It’s that time of year again… The holiday season is upon us. It might be the most important time all year to make sure you’re spending your AdWords budget wisely. This week’s Wednesday Workshop video shares several tips that will help you make the most of this year’s holiday season.
Does your dealership (or your SEM vendor) run a fully automated SEM management platform? Sure, they’re easy and convenient, but the AdWords for Dummies approach misses several important factors that will help your campaigns be more successful. This week’s Wednesday Workshop video explains the elements that the automated platforms miss and explains why some human interaction in your AdWords account is vital to success.
If you’re just going to let a machine do all the work, you might as well stop. The majority of SEM campaigns running for car dealers today are machine-based programs. Is this all bad? No, but there are consequences that come with “set it and forget it” SEM platforms.
Honestly, some dealers can afford to run SEM campaigns through automated systems that miss critical components for optimal results, but why would you want to? Let’s be fair… most dealers are not going to take the time to know how every digital marketing detail affects their bottom line. With that in mind, here are a few tips to fill the knowledge gap that will at least help you keep an eye on areas of importance.
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You might have missed it, but in late September, Google announced a potentially revolutionary new Adwords marketing channel that they’ve named Customer Match. Google is giving dealers the ability to sell and service more cars by getting more value out of an asset they already own – their existing customer lists. Continue Reading
If Google AdWords were a piece of juicy pie, your impression share would be the size of your dealership’s slice… Tracking impression share is important, since it shows exactly how much you’re showing up in local searches. If you’re not measuring how big your slice of pie is, you won’t know if it could (or should) be bigger! Watch our latest video to learn more about PPC impression share and how you can use it to boost your dealership’s performance online.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another DealerOn Wednesday Workshop. This week, we’re talking about impressions in SEM campaigns. Impressions are not achievements, so how important is impression share to your SEM campaigns?
The answer is – VERY important… but you might not know why.
Impression share is basically the comparison of opportunity and reality. Google defines it as the number of impressions you’ve received, divided by the estimated number of impressions you were able to receive. Pretty simple – but why is it important?
Think of the automotive online advertising landscape as a delicious apple pie. You and your competitors are all trying to grab the biggest slice. When you track your impression share metrics, you’re keeping tabs on the size of your slice compared to the whole.
The most important factor regarding your impression share is your ad rank and quality score. If your quality score is poor, your ads will not show – regardless of what you’re willing to spend.
Tracking your impression share is a great way to determine when budget increases are necessary. If your piece of the pie isn’t as big as you want, increasing your budget can help grab more pie. Plus, maximizing your impression share helps your campaigns generate more traffic and leads.
How do you track impression share? Here’s a couple of tips:
Sign in to your AdWords account and click the campaigns tab. Then, click the columns button above your statistics table and choose “Modify Columns” from the drop down. Click competitive metrics and then add the impression share columns you’re interested in.
Another way to view impression share data for specific ad groups and keywords is to enable the “impression share” column in the Ad Groups and Keywords tabs.
Decreasing your targets can increase your impression share, but comes with the trade off of reducing the size of the pie. The fastest and most effective way to grow your impression share is by increasing your campaign budgets and bids.
If you want a serious competitive advantage, be sure you’re chasing the largest impression share in your market.
If you have questions about impression share or SEM in general, jump down to the comments section and leave your questions there. We’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.
Thanks for stopping by to watch – we’ll see you next week with another DealerOn Wednesday workshop!
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