DealerRefresh

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

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Did You Receive Your Google Places Notice?

It is nothing new to say that Google Places can be a pain in the neck especially if you have multiple franchises located at the same physical address.

Google Places Update LettersPCG has been working with the industry to educate, assist, and correct Google Places pages so that they can be leveraged during the Zero Moment of Truth. Once a dealer’s Google Places page is setup properly, they can start to use Google Adwords Express.

Adwords Express could be the BEST PPC strategy a dealer could leverage, if the dealership has strong reviews.

Google Places Notices Raise Concerns

Google Places Team have recently been sending out letters about updating information on Google Maps and Places. This is causing a stir, so let me advise you to be calm.

The notices are part of a transition that Google has in mind that will eventually transform what we know as Google Places to something better. Google now has a documented escalation process and trouble ticket system that is fixing Google Places issues in a timely manner.

In fact, Google has been listening to dealers and in the coming months you will see that Google does want businesses to control and leverage their business pages. The visibility, traffic, and advertising opportunities with Google Places FAR outweighs some of the pain that dealers experience as Google Places is transformed.

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Use BatchGeo to Produce Monthly Sales and Marketing Reports

Most of us are visual, you know the old saying… “A picture can tell a thousand words“. I am here to tell you that when it comes to business decisions, decision makers will move mountains if they can see their progress on charts and maps. Today, I’m exposing a really cool and free online map builder: http://www.batchgeo.com.

I have been using BatchGeo to produce monthly sales and marketing reports for almost 2 years, I thought a few of you could use this site and get real creative to help demonstrate why you should get that raise!

BatchGeo takes any address and plots it on a google or yahoo map for you. “Yawn” you say? But, what if you can plot all your internet sales from the last 90 days, assign different colored push pins for each lead source… in say 60 seconds!!? Now we’re talkin’!

Let’s start ‘er up and take her for a spin!

First project for our demo will be plotting a list of a few of our DR members on a google map. 1st, we collected the names on our DR message boards, then, I moved it to a Spread Sheet, then I copied and pasted that info into BatchGeo and viola! Look what we have here!

The Dealer Refresh Community Foot Print!

Nice indeed! What BatchGeo.com will do is allow you to copy-n-paste  any address information from a spread sheet and automatically plot it on a Google or yahoo map.

The information that comes from this can really move decision making. How big is your sales foot print?  What about last year? How big is your service foot print? What if you want to advertize in a market that’s just outside your reach?

Say your 90 mins out from a large market and you want to run a Google AdWords campaign to draw people in. After you plot your existing sales on BatchGeocode.com, Execute your new Google AdWords campaign, the following month, re-run your updated info into BatchGeo.com and your new map will see if your footprint has changed.

You can produce Sales Maps by Store

http://www.batchgeo.com/map/2084fdc5a16f753b2a98175330a0a939

You can produce  Sales Map by Sales rep

http://www.batchgeo.com/map/d9912c0f5e44f98fd6e344200a54feb8

See where I am going with this?

You can plot “Internet Sales” vs Non-Internet Sales.  You can plot sales by lead source, you can copy n paste in your incoming phone call records (by lead source if you’d like ;-).  We opened a new store after an Sales Map analysis quickly showed everyone that this new store’s location would have no material impact on the other stores footprint. Nice… very nice. Did I mention it was free?  If you like it, They take donations via PayPal!

Just amazing.

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Geo targeting for Google Maps and GPS-applications

Google Maps and Geo Targeting Your Websites

Google Maps is the #1 organic advertising tool for most car dealers but how Google Maps actually works is a mystery to many of us in the SEO community.  For example, one New Jersey car dealer’s Google Maps listing is displayed over 17,000 a month.

What has been a challenge for many car dealers is determining why certain car dealer listings show in Google Maps when consumers do a county or statewide search.  I have tested hundreds of scenarios where a Google Local Business listing is correct but it does not show for searches that you would expect it to appear.

With GPS enabled mobile phones and geo targeted search marketing applications like FourSquare.com on the rise, I started to look into how websites are geo-targeted.  It started with a conversation with Alex Snyder at Checkered Flag because all his dealer websites are a sub-domain off of www.checkeredflag.com and not on a standalone domain name.  What that means is that Checkered Flag Toyota is located at http://toyota.checkeredflag.com and not on www.checkeredflagtoyota.com.

In the case of all the Checkered Flag store websites, they are hosted off a primary domain and Google Maps was not behaving properly for some of the store listings.  As Alex and I discussed this matter, Alex took it on his own initiative to see how other franchise chains handled mapping multiple stores off a central website.

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