The POMCAST
A digital marketing podcast focused on local lead generation strategies and insights. Your search for in depth discussions, tips and tactics has led you to the right place.
The POMCAST
Automotive ROAS: Expert Strategies For Immediate Impact
Get ready to learn the secrets to maximizing your ROI and ROAS in the automotive and power sports industries with expert insights from Mike Shaug, founder and CEO of Premier Online Marketing. Discover how to avoid negative profitability and set up successful search ad campaigns that truly enhance your bottom line. Mike shares practical tips on resource allocation, keyword targeting, and making data-driven decisions to stand out in a competitive market.
Explore the importance of campaign segmentation with a case study on a Ford dealership, where precise targeting can lead to better control of spend and performance. Learn the pitfalls of lumping various product categories into a single campaign and the evolution of Google AdWords. We delve into the necessity of experienced oversight to avoid wasted budgets and ineffective strategies, ensuring your marketing efforts are both efficient and effective.
Get the lowdown on intelligent targeting, precise tracking, and the essentials of effective ad copy strategies. From geo-targeted advertising to leveraging AI in marketing, this episode covers it all. Understand the significance of updating creative content to avoid ad fatigue and how smaller, strategically placed targeting circles can improve marketing efficiency. Mike also discusses the future of search technologies and how they influence current and forthcoming strategies in digital marketing. Don’t miss out on these invaluable insights to elevate your dealership's digital marketing game.
Premier Online Marketing helps businesses grow through smart SEO, content, and search strategies. Learn more at www.premieronlinemarketing.com
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Welcome back to the POMCAST. In this episode, we're discussing strategies and tactics for maximizing the return on your investment in paid search ads yes, and also improving that return on your ad spend, of course, roi. We're joined again by the founder and CEO of Premier Online Marketing out of Austin, texas, mike Schaub Yep. He's our expert and you'll be educated once again by his insights, tips and real-world examples, which will definitely help you and your business optimize your paid search campaigns effectively. So, without further ado, mike, how are you, by the way?
Speaker 2:How are things? Doing great, doing great. It's a beautiful 100 degree day in Austin, texas, can't complain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, boy, I'll tell you, the storms have been rolling through Texas here the last couple of weeks. Right, indeed, they have. Yeah, well, speaking of stormy weather, there are a lot of dealers out there and for those joining the episode, either listening and or watching we're really going to talk and try to contextualize this episode. Today, a lot around the automotive industry and for dealers and 2020, and really it started probably in 2023, there's a lot of stormy weather for dealers as they try to get their arms back around the marketplace being much more competitive. So I'm excited to get into the questions today and I really want to start. I like to start most of these episodes with you, which, to you and I probably feel a little bit elementary. Sometimes we fly right past things like can you, does a dealer even know what ROAS stands for? And a lot don't. So I just want to start there. Could you explain what return on ad spend actually is and why it's really important for being able to evaluate your ad performance? Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so return on ad spend, roas or a lot of people say ROI, but essentially it's your profit margin that you make above the cost of your advertising. So if you have a cost per wean that is too high, you will have a lower return on ad spend because the amount of money that you needed to spend to go get that traffic, to get that lead and get that sale ultimately it kind of cut into the margin. So obviously you want to have as good of an ROAS as possible so you can have the highest margin health possible. But yeah, that's return on ad spend. You want to make sure that you're not running a negative profitability campaign associated with the channel but there won't be a lot of leads or the cost per lead will be so high that when you end up doing the math on a, say, a campaign that has a cost per lead of a hundred bucks or more, you're like, okay, well, it takes 20 leads to sell this bike or this car and the margin on that car or motorcycle is $2,000 or less. Or in that ballpark, so you can easily less, or in that ballpark.
Speaker 2:So you can easily, very, very easily spend too much money on traffic or spend it in the wrong places and have a negative borrowing campaign, meaning that you're actually spending money for every car that you sell. So that's a pretty crazy concept. Can you think about bad marketing management, like if you were the finance manager of a dealership and you're writing a $500 check and giving it to the buyer of every car that you sold, because that's how much money you use? But sometimes it can be very hard to evaluate it. It's hard to kind of really pinpoint where the waste is. So that's kind of a huge part of the work that I've been doing and the work that we do here at Premier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all of that's so critical and I don't think a lot of dealers, and I'm going to back up and not just say that this episode is really valuable for car dealers and also for power sports. If you're a dealer selling motorcycles, atvs, side-by-sides, what am I thinking of is a personal watercraft. These are also really important concepts for power sports dealers, and so you're just sharing some things that I don't think I've ever actually heard a dealer themselves articulate themselves, articulate, um how you, you could be in uh kind of this uh negative equity around. You're actually spending more um to acquire these opportunities or to actually sell the units and, um, without knowing that boy, you end up in a real ugly place when it comes down to looking at your p&l statement absolutely and kind of one other thing on that.
Speaker 2:It's not like the business as usual right now, where it's may 8 24, the, the american consumer is about as squeezed as they have been. Consumer debt is at all-time highs, financing is all-time highs, so if there were a time where your buyer might just sit it out and try to keep the the clunker running for one more year or whatever, now is that time. So you have people that are going to be doing a lot more window shopping, less buying, and that increases the costs for everybody. I think one other thing to note on ROI for your marketing is that it really should be what leans your decisions around, where you allocate your resources, your spend your keywords that you've been on specifically, where you target, where you don't target, um, so you can run your ads for maximum profitability yeah, those are really, really great tips.
Speaker 1:I'm guessing that the the beginning of all this, like just setting up campaigns, is so critical. Like what would the key components of making sure that these campaigns for for search are set up correctly, I guess to give yourselves the best chance for success, so that you don't run into some of these kind of positions of negative equity or just kind of setting yourself up to pour gas on the fire and burn through budget when you don't need to be? Can you share some of those things Like just successful, I guess, initial setup strategies?
Speaker 2:Yeah, starting out correctly is literally so important. And the biggest issue that I see with fall of digital marketing campaigns is the agency that we're typically competing against. Applying their template and best judgment, which is kind of external from what the customer has. They try to impress the customer and show them hey, we're targeting, you know the standard 20 mile radius around the dealership or if it's a rural area, maybe it's 50 miles. We have these different ad types that are that are in place, but it's extremely rare that we'll actually see campaigns set up in a way that they can be successful and then become more successful. So, a few things that we look at and we do. An recommendation and this is by no means going to be the full list, but just kind of the main key items is to dive deep into your CRM to understand your customer. No, cheap markets are created the same, and I think we talked a little bit about the Bentleys and Highland Park versus Mesquite last episode. That's a great example.
Speaker 2:Where have your customers historically been selling? Obviously, if it's a brand new dealership to market, it's a different scenario and you are going to have to use the best judgment and all of that. But typically when we work with a dealership. We're working with a store that has worked with a lot of other agencies. They're kind of sick and tired of getting a 7 out of 10, and that's not working for them. So when they come to us, they're looking for more control.
Speaker 2:We're looking toward granularity and I have never had a circumstance where I've asked a customer hey, have you leveraged your CRM data or first party data to enhance the targeting of your campaigns? The answer is always no. It's just not a question that's being asked often enough. But if you have a dealership that's been around for a few years five years plus even they're going to have so many transactions by zip code that you can leverage to, um, better target your customer, um, they're going to tell you, it's going to tell you who the customer profile is for that dealership, and they're very different. You know four dealers. For instance, we will four dealers in west texas and we will book one in aspen. So it's like they're not the same person, they're not the same buyer everywhere.
Speaker 2:So it's. You know you have to really be dialed into. What is the information we have in our CRM that we don't look at and don't leverage? And that is the most valuable data mine for getting in front of that demographic data. Another thing that's really important is to build with control in mind.
Speaker 2:So what a bad implementation looks like and stick with the Ford dealership example would be for them to have a branch campaign, which would be Glenwood Springs Ford, have a dealer terms campaign, which would be like Ford dealership near Aspen or for dealership veil you know that is actually where the vast majority of the search volume is. But then typically what you see is they have an inventory campaign where sedans, suvs and trucks are all jammed into one campaign and they're just like well, that's the inventory campaign. You want to throw everything in there, but the problem is, uh, most dealerships don't carry those units evenly, so you need to be able to ratchet spend up and down based on what they carry, especially over the last few years, with inventory being super inconsistent. That would be the funny thing. I'm going to account, do an audit and be like you're spending most of your money on, you know, ford edge or, uh, some lower value when you want to be spending your money on f-150s but you actually don't have a campaign that's set up for that. So back to the. The way to do it is you want to make sure that you're segmenting by products and you want to be as granular as possible. You want to avoid having a situation where you have more than a few hundred keywords in a campaign. It's very rare that you're going to have more than, say, 300 keywords in a campaign that are all really relevant to each other as a category.
Speaker 2:So what we recommend is splitting out campaigns by products and making sure that your ad groups are really tight. So a good example would be new Ford F-150, 2024 Ford F-150, you know 2024 Ford F-150 for sale. You know those are different keywords. You know those are different keywords. They all are Ford F-150 keywords, but they should all be in separate ad groups because you want to arrive your ad as a response to the specific question that they're asking. Most of the people will just search Ford F-150, buy Ford F-150. They'll kind of be very short tail.
Speaker 2:But you want to make sure that you have all of those ad groups split out.
Speaker 2:You want to make sure that your SUV spend is certainly not messing with your sedan spend or vice versa.
Speaker 2:So you're going to want to make sure you have that all split up, and the main reason for that is you can control audiences at the campaign level. You control your spend at the campaign level and one of the biggest pain in the asses that I've ever had to deal with in my career running ads is when you go into a campaign that has a thousand keywords and you have a bunch that are performing really well, but they're different product categories and they've been running for a long time because dealercom set it up five years ago and they have a bit of a calcistry to them. So you're like, ah, I really don't want to mess with this campaign styled in and optimized, but if I want to control SUV spend, I need to move these six adverts down the campaign over here and then are starting from scratch. So you kind of want to begin with the end in mind and just have a really robust segmentation strategy for your dealership or for any of the products that you offer.
Speaker 1:I remember well. Now it's several years ago. This was well. Let me just give two points of reference, because I've known you for a long, long time and I know that, going back into your first few years in digital marketing, that wasn't a topic the single keyword, ad groups, or I don't know if it's even called that now, but I do know that you built a multimillion dollar digital marketing, mostly around paid search, for a pretty big company in the auto industry.
Speaker 1:That's still around today and I remember at that time you were advocating and waving the flag for single keyword ad groups and that just account setup. It was a lot of this, but you're even sharing more detail now. So I can one thing I would just for people that are tuning in and listening on this topic Google continues to advocate ease of use in their platform. That was the original inception of Google AdWords for the small business, small medium-sized business owner. Hey, now there's something you can do yourself. And then they realize well, no, the automotive, power sports verticals, rv verticals, marine verticals the more they also want business owners in those categories.
Speaker 1:So if you're a dealer of any of those industries that I just mentioned, google wants you to believe that the platform now, with options like performance, max campaigns, that it's all, just jump in there. Even yourself, like you, can figure it out like it's it's really doable. But it's not really true and I'm not going to say that google's purposely trying to deceive businesses that way. But it is still really important for businesses to understand that and you've mentioned things like this before. But the institutional knowledge, the, the, the experience of, of being able to say, well, I was there in the beginning of all of this and this is how it's changed to today, is so important so that you don't waste money, so that you don't chase things that are fool's gold like well, I'm dependent on the co-op payback, so that's why I'm going to do this. That's like the worst decision ever, and yet it's still a thing for a lot of dealers.
Speaker 1:And so I love how you go into these details. It's really important.
Speaker 2:I'm going to light 70% of your budget on fire so you can get half of it back.
Speaker 2:That's the co-op argument which is it's interesting, and the problem specifically with those co-op programs is nobody that has ever done any digital marketing at all makes the decision on who the vendor pool gets to be. That's based on who bought the best steak dinner or took their clients to Sapphires in Vegas or something, but it's definitely not based on a robust audit of all providers. We actually just had a situation with Genesis recently where we tried to get into their program. They've only got three agencies in there and none of them are good, and we're like, hey, we're doing this incredible work. We've provided them with a case study. We're a brand new store in a very difficult market for Genesis. This is such an expensive product. They were just not interested. They're like we're not pursuing this. At that time, I'm like your client. The dealership owner is asking you guys, uh, for this opportunity. Let's at least have a conversation. But anyway, I could. I could uh go on and that I don't want to get too off track. But yeah, it's, it's super. The the issue that I have at google as a platform right now is that it's um, they don't tell you how to do things correctly.
Speaker 2:Again, let's talk about targeting. I think probably your ad targeting is the most important aspect of getting the right type of customers. You want to make sure that your spend is allocated more to the zip code than to the city, or even to the micro radii than the zip code, depending on more to the zip code than to the city, or even to the micro radii than the zip code, depending on how big the zip code is. Also, for businesses that offer finance, you actually cannot target by zip code, so we use something called micro radii. But basically, what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at data for sales. We're going to look at all time, we're going to look at revenue by zip code and that would tell us where we need to spend more of the money.
Speaker 2:So when we create those targets, we'll actually add the positive bid adjustments to them to say, hey, if I'm a Ford dealership and I'm selling someone an Aspen, they have rifle, which is not Aspen, and they've got Aspen, which is one of the most affluent areas in the country, in the world. So am I going to spend 25% more on a quick from Aspen than rifle Colorado? Yes, I would, you know. So it's really. It's just having that kind of intelligence and aligning your targeting with what works and that always kicks the crap out of the standard 25 mile radius. That's still the mantra that's kind of being preached to a lot of dealers, and I can see it based on the implementations that I've been auditing. But your targeting should not just be a big round circle, it should have a ton of little circles and it should have a lot of red in it too, so you can correctly target and also exclude customers that are not right for your business or brand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes sense, all the sense in the world, and it makes me think about my older days of being. You know, most of my days back then were always centered around paid search for several years of my career than there was, and then, of course, okay, that's great for people that really wanted to do that. Then just radius targeting and all of that has evolved. And what you just shared, that is extremely important for business owners to understand that. If you have no understanding of that, how would you even know what types of conversations or questions to ask your provider to hold them accountable? Because anybody out there that can get away with not being accountable to these things is going to do it. But the way to combat that is for business owners to really be consuming knowledge, just like what you're sharing. So, anyway, I don't want to stop you.
Speaker 1:You're still talking about things that are core to this kind of setup thing I think is very critical.
Speaker 2:Right, I would say the other one that we see wrong. A lot is correct tracking and correct audience gathering. So Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are also tools that are not super-nupriciary for where you have to have someone that really knows how to do it. Most dealership implementations are not correct and if they are correct, at some point dealercom or dealer on or some company will make the update to the platform, platform Y, and everyone gets a little faster to the platform or whatever. But oftentimes there's Google Tag Manager codes who get stripped out. We'll just we'll go from having conversion track in one month to zeros 15 days into the next month and we're trying to figure out what happened. But basically, correct tracking implementation means I am tracking the different ways you can make a phone call and tracking phone calls within digital marketing. There's actually three different ways that you get that one call. One is the call from the ad. That's the easiest one to track and that's super easy. Then the next one, which is a little harder to track, is an on click, which is I'm clicking on a mobile phone number, uh, on a mobile, uh dealership website or business website. And then the other one is I'm dynamically, uh, I'm on my laptop, like I am right now, and I see the number and it's dynamically swapped. Oftentimes they'll have one of those tracked, but not all three, so they're missing really high conversion data. 90% of all the leads that convert to car sales for most dealerships. Most businesses are coming from the phone, not form anymore. I think people are tired of leaving their emails with businesses and getting spammed with stuff that they're not interested in anymore, so the phone is definitely the main place. Shifting over to forms, you want to make sure and again, this is a challenge with dealership websites where they have a lot of iframes, where your iframe like it's hard to track something that's in an iframe Sometimes you can only track the start of the form submission. So that's what a lot of people do and they're like, hey, congratulations, I got you 300 form fills and the reality is you really only got 30, because someone starting the button or fat fingering the button or something like that is not the full completion giving that information to someone to follow up on from a form.
Speaker 2:The other aspect of this will be correct audience tracking, where there's kind of different types of audiences that you can track. You can target people based on user activity. So I go to the website, I spend more than the website benchmark, which is probably about two and a half minutes. So you could have like a highly engaged audience where it's all the people that are above two and a half minutes. Um, so you could have like a highly engaged audience where it's all the people that are above two and a half minutes. That's a. That's an audience that you could create, an audience of everyone that is converted and that's a great audience to have. Then you have an audience of everyone that's got to all of your trucks pages and then all your finance pages. It's really important that you have those things tracked, and that's when we show white bridging.
Speaker 2:What we see most of the time and it always really frustrates me when this happens is they'll just do more marketing against all users. All users is like nothing. It's what. Who is it? You know there's probably two thirds of the business that a dealer should get is service and parts. What you're, if you set that up incorrectly, you're going to be remarketing new car ads to someone that just bought a car and maybe they're just looking for parts or whatever, and then you're wasting impressions on them. So that's an important thing to really bear in mind is that you want to make sure that you're doing your marketing intelligently. And then, of course, there's dynamic for marketing as well. Whereas I saw this vehicle, now that vehicle is following me across the web, which I think is another really great way to do that.
Speaker 2:But if you have correct audience tracking for instance, all converters you can layer that into your Google Ads account and say, hey, for all the people that are in this all converters, audience find me more people like that. We're bid on this type of user. So it gives you a really powerful signal, um, that you have to set up the right way again. You kind of have to begin with the end in mind, and, uh, it's. That one is a really important one too. The other aspect of audience tracking, um that we don't typically see a lot of um is first party data or it's not updated frequently enough.
Speaker 2:I mean, if I were doing a implementation for a new account, I would probably start with okay, we're uploading all of your new car sales data and all of your used car data, and then all your service, your fixed offs data, separate and um. You know you're going to have that whole list in there. So if you want to target everyone, that's fine, but you can find similar users. You can target those people explicitly. A great example would be with one customer we're actually targeting for buyback.
Speaker 2:We're targeting sold units people that bought units from these dealerships five years ago. So we're saying, okay, we don't want to target anyone now with this ad. We want to target people that we have sold and serviced these bikes so we know they're great. We want to target those people and we're looking for vehicles above a certain threshold so you can upload all of that information into the web. It takes a lot of work. The data security part is really important. You kind of have to have a client that's willing to work with you through that. But that can be the massive game changer and that's like you know. That'll be a situation where you'll get like a 20% before it's boost out of that one change alone. It's a very powerful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you just went through five or six really really critical points on. You just actually said it, thinking about, but it's the if you're trying to get fancy with forms that are not native to your website platform and you're spending heavily on paid search. In fact, I can think of an example, I'm just not going to say it so it's captured on here but somebody that spends a lot of money, so much that paid search is their number one source of traffic and what the reporting shows to this company is that they're getting hundreds of conversions. And you just explained and I think it's really important to reemphasize the point that if that's the case in your business, where it looks like, wow, we get a lot of traffic, and it may not be most of your traffic, but even if it's 30 or 40% of your traffic, you're driving through paid search and it's showing you hundreds of, you know, key moments or whatever key events or whatever GA4s call them now, but you're equivalent of you know what we all would think is a conversion and you're like no way it's because it's just tracking the, the beginning, or they opened that particular form, and the reality is is that you may actually be getting zero conversions.
Speaker 1:That's right. Um, very, very important. It's great. This is really good stuff. I hope the audience is enjoying it as much as I am. I'm learning. If I'm learning stuffug, then I can guarantee you sure as shit car dealers and power sports dealers and RV dealers and marine dealers there's going to be so much stuff here they could literally load up an arsenal and give their crappy vendors a really bad day.
Speaker 1:I want to switch, if you're okay. I want to move in and ask you pick your brain a little bit on keyword research and selecting keywords. Some people think that keyword research is an age-old topic, but there is so much depth and importance to understanding this, depending on what kind of company you are, and so could you share a little bit on some of the factors that should be considered when you're trying to do keyword research and selecting what you're going to actually because your money is going to go towards this stuff Can you share a little bit about that?
Speaker 2:Again, beginning with the end in mind, you want to funnel as much of your spend to the geo that you are physically located in. If I am a dealership in Austin Texas, I should not be spending more money in Georgia than I am in Austin Texas, texas. I should not be spending more money in Georgia than I am in Austin Texas. So, keywords that are concatenated with Austin Alaris dealership Austin, harley-davidson dealership Austin, ford dealership Austin those are going to you're going to want to make sure that you have a really good, robust list of that. And then you go into the micro markets Westlake, lakeway you know the more fluid areas, or the areas that your business, where your customers are, and that crm data will put you in the right direction. There's um, but yeah, um, in terms of keyword research. I mean you want to have a good mix of like short tail keywords for one fit for an f-150 lightning, but then you're going to also want to have some of the longer tail and geo-indicated versions as well. The search volume will mostly accrue at the short tail, but there is still a tremendous amount of people that will say a couple more words that will indicate that they're not just. They don't just know that they want a florida club 50. They know where they want to go and that's just a really great signal that they're in market for you and that business is winnable. Finance is one that I really don't see very often in human research. You definitely want to be going out to finance A lot of. It's funny. There are some brands that are mostly finance driven. For instance, there are not a ton of people looking to go buy mitsubishi, for instance, um, but mitsubishi has incredible finance offers right now. So that's how they're getting a lot of units sold and you wouldn't think of yourself as that person, but a lot of people are primarily financial shoppers, especially in the lower uh you know kind of quartile of the market. So that's a really important one, you know.
Speaker 2:As far as like tools, there's so many different ones SEMrush. I think the most important thing is to build a really strong list of inventory-related keywords, segment them by trend level, you know, and then look at your alpha products. You know you might have before a dealership that sells 10 edges a year and a hundred, and f-150s are way more than that. Then the f-150 needs to have its own keywords, it needs to be its own campaign, because that is the top moving product and you want to make sure that you can control the targeting and everything at that level. But yeah, you know, looking at products, looking at your primary target areas and then looking at the sub-markets, those are all things that you're going to want to make sure that you have in there.
Speaker 2:A lot of what we hear is that the broadband kind of covers everything and it does. You know, like if we just ran Ford F-150, we would get Rifle, we would get Ford F-150 Aspen Vail, we would get all of that, but we wouldn't be able to say, hey, I want more of this. So that's why you want to differentiate and have these different types of keywords. And then also, you know, going back to that Ford dealer example, you can say, hey, we're this Ford dealership in Glenwood Springs. You know, we tell them hey, we're answering your question, you want to be sold to an asset.
Speaker 2:Here we are. We work with people all the time, so you can really kind of hyper-target your messaging based on the keywords that your users are trying. One other thing, though, to note I don't know how much you've looked at Google IO for kind of the big unveil they did of search, uh, basically searches that are enhanced with ai. I actually foresee long tail keywords getting a second wind now because a lot of, because, as people become used to searching with ai search, they'll start. They can start their query in kind of a dumb way and be like hey, like what's, what's the Ford? You know the new Ford truck model? Okay, we're getting information of what that is. Where can I go get it, you know, and you'll see this kind of multi-search touch point to kind of get to that refined query.
Speaker 2:So you're going to see the long tail keywords, I think, being a lot more utilized. Because I think being a lot more utilized because Google makes more money when people do more searches. They have a revenue per search model. So if they can take the buyer journey from hey, I'm looking for an F4 to F1 50 near me, I'm going to search the 10 blue links, click on a few different ads, or you know, basically when that person does a search, another ad is triggered. It's another opportunity for them to, you know, serve ads, so that is how they make the money. So I really feel that AI is going to kind of extend the search for any products kind of strategically, because that's how you can better monetize Google search.
Speaker 1:I can see that, um, a couple of points you made in there. I love you using the mitsubishi example. I think that's really a perfect example to help people learn from, and I think it's also interesting that mitsubishi, um, although they haven't been able to quite, uh, capitalize on it the way that a couple of other brands did, but very similarly to mitsubishi, hyundai and Kia used to be an example of a disposable lighter as well. Like, I don't really want a car like that on one of these cars.
Speaker 2:They had to slap a five-year, 100,000-mile, no questions asked warranty upon that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's interesting because it bought them the time and you know, clearly they made all kinds of business decisions other than just having the time to do it, but they did buy themselves enough time to create a place in the marketplace to be a, you know, a business economical right it was uh, you can save money and still, you know, have four wheels and a steering wheel. And look at those two brands now. I mean, just are they? They've done amazing things.
Speaker 2:I can't say that mitsubishi is going to do that, but you know we'll you ever know, a price and financing is their hook for mitsubishi or, sorry, for, uh, kia, hyundai. It was the warranty and that, you know, caused people to consider that over Shvera and over Honda to a pretty substantial amount. So there's always a hook for your brand and you just need to kind of lean into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure, absolutely true. Again, just kind of moving through some of this, although it's great, I mean we could stay on any one of these categories for a long period of time. But I want to get into a little bit to um kind of ad copy and creative. Um. Some of the best practices, I suppose, are tactics for writing good ad copy. People are always, uh, I think, wanting the easy way out, for some reason, on ad copy. People are always, I think, wanting the easy way out for some reason, on ad copy, and I think it's far more important than just you know the path of least resistance. But what are your thoughts on ad copy? How important is it?
Speaker 2:Super important. I mean, that's another kind of thing that I wish Google gave a little bit more clarity on. Right now we're using RSAs. We're migrating on from extended text ads. I don't even think you can add them anymore, so it's all just RSAs which have a ton of headlines and description lines. You let Google's AI engine figure that out, but what I see sometimes is an RSA that has multiple lines that say the same thing, because they really want that to be in the ad and they didn't pin that particular headline. So you'll see the ad served with come get your uh, come get your financing. Apply for your finance now talk to our finance consultants all within the same ad. It it's just like okay, clearly, whoever set this up thought that Google would share one, not all three of those variations, so that's a really important factor. I mean, the most important thing is you want to get some of the dealer speak in there. Every dealership has a different way of speaking to their audience, has a different way of speaking to their audience. For instance, tri-state Ford of Amarillo is number one competitor. For the last, I think, 50 years it's been Gene Messer Ford in Amarillo and their slogan is we don't mess around. So it's like they're playing on their name. So that's something that they wanted in there.
Speaker 2:A lot of dealerships have to be unique, so find those things that in the ad, because they do. That'll make your your clients, happy and it's it's effective. You want to reinforce whatever the brand messaging is that they typically have, but outside of that, you want to make sure that your, your ctas and value propositions are really on point. You know, for instance, we're talking about a truck. You want to talk about the engine in one of the ad lines. You want to be talking about how many miles you can go on one charge if it's an EV. You want to really talk about the NPG on all those things. That is a line for each one.
Speaker 2:If you're looking for something a little bit more general, like Ford dealership near me, me then you talk about what you have to sell. But you want to avoid repetitive copy and you always want to have two ads running because you can leapfrog for that way typically the way that works for us when we're optimizing ad copy again, you're looking at this all based on the account being built the right way and it's not 500 keywords with one ad that kind of speaks to everything. This is ad copy that speaks directly to people that are looking for hana series. You know so you, you can put all that stuff in there, the, you know your dealership promise your, you know the, the mpg of the crB capacity and luggage capacity, all that kind of stuff. But then you want to have another app that's kind of similar and you play them against each other and when you have the decided winner which I think takes about a thousand impressions to figure out, that can take two weeks, that can take one day. It really depends on the market and how much traffic you're getting through your accounts. But yeah, what we do is we actually leapfrog, we kind of leapfrog optimization model where we'll take the better performing ad and they copy in that. That's kind of similar but a little bit better from the viewpoint of our ad manager, and that's how we incrementally get the ads moving in the right direction.
Speaker 2:Quality score is not as big of a deal as it used to be. It used to be this incredible thing that if you wrote an ad with a bunch of basically keyword stuff that graphed out of your ads, you paid a lower CPC and you did, and that worked for a really, really long time and it works less well now. So you don't necessarily want to do that, but you want to make sure that the keyword of the product is there in the ad at least a couple of times. It's got to be in the headlines, it's got to be in a couple of the description lines so people know that this ad is not, you know, uh, a general honda dealer ad. It's a crb ad.
Speaker 2:So those are some of the best practices for A-B testing. Obviously, outside of just running split tests within ad groups, you can also create a sphere, miss, where you will try a bunch of other different things that you can try different audience segments. You can try hey, we're doing these ads against different A-types and stuff and see which one wins. But the thing that's a key to success in A-B testing is that you want to make sure that you're clear on what's the timeframe or the data timeframe that you want to be assessing ad performance in. If you have an ad that's only gotten 200 impressions, then you probably don't have enough data to make the optimization and then you'll over-optimize your accounts. That quality score keeps resetting. So you have to be cautious and kind of methodical with how you do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Again really good tips makes me think of things from the past. I'm like you know, just quality score, Just I kind of gave me a little bit of anxiety there for a second, just kind of gave me a little bit of anxiety there for a second. Just all of these different things that you end up as a business chasing. But in the case of car dealers, power sports dealers and a lot of businesses, for me it's the reason why I have to emphasize the importance of who you're choosing to do this on your behalf.
Speaker 1:I'm a big always have been, but very, very big fan of businesses, being smart enough to know how to choose someone that can do things that they would never be able to do on their own, on their behalf, Almost treating it as if these businesses are our businesses. We're trying to chase the type of success that we'd want if we owned your business. That's how good we are at what we're doing, and when I listen to you share these things in such great detail, it just makes me think of how important that is. I think it's extremely valuable for people tuning in. So I know you talked a little bit already on targeting audience segmentation. I don't know if you have any more thoughts on that before I pick your brain a little bit already on targeting audience segmentation.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you have any more thoughts on that. Um, before I pick your brain a little bit on on tracking, yeah, um, I think, in terms of, like, audience segmentation, it really obviously totally depends on who on that crm and those people are and what type of different buyer you have. If you're a motorcycle dealer, let's say you sell polaris bikes, indian triumph, uh, canon, all under one roof, you have many different types of buyers and you need to segment your products accordingly. But even within like smaller lineup brands like ford, there is a huge discrepancy in the type of buyer between someone who's looking for a $25,000 sedan and someone that's looking for an $85,000 lifted Pronto. Those are different human beings shopping for the same brand. They have different income levels. So, again, I think the benefit of having a segmented structure where you have sedans over here and you have your SUVs over here or higher ticket items, that way you can do things like bid up or down based on the income. And sometimes I mean I don't think you ever really need to exclude the top 10% of income earners, because if someone is looking for a Camry, a camry that's fine if they're multi-millionaire or whatever like, but what you do really need to focus on if you're looking at luxury products, um, you want to exclude the bottom 50 of the emers as much as you can, just because there's so much meat on the bone with that top 50.
Speaker 2:That's who you sell all your cars to and you will, incidentally, get a lot of that traffic anyway. And you will anyway because people are removing our viewers of control. You used to be able to be incredibly precise to the street. I remember with the Huffines group in Plano, we would draw lines like on streets, where we would target here and wouldn't overlap in some other viewership. That level of control is not. It's not really happening. So you have to know that, even if you do everything perfectly, you are going to get some mock traffic. You're going to get some people who Google didn't know what income level they were in. They were in others, so they saw your ad and they wasted your money, or maybe not. But that's a really important factor is segmenting your audience based on the income level for the product that you're selling. Yeah, I think that's the main thing.
Speaker 1:I love those examples and I think it's really important for the audience. Whether you're selling cars and trucks and SUVs or you're selling motorcycles, I think this also applies in the RV industry. I'm an RV owner as of last year not quite a full year of owning a travel trailer which I love. It's so, so fun, not a have to have, just kind of can you have. And I'm old now, Mike, so don't make fun of me. But but even knowing the differences between you know, jayco versus Winnebago versus you know, Keystone there's so many brands and differences, but not getting too far into RV.
Speaker 1:I think for the audience it's really important whether I guess I would focus mostly on automotive and power sports dealers, but in power sports, my goodness, it's rare that you're just Harley Davidson or you're a powerhouse Honda store and so you're only Honda product. It's much more common that you're like the Ride Now stores, where you have multiple brands under just about every single one of your rooftops and, my goodness, not only is that an opportunity for segmentation and proper targeting, it's almost should be a mandate. Like, yeah, you don't even want to start to spend money if you have 10 brands uh, you know, from ducati to suzuki. Yeah, those are two very different buyers. The guy who's got the money for a really hot italian product like ducati versus hey, it might be my first bike and I'm getting a suzuki or a kawasaki. That's important.
Speaker 2:So I love that you share on that, because I think it's really important his thing is when he's like audience segments apply for motorcycle enthusiasts, which I'm like, okay. Well, I'm going to sue all the motorcycles that have been sold in the United States. Most of them are probably under $9,000. That's probably the minority of bikes that are in that $30,000 to $50,000 territory which, if you're an Indian dealer, that's all you sell. Territory which, if you're an Indian viewer, that's all you sell. Their base level, indian chief I think is like $15,000 or something like that. When I bought my rider it was $12,000. The same bike now is $20,000. So if you are applying kind of general settings and you're kind of moneying, you're targeting for people that are looking for a cdo with people that are within a calisopi audience. Those people are not going to fit. You're not going to move that person over. So I think that's that's a very important factor as well yeah, I totally agree.
Speaker 1:It's, uh, one of those points that just kind of needs to be stressed over and over and over for those power sports dealers, because they don't all understand that or maybe they understand it, but the depth is really important. Tracking, measuring performance, of course, is really really important. Do you have recommendations or some things that you might say in terms of tools or metrics that businesses should be looking at, tracking and measuring for performance? I love that you share the kinds of things. That's why I'm asking a question like this, because you are equipping the business owners to have really insightful conversations, right, and there's just not enough of that and all serving all these industries. So what are your thoughts on maybe helping businesses around, how they would track, or metrics to measure?
Speaker 2:right. I mean, obviously, google analytics is free, if what most people shouldn't use. You have your crm that's hopefully set up correctly, and you have the blast. You have kind of two systems that that work and are both tracking, typically within gtn, but they'll say different things. So you you at least within a standard google ads implementation you get blast tracking, you get analytics and you can kind of cross reference each other.
Speaker 2:Um, however, not a huge fan of analytics G4 for a number of reasons, the main one being there are no more views. You don't have the ability to create a Google Analytics account anymore and say, hey, this is the raw data view, this is the POM view, this is the filter view, where we filter out all the traffic for our IP, which makes a lot of sense, especially in dealerships, where your team is on the website all the time, visiting your website hundreds of times a day. That absolutely will inflate your metrics. And again, if you're doing all users or marketing, guess who you're marketing to your own staff. So, yeah, that is definitely really important.
Speaker 2:We're starting to actually explore with other analytics systems as well. There's a couple of ones out there Clauseable is one that we're going to be piloting, sheep Analytics is another one, and these are already kind of cookie-less, because what we're facing right now is the deprecation of cookies. Luckily, thank God, it was postponed for another year. Uh, because google doesn't have. They have not figured this out and they keep warning us as agency and saying hey, if you don't have your first party matched in here and all the stuff, you're gonna lose this ability to track. And it's just like you mean you're taking away our ability to track users, like you're giving us less than civility into what moves the needle that absolutely benefits google, like it just you know there's a lot of changes.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of changes they could make to make your marketing more precise, but the less precise they make in marketing, the more you have to spend.
Speaker 2:So and that is absolutely a fact and there are absolutely cases.
Speaker 2:Um, I was reading a Search Engine Journal article on basically the case that Google has versus a bunch of plaintiffs in different states and they're talking about how Google absolutely rinsed the auctions, the removal of search terms under 10 impressions every month, every month.
Speaker 2:There's just a lot of things and that doesn't benefit dealers when they made their search terms change a couple of years ago where basically the data threshold that you had to be at in order for Google to say, hey, your Ford F-150 matched to the search term of new Ford F-150. If you get less than 10 impressions, it won't show it, it'll just say it was that keyword. Less than 10 impressions, it will just it won't show it, it'll just say it was that keyword. It will not show you those search terms. And for us, when we're doing our keywords plus minus sprint which is when we remove where we add negative keywords for stuff that doesn't make sense, for instance, for F-150 lift kit or something like that, if you get one or two impressions or clicks on that a month, you're not going to actually know where you're wasting your money, so that's definitely a very important thing to know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think for me it's been amusing to watch Google. I wasn't surprised at all that they punted that implementation for another year, because I haven't seen them say anything that would indicate that they figured out how to not actually shoot themselves in the foot in terms of it's gonna cost them money, like it's gonna eat into revenue when you take away, uh, some of those tracking capabilities like that.
Speaker 2:So it's they had turtledove, they've had all these different things which I just don't think work. And then some of them aren't gdpr compliant. So they're really looking for a solution. They'll work in the States and be compliant with California law and then also international law. So that's tough for them. But it would be really cool if you could have a setting Like, say, I'm in Texas, we're a cookie-free state, and then you have all of the options to target people the way you have been.
Speaker 1:And then other different options, but the tool's not quite as there. It's not there yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah they'll figure something out, and so it's always fun to kind of watch all the different goings on within this digital era. You had just a few minutes back you were talking about, you know, ai and search and I I think that's an area where Google will probably stay really dominant. Only because I don't know if you noticed this and this is a bit of a tangent, but for people that are interested, rand Fishkin of Moz fame and now SparkToro he posted just I don't think it was last week, it's in the last few days, but he, sam Altman or somebody it wasn't sam, but somebody was just saying all these glowing things about how, yeah, you're gonna go to chat gpt and you know it's gonna do better on search. And they literally said go do these types of searches, one of which was like find me some great places for lunch in town. And so rand did it in chat gpt I think what are we at 4.5? And he's like give me recommend some great places for lunch in seattle, and half of them were closed or not open and he wrote back.
Speaker 1:I love how rand just kind of won he's. I think he learned so much from the maz experience. He's a really pretty transparent um guy, but he was like this this is garbage. Like this is awful, all these businesses are terrible. And he then posted his sequence with ChatGPT of basically telling it these businesses are closed and we're like oh I'm sorry, let me get you a few more, and then it would same thing. So we'll see. Hopefully Google leads on that. That should be a place relative to AI, that they would be the leader.
Speaker 2:I think something wasn't on the agenda today, but AI in search is absolutely going to gobble up a couple of verticals. I don't think it's going to hit auto car sales that heavily, but I think it will massively impact fixed stocks. When you think about what Google has done historically with verticalized search and partners, back in the day if you were a travel agent for an airline, you would list with Expedia or whatever. Then Google came out with Google Flights. What do you think happened to all the traffic that used to go to TripAdvisor, that used to go to Hotelscom? All of those companies became substantially less valuable.
Speaker 2:I worked with someone that actually witnessed this firsthand when they were working on Hard Rock Casino advertising and then you could book your stay natively in Google and your flight like pretty much natively. That traffic didn't. You didn't go to the website. You lost that opportunity to remark it. So I don't think that that's going to be necessarily a threat for, like local searches or for like, say, you know, unit or inventory searches for for cars, for any search that's like hey, how do I, how, what's the best way to change an oil filter there that you're absolutely not going to be going to those content you're not going to be going to the places where the content is coming from. Let's put it that way you're going to be getting a distilled version of that that keeps you searching and interacting, because that is again what's going to be triggering the impressions which I mean. It's good, job security ads are not going anywhere. I was kind of worried the other day when I I thought that you know, gpt, fire or whatever was going to have a search engine in it.
Speaker 1:But, um, it's a really complicated problem and, uh, we'll see how it goes yeah, I, I, we're all finding this out at the same time, but there is so much nuance, and especially when you start to get into the niches and then the niches within the niches I say this all the time, I feel like a broken record on so many things, as I just say them all the time, almost every day but the automotive industry, the power sports industry okay, those are two niches alone. Okay, well, you get into the automotive industry and then what's your niche? What? Are you a CRM provider? Okay, what's your niche? Are you a DMS provider? Are you a digital marketing provider? Are you a digital marketing provider that doesn't do SEO? Are you only SEO? I mean, it just goes on and on, and on, and on. And it's so important to know all of those things before you even start thinking about how many salespeople you need or what your marketing strategy is, and you know what channels you're going to, you know spend money in, what ones you're going to try to optimize organically, and there's just so much to be thought of.
Speaker 1:And when I think about AI, about AI, I think, well, the nuance within all of those Niches. There's still an extremely important Part of the human Relationship with AI. That's still Going to be the champion. Now that doesn't mean that we won't see some things Develop like, oh, it'll blow me away, but I'm seeing so many things Around. Graphic creation and video Creation and the things you can do with mid-journey are still blowing my mind. It seems like every couple of weeks I'm like it does what now?
Speaker 1:But on this topic of you know, is it going to be able to do better on ad creation, everything you've talked about on this episode, mike, I'm not worried and I'm playing around with AI stuff and reading and consuming every single day. I'm not worried about any of it being able to do the things that you've talked about just on this episode anytime soon. I would, as a business owner, I wouldn't turn it over to oh yeah, let's let AI do it when I have somebody like you and your business that knows things that AI doesn't understand the nuance of. So but let me get back on track just a couple more minutes before I'm going to unfortunately have to land the plane, but I want to get your thoughts on a couple more things before we close. One on optimizing Optimization and ad fatigue are a lot and I'll give you an either or, if you'd rather.
Speaker 1:I would love to know your thoughts on when people just get kind of tired. I say this a lot you can fatigue your audience with your ad copy, with email campaigns, all those types of things. So yeah, we have enough time for you to choose one or the other. If you want to talk on optimization or kind of add fatigue, or if you feel like you can hit both, I'd love your thoughts.
Speaker 2:Fatigue is. You should be modifying your ads frequently. So with new copy it should reflect what's on their website and where you're going to get more. Ad fatigue is in display. It's in social ads, marketing ads, and you should be changing those out at least on a quarterly basis, ideally on a monthly basis. You shouldn't be getting fresh, creative and hitting people with different formats. That's, that's how you handle the ad fatigue. I don't really think of ad fatigue too much associated with search ads. Search ads do work the best, but I don't know if people remember necessarily what was in line for whatever. So I think ad fatigue is more kind of the visual. Obviously it applies to TV or any kind of video advertising.
Speaker 2:You absolutely want to change things up fairly frequently, just real quick on optimizing ad campaigns. In our workflow we have about 22 different things we do, but kind of the categories that your agency needs to be looking at or you need to be looking at in-house is time of day bid adjustments. What does our ad schedule look like? When are we serving our ads? Are we spending our money where we typically have higher density of conversions? How does that look? You want to be looking at that once a month at least. You also want to be applying a monthly kind of audit spread to your audience's income levels and making whatever changes you can to get more of what's working. You definitely want to look at targeting and say, hey, over the last 30 to 90 days, this particular zip code has been our absolute winner from a conversion standpoint, or these fine zip codes. Was that the case last month or month to date? You want to make sure that you're really looking at those things, because sometimes there can be a change things, because sometimes there can be a change and, um, you know and you've dealership love and then all of a sudden there's just a ton of intent that kind of disappears from an area that might have been kind of a neighboring as a cover market for both of you. So geos is something you need to be looking at all the time. You need to be excluding keywords that don't make sense for your business all the time, and when you do exclude them, you should probably add them to an exclusion template, because sometimes, uh, you'll find the truth spread out in a hundred different places.
Speaker 2:So for us, we have more than a hundred dealerships that we work with and if we look singularly at one store. We might not get enough data on keyword waste, but we'll get a little piece for one dealer, then we'll get something from another. We'll get a little piece for one dealer, then we'll get something from another and kind of in aggregate, we'll make our negative keyword lists smarter, more robust, with the understanding that our visibility has dropped by at least half. So those, I think, are the main elements Not over-optimizing to brand or spending too much on brand. You might have to spend like 10% and then not ensure spending the rest of your budget between bill or tours and inventory. You need to, on a monthly basis, be looking at your incentives, making sure that that's in your ad copy. Any kind of finance specials those are super compelling, always they are now, they're always the number one most valuable feature, even maybe including your creative. Those are kind of high level to be the main things that we would look at in an organization.
Speaker 1:Once again, awesome, awesome stuff For the audience listening and or watching. You can have a one-on-one conversation with Mike, and those are totally free. I can't imagine how much longer they will be. Just kidding, mike's very gracious with his time and you literally can have a one-on-one conversation. If you want to get in contact with him, go to premieronlinemarketingcom, but we've been cleared to land the plane. So, hey, look at that. Another great place to park, another great episode. We appreciate the comments and questions from the audience, so please, please, feel free to share. Your feedback helps us deliver episodes like this that are relevant. This also includes your comments. Might be a question or something that you want us to dig in on on future upcoming episodes, so feel free to jump into the comments, especially if you see this content on places like LinkedIn, facebook, instagram and definitely YouTube. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you soon right here on the Palmcast.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Shaw.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Mike.