

The results indicate that CarClicks is the best choice.

CarClicks drove twice as many auto shoppers to the site, their shoppers were more engaged, and conversion was more than double. The data made clear that CarClicks is the leader in driving VIN-specific in-market shoppers to the dealership’s websites.