It’s been said that many customers begin planning their next car purchase the minute they drive their previous one off the lot. And research from J.D. Powers has shown that 82% of new car buyers conduct at least some of that vehicle research on the Internet. Obviously, the major automotive brands conduct vigorous search marketing campaigns to get their products in front of the car shopping public early in the buying cycle.
But people don’t buy directly from Honda or GM; they get their cars from local dealers. And very often those dealers don’t have the knowledge or the staff to set up and manage an effective search engine marketing (SEM) campaign that will draw traffic to their web sites and tire-kickers to their showrooms.
Jumpstart Automotive Media, an agency specializing in marketing programs for local auto dealers, has launched an SEM service that will help jump start those pay-per-click ad campaigns for small to mid-sized dealers. Called trafficBUILDER, the service charges a flat fee to buy and manage clickthrough ads on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL Search and other search engines. When customers in a participating dealer’s local market search online for car information, the dealer’s ads will appear on the search results page and draw increased traffic to the company Web site.
The traffic derived in this way is particularly valuable because these searchers are highly qualified and actively in the market for a new vehicle, says Jim Irving, vice president of media relations for Jumpstart.
“A lot of the dealers we represent have set up Web sites, but they’re often pretty basic brochureware,” Irving says. “and while they’re interested in the potential of search marketing, their core interest is not in that; it’s in selling vehicles.”
Many of these small dealerships don’t have the Web expertise to set up an SEM campaign in-house. “I’ve heard that the average turnover among Internet sales managers at dealerships is about four months,” Irving says. “So you’re dealing with a lot of dark space there. And while search marketing isn’t rocket science, doing it well takes some applied knowledge. It’s the difference between somebody who really knows what they’re doing versus someone who just knows how to set up an AdWords account.” Irving himself worked with both brand and search marketing at Mercedes Benz and Honda before joining the Jumpstart staff.
Irving says the trafficBUILDER program was actually in development for months before its official launch in mid-July and has now moved into the product enhancement phase. For one thing, that means Jumpstart is exploring a move from simply guaranteeing to build traffic at the dealers’ sites to ensuring a set number of leads per month from search engine marketing. Jumpstart also wants to broaden its value to subscribers by applying Web analytics to their sites and landing pages. “We’re working to get to the point where we can tell clients, ‘We sent this number of visitors to your Web site, and here’s the point where this number of them fell off,” Irving says.
Right now, subscriber fees are based on the size of the keyword campaigns they want to run. Jumpstart then constructs two campaigns: one geotargeted for local search and another with a national focus, so that a searcher in California who enters a search query for a Ford dealer in Chicago can see the relevant ads. Reporting consists primarily of a dashboard that indicates
Dealers subscribe to the service on a monthly contract. “If it’s not working for them or they’re not happy with the service, we don’t want to hold them to it,” Irving says. He says the dealers in the program exhibit a range of interest in the mechanics of SEM. “Some will call up often and ask to add certain keywords to their campaigns, or they’re check to see what terms their local competitors are bidding against,” he says. “Others just set it up with us and then let it run.” He says the Jumpstart staff studies dealer suggestions for keywords, but ultimately has the power of veto over proposed search terms.
“We’re responsible for the campaign as a whole,” he says. “So if you start bringing in these dog words that bring down the campaign results, we’re responsible. We’ll review dealer suggestions and either incorporate them if they make sense, or push back if they start getting into words that we know aren’t going to perform well enough.”
Irving says that whatever their level of hands-on involvement, a large number of local auto dealers recognize that one way or another, they need to be doing search marketing. While the number of shoppers who visit a dealer’s Web site before stepping into the showroom may be small—perhaps as small as 15% of their total visitors, Irving says—those Internet browsers are highly qualified and convert to sales at rates three or four times higher than shoppers who were drawn in by other means, such as newspaper classifieds.
“People use the Internet to research their car purchases in several different ways,” he says. “Some start at the big brand sites. But to me, search is at the very beginning of the buying decision funnel. People who enter a specific car brand name or model in a query box are hand-raisers. And shame on you if you’re not there when they’re looking for the product you sell.”