DealerRefresh

Obstacles, Observations and Opinions of an Automotive Internet Sales & Marketing Manager

About the Author

Brian Pasch

Brian is the founder and PCG Consulting Inc. Brian offers consulting services to assist car dealers develop the strategies, processes, and reporting needed to operate profitability in an Internet centric business climate. His latest book "Mastering Automotive Digital Marketing" is the automotive industry's first true textbook on digital marketing. Visit: Mastering Automotive Digital Marketing

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Inspecting Dealership Website Traffic For Unusual Click Activities

Google Analytics is the “Up Log” for your virtual showroom. It is critical for dealers to develop the skills needed to inspect the website traffic that they are generating through their marketing efforts. Every dealer has their own unique online marketing strategy. However, there are a set of tasks that must be integrated into monthly inspection of campaign performance at the dealership.

Recently, I have been writing about my concerns regarding email conquest campaigns. You can read the entire series of articles by visiting my LinkedIn profile.  In this blog post I will outline how dealers can create a Google Analytics segment to identify suspicious website traffic. I will define suspicious as a high number of clicks to pages that consumers normally do not visit.

[Read more…]

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Third Party Automotive Leads Are Like Tainted Wine

I want to recognize that DealerRefresh contributors, and members of the dealer community, have discussed the need for third-party lead reform in the automotive industry in the past.

Today,  I am joining with Jeff Kershner, and automotive professionals who have voiced their concerns, to raise national awareness and energize the discussion of third-party lead quality.

Can auto dealers work together for change? It is my hope that once dealers understand the flaws in the current system, they will demand change. It’s time to turn the light on to third party leads sales.

[Read more…]

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Organizing Your Custom Website Content To Track ROI

It is extremely important you understand that if you can’t track the ROI of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content writing investments, your manager(s) will likely pull the money from the budget for these services.

It is equally important to face the reality that you will likely change or upgrade website technology in the next few years so you must protect your original content investments. The only way to easily track the ROI of your earned media strategies is to organize where the content is published on your website.

I am suggesting that you create a small number of directories on your website that will contain your customized web pages that have been created for marketing campaigns and SEO strategies. If all the content is properly organized, when you change or upgrade website technology, it will be very easy to move the custom pages to the next platform.

You can advise the website provider to transfer over all pages in your sub-directory folders. You will able to inspect the cutover because you can simply count the number of pages in the old sub-directory and compare it to the number of pages in the new sub-directory.

Here are some suggestions for the content directory structure: [Read more…]

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Is Your Website Alienating Auditory and Visual Learners?

I normally don’t read a printed newspaper unless I’m traveling on the road and pickup a free copy at the United Club or at a hotel. I prefer to read my news online. I visit CNN.com, FoxNews.com, CNBC.com, or Yahoo.com to see what is happening around the globe. Regardless of which online news service you visit, have you noticed how many stories are exclusively video links on the home page?

Take a look at the FoxNews.com homepage below. I have added orange stars where a video story is displayed on their open page. There are 21 video stories on the home page for this day!

fox-news-video

Video Wasn’t Added By Accident

Websites like FoxNews.com generate revenue from advertising. News websites are keenly aware of their visitor metrics and user feedback. Videos would not have need added on Fox News, to such a high degree, if consumers were not playing and enjoying the videos. The videos would not have been added if they were not generating more advertising revenue for the website.

News websites have acknowledged and have created content for consumers who are auditory and visual learners. There are many consumers who would rather watch a video to get updated with the latest news rather than reading text. In fact, when a consumer is on the go, video makes it easy to catch news on a train, bus, or in the back of a cab. [Read more…]

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The Missing Ingredient To Automotive Enterprise Software Recipes

sticky-700

In recent months there has been a renewed effort by some of the largest automotive software providers to entice dealers to sign enterprise business agreements. These contracts bundle products and services to offer considerable savings to dealers who are willing to standardize on the vendor’s product suite.

The largest software companies serving franchise automotive dealers include CDK Global, Cox Automotive, Dealertrack Technologies, Dominion Dealer Solutions, and Reynolds & Reynolds. Some of these companies offer dealers a complete operating platform that includes the DMS, CRM, Inventory Management, Websites, Desking, F&I, and Fixed Operations software while others have a few key software pieces to offer.

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Defining A Hierarchy Of Automotive Digital Marketing Responsibilities

As larger dealer groups allocate more internal resources to manage their digital marketing investments, our industry needs to discuss roles and responsibilities for digital marketing execution.

In the graphic above, I started a conversation in my latest book, using this chart, on how a dealer group could organize their marketing team or employees who are performing marketing tasks.

Most active members and readers of DealerRefresh know that dealerships are normally under staffed in regards to their online presence. The roles (Entry Level, Associate, Senior, Manager, CMO) that I use in the chart do not have to be full-time positions; they are roles that are normally shared. However, since dealers are in the e-commerce business, they need to have an internal discussion on how to organize the dealership’s staff based on knowledge and skills.

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2 Strategies to Reduce Your AdWords Cost per VDP View

Dealers are spending more and more money each year on Google AdWords campaigns.

AdWords can be a very effective way to connect dealers with in-market shoppers.  With budgets increasing, I want to encourage dealers to demand more transparent reporting from their AdWords management agencies.

In particular, I would like dealers to request that each AdWords campaign to have additional metrics documented so that some specific campaigns can be better optimized.  In the example below, adding three columns to standard AdWords reports can be very helpful in campaign optimization for online advertising strategies that are designed to connect consumers with in-stock cars.

Not all campaigns are designed to drive consumers to look at in-stock vehicles. However, campaigns like a dynamic inventory campaign based on in-stock VINs, should be driving a high percentage of clicks your dealership website’s most important page(s) – the Vehicle Detail Page (VDP).

The data shown above is from actual dealer campaigns that I recently audited.

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Cobalt Delivers A Personalized Consumer Experience Online

personalized-experience

Car dealers have been promised that Big Data will be enhance their businesses yet for the most part, there have been few products delivered at the automotive retail level. Dataium was one of the first companies to offer car dealers insights based on the millions of data points collected by Dataium from Internet car shoppers.

Today, we are starting to see the other retail products emerge that leverage Big Data. This weekend, I was very excited to see in action an enhancement to Cobalt’s Flex Websites for GM dealers, which creates a Personalized Consumer Experience powered by Cobalt’s Intent Engine.

If you are a regular user of Amazon.com you know when you visit their homepage, it suggests products for you to purchase. It does this by using a data warehouse to analyze your previous clicks, views, actions, and purchases on Amazon so that you are presented a personalized experience. Amazon’s customization is based on actions on their website, but what if the data set could be enriched with offsite data?

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Custom Content: A Conversion Machine

How to track the influence of custom content

Last year I wrote a number of articles on how to setup Google Analytics Multi-Channel Sales Funnels (MCSF) to track assisted conversions. I was thinking about how dealers could use MCSF to show that their blogs and custom content helped in the lead submission process.

If we can show dealers that blog posts and customized content were part of the shopper’s journey PRIOR to submitting a lead, the content budget could be supported. There is always a struggle inside the dealership on the value of custom content despite numerous articles stating why unique content is important for search rankings and social citations.

The measurement system I am suggesting is not perfect because MCSF does not track phone calls. It can work well for tracking the influence of dealership generated custom content on form submissions. As quality content is indexed and read by consumers, I will tell you that it will show in the conversion path to the eventual triggering of a Google Analytics goal when a lead is submitted.

Here is the quick overview of what needs to be done: [Read more…]

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Why Would Anyone Buy a Car From Your Dealership – Really?

 

We’re getting some conversation and sharing rolling this weekend with a post by Brian Pasch. He’s looking for the answer to what appears to be a simple question. But, is it?

Why Buy A New Vehicle From Your Dealership?

I love working with car dealers to create a comprehensive marketing road map that integrates traditional, digital, and social media marketing channels.

The more I work with dealers, I am finding that the dealers starting point to create a solid marketing plan begins with a simple question. This question seems to be difficult for most dealers and their staff to answer effectively.

The question is simple:
Why would anyone purchase their next vehicle form your dealership?

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