Google’s Latest Ad Updates

In case you haven’t heard, Google is rebranding Google AdWords as Google Ads, and with that change will come a slew of great new features that can help dealers sell more cars. In our new blog post, we highlight some of the most important changes that your dealership should begin leveraging IMMEDIATELY.

If you haven’t linked Google Ads and Google My Business, you should.

Many of Google’s upcoming features announced at Google Marketing Live 2018 rely on dealers verifying their Google My Business Listings AND linking their listings to their Google Ads (formerly AdWords) accounts.  As we’ve worked with our clients to leverage Google’s new features, we have many dealers don’t know who set up their GMB listing and don’t know the email address that has access to the account.  Your dealership MUST get control over your GMB listing so you can begin leveraging these news benefits:

Store Visits Reporting

Dealers have always wondered what about the impact of their ad spend in terms of driving more consumers to their stores. Now, with store visits as a conversion metric, Google provides insights into which campaigns actually drove consumers to your store. You cannot do this, however, without your Ads and My Business listing being linked.

Local Campaigns

There’s an increase in mobile “near me” searches, and Google has responded with Local Campaigns, which is aimed at bringing in more store visits for local businesses. The ad is based on location, and Google automatically optimizes across search, YouTube, Maps, websites, and apps.

If you are a DealerOn advertising customer, you will be hearing from your advertising strategist soon to request permissions to link your GMB and AdWords accounts.

 

Paying attention to your mobile speed and experience is crucial.

Google has been loud and clear about the importance of providing a fast and optimized experience on mobile devices. They even recently announced mobile site speed as a ranking factor.

Google launched its Mobile Speed Score, which will be available in the AdWords interface, in the landing pages section.

You can read more about Mobile Speed Scores and its impact here.

 

Start thinking about YouTube content more seriously.

New tools that focus on better brand reach and improved conversions are now available on YouTube. Video is becoming more and more popular every day, and Google released two new ad formats in response to its rising popularity and potential reach with online shoppers.

TrueView for Reach

TrueView for Reach ads are optimized to raise brand awareness. You can create ads that run before or during videos that users can skip after 5 seconds if they aren’t interested (you don’t pay for the view if the consumer skips the ad).  The videos can be as short as 6 seconds, or up to 30 seconds in length.  Google’s testing saw a 20% increase of Ad Recall with the brands they tested.

TrueView for Action

TrueView for Action ads have one goal: to convert more leads. Advertisers can include a customizable CTA banner either during the video or at the end, and Google will be adding lead forms later this year. They’re still working out the details for customer experience, but these ads will be globally available soon.

Dealerships need to start working with their agencies and content partners to think about how best to create content that is quickly digested, gets the point across, and makes a consumer want to submit a form or lead via YouTube.

 

Opt-in to new and exciting ad formats & analytics capabilities as they become available.

Google announced new ad formats, some of which are now in beta. Dealers should jump at the chance to try these out with their agencies, when available, so that they can outstrip their competition.

Responsive Search Ads

Responsive Search Ads use machine learning to create ads with up to 3 different headlines and 2 descriptions for a personalized experience. We’ve been testing this new format with Google as a BETA partner in Q3 and we are seeing some extremely exciting results for our dealers.

Smart Campaigns

Smart Campaigns have been introduced to allow advertisers to automatically optimize ads for a personalized goal, like conversions, stores visits, and new customers. This is designed to be a set it-and-forget-it tactic, and we do not recommend this for dealers using campaigns that have a complex setup, need fine tuning against sales or profitability data, or if OEM compliance is a factor.

Cross Device Reporting

Dealers should also get excited about cross device reporting in Google Analytics. This means you can see a shopper’s interactions across all devices and have the option to use cross-device remarketing in Google Ads.

 

We’ll bring you more updates to Google’s platform as they are rolled out, and our goal is to educate dealers on how to get the biggest possible return on their digital advertising efforts. If you’re not yet using DealerOn for your Search Engine Marketing or PPC campaigns, we’re happy to answer any questions you may have, or to give you a quick demo.