Search Engine Marketing (PPC)

A recent study by Marin, “State of Mobile Search Advertising in the US“, shows that the percent of paid-search clicks from mobile devices is growing faster than expected, and if the trend continues, is expected to account for 25% of all paid-search clicks by Google by the end of the year.  This includes not only mobile phones but also tablet computers.

This is just another reason why your dealership needs to include Mobile Ads as a part of your PPC campaigns.  These ads can run in conjunction with your traditional PPC ads, but the copy, images, and even landing pages (which are a requirement) are designed and targeted towards users seeing your ads on mobile devices.  According to Google, customers that utilize mobile-only PPC ads can increase click-through rates by 11.5%.

While the percentage of mobile clicks continues to increase, the conversion rate is not as high as desktop PPC traffic.  However, the study focuses on traditional “conversion” and “leads” – online form submissions or online purchases.  Mobile searchers are on the go, so it’s likely that the traditional conversions are not relevant for these consumers.  Instead of submitting a lead online, they are calling the business, or coming into the dealership or store.  In fact, brick-and-mortar stores that have ecommerce websites (so that they can conduct actual click-to-sale transactions online from their paid search advertising) receive $6 worth of OFFLINE, IN-STORE sales from their paid search spending for every $1 they receive in click-to-sale revenue online.  I can only imagine that this ratio would be higher than 600% when mobile PPC ads are taken into consideration.

Mobile usage, search, and pay-per-click are continuing to grow at extremely high rates.  Make sure your dealership’s online marketing campaigns are prepared and that your auto dealer website customers can find your dealership when and how they choose to do so.

For those out that use Google AdWords for your auto dealer website, this is big news.  After some testing in foreign markets, Google has announced that they are changing the algorithm used to determine the Quality Score of PPC ads to give landing page quality more weight.

According to Jonathan Alferness, director of product management on Google’s ad quality team, Google wants their advertisers to focus on relevance and “choose a landing page…that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re targeting and also a good experience for end users.”

This algorithm change will “result in better quality experience for the users” and those ads with a high quality, relevant landing page will get a “strong boost” upward in the auction.

Now more than ever, your dealership can’t afford to ignore where you’re sending your PPC traffic.  Having a webpage that uses relevant keywords and gives users the content and experience that they are expecting from clicking on your ad will reduce the cost per click your dealership is paying.

Do you know where you’re sending your PPC traffic?

I’ve been seeing the Google +1 button appearing on more and more websites since it was released a few months ago.  Recently, I’ve even seen it as an option for paid search ads.

If I perform a search while signed into my Google account, the +1 button appears as a part of the actual PPC ad.

This seems to be the exact same thing as giving users the ability to “Like” an ad in Facebook.  However, Facebook is built around the idea of social sharing.  You would “Like” an ad because of the brand or product it represents, knowing that your friends will see that you are a fan.  It seems like a shortcut of sorts for Facebook users wanting to share that they “like” something without having to leave the page they are on and track down the actual business page.

I’m not sure if many people use Google’s search engine in the same way.  Personally, I use it to find information, not to recommend a company/brand/product to my social circle.  If I were to click the +1 next to a PPC ad, my Google contacts would see that notation if they performed a similar search while also signed in.  Also, Google will show the +1 when the clickthrough URL for the ad matches a website that one of your friends has “+1”’ed.

Google makes it clear that the +1 button does have an impact on your organic rankings, regardless of whether they come from a PPC ad or your organic listing.  As long as the URL of your PPC ad matches the URL of the organic listing, +1’s will show on both results.  The company also notes that while +1’s will affect your organic search ranking, they will not change Quality Score or ad ranking.  However, the most important component of Quality Score is Click-Through Rate (CTR) and I suspect that the primary reason that Google is testing this functionality in PPC ads is that they believe (as I do) that when a user sees a +1 from a trusted source, they will be more likely to click on the ad—increasing CTR, Quality Score, and Google’s ad revenue.

What do you think?  Is Google trying to make +1 just like the Facebook Like button, or is there real value/usage for people clicking the +1 button on a PPC ad?

One of the SEO sites that I frequently read (www.searchengineland.com) has a VERY interesting post by a  reader, LebSEO Design’s Wissam Dandan.  He has found examples of Google Adwords ads appearing at the bottom of the page for some searches.

No one on our search team at DealerOn has come across these examples yet, and  judging by the information I’ve seen on other SEO industry blogs, it’s a fairly limited test, since not many searchers are.

This could have interesting implications to PPC buys if Google decides to keep this test as a permanent feature.  I haven’t seen anything about how Google would report on the placement for ads that run at the bottom of a results page.

This could be a positive for dealers using PPC as a marketing strategy. If your ads were previously being pushed to page 2, they may now be on the bottom of page 1.

I wonder how Google will incorporate these ad positions into their “Position Preference” targeting.    It is entirely possible that ads would be more effective on a Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) basis when they’re at the bottom of the page.  Potentially you could target your campaigns to reach users that had scrolled through the organic results to the bottom of the page, most likely not finding what they were looking for.  This could be very interesting and a huge campaign management changer for PPC providers.

What are your thoughts on how this might impact your Google Adwords campaigns?