A Quick Note About Your Customer’s Privacy & Your Websites
If you plan on using different microsites, be sure you think about how to secure your contact forms. Your customers put their trust in you, and if you make it easy to find their information I’m not sure they would appreciate it much.
I was just looking at the live stats for one of my dealers websites. This particular website has Google Adsense Installed, and one of our ads popped up.
The customer clicked it and was brought to my site. I saw that the url had a session ID on it, so I clicked it.
There was all of the womans information filled in. You should all make sure you are not using sessions ID’s like this:
When I Clicked This URL, All Of the Womans Info was on there (still). I blacked out her info
How To Get A Friendly URL For Your Facebook Pages (Fan Pages Or Personal)
Many people wish there was an easier way to promote their Facebook Fan Pages on print or TV Ads. Well I have good news, there is and it will take you about 10 seconds to do it.
You can do this with personal pages as well. For fan pages, you must have at least 20 fans before Facebook will allow you to do this.
1) Click http://www.facebook.com/username (or type that in your address bar and hit enter)
2) The first screen will let you change your personal page (you must be logged in). I already changed mine, so now it will show me my other pages by clicking “set a username for your pages”.
Click "Set A Username". You must be an admin of the fan page to do this
3) If you’re an admin of more then one page like I am, simply select your page from the drop down menu. Now add your Keywords. Note: You cannot undo this, so put some thought into it. Consider a keyword domain like:
http://www.facebook.com/napleton.orlando or http://www.facebook.com/used.cars.tampa
You must use periods instaed of dashes. When you done, click "check availability"
Remember, Facebook recently changed it’s privacy settings. Fan Pages will now show up on Google, Yahoo and Bing searches a lot easier. That is why you should consider a keyword domain if you don’t plan on promoting your fanpage with newspaper, radio or TV ads. If you want both, find a happy medium and just make it easy to remember.
It's that simple. Now Click Confirm and You Are Done
Better Tip For A Friendlier Domain Name:
Go to Godaddy.com and buy a domain name for 10 bucks. Once you create it, log in to your domain manager and redirect it to your Facebook Fan Page URL.
Here’s an example: NapletonFans.com This will make it easy for them to get fans when they start their newspaper campaign they are planning.
When You Advertise With Google PPC, Should You Opt In To The Content Network?
Everybody has a different opinion about the Google Content Network. When you pay for clicks using Google Pay Per Click, you can choose to have your ads displayed in Google Search and/or the content network.
The content network is a collection of news sources that display Google Ads, and every time the ad gets clicked the advertiser gets a piece of the action.
Personally, I feel the content network is a great way of branding. One of our dealers in Tampa Florida received an astounding 4,448,514 impressions. Out of that number, all but 152,562 came from the content network (the rest came from actual searches).
When I dug a bit deeper to see what kind of websites are in the content network, I could clearly see where each visitor was coming from. My most important metric is pages looked at per viewer from each source.
In order, here are the best performing referring websites:
youtube.com
automotive.com
allpar.com
internetautoguide.com
motortrend.com
automobilemag.com
automotix.net
autobuyguide.com
ehow.com
about.com
cars.oodle.com
ford-trucks.com
autos.aol.com
autos.kosmix.com
automotiveforums.com
nytimes.com
squidoo.com
trucktrend.com
amazon.com
epinions.com
autoguide.com
Google does not charge you for impressions, that is the great part. I compiled all of the data for all of the car dealers that use our inventory adwords tool. I did some simple math, considering how many clicks they had.
Tips To Make Your Own Campaign More Successful
If you want to try create your own campaign, follow these simple tips:
- For each ad group you make, be sure to have the keywords in your description.
- For each ad unit, be sure you are linking either directly to the vehicle page or to the vehicle category page. If you choose to send them to just your homepage every time you will have a very poor quality score, which could double your cost per click.
- Be sure each landing page is optimized. This highly affects your quality score.
- Be sure to include keyword or keyword phrase in url Google asks you for. When you set up each adgroup, Google will ask your for the actual url, and what the url will display. In this field, enter your keywords like yourdealer.com/Toyota-Camry.
You want to make your life easier? We will give your actual inventory (new and/or used) 1,000 impressions in both networks for only $2.00. That’s right, only 2 bucks. All of your inventory will show up on Google Searches and networks in your area. These impressions will only come from vehicle related searches and articles, they are simply the best you can get.
Here are the rules:
- You must use our landing pages (we get better quality scores)
- You must send us your inventory feed
- All leads will instantly go to either an email address or your lead management tool
- Minimum amount of impressions desired must be at least 500,000 (This will cost $1,000.00)
- You should provide us with a trackable 800 line for tracking purposes
- You select your radius (25 miles, 50, 75 or an entire state)
Questions? Send an email to mike@showroomlogic.com
A Great Way To Handle Sold Vehicles Without Losing Search Engine Traffic
Here is a screenshot of our live stats. As you can see this just happened.
Last month I blogged about how Dealer.com created 301 redirects when a vehicle was deleted from a car dealers inventory feed. Judging from the comments and emails I received, there are more companies doing just that.
Showroom Logic has been doing this for a while now, but we handle our sold cars a bit differently. We don’t create the 301 redirect for a certain amount of time.
What we do is simple, and I will show you some screen shots below. Just a few minutes ago, I was looking at my live stats for a car dealer I service in Orlando Florida.
I was shocked at the keyword we ranked on from a Yahoo Search. We ranked number 2 in the entire country for the term “used 2010 camaro ss“. I thought it was cool because no local keywords were used, like “Orlando” or “Florida”.
This Visitor Just Arrived From Yahoo Using A Long Tailed Keyword Phrase
This particular car dealer is a Jeep Chrysler Dodge Dealer, and I knew they didn’t have any Camaros in stock. They did have one a couple of months ago, but it was sold very quickly.
I clicked the link and the below screenshot was the page I was presented with. This is one of our landing pages, and if you see it says that the vehicle has been sold in yellow on the top of the screen. The idea here is to show similar vehicles, but because this dealer doesn’t normally sell Camaros we had to show them something. If they had other Camaros they would of been listed on the right.
This Landing Page Is Now Marked As Sold
The great aspect of this is the fact that the car will not show up on the homepage of the miscrosite. Go ahead, see if you can find it: http://www.used-cars-orlando.com.
It is now only a landing page. Many times I blog about a particular vehicle and send a deep link to the car page. If we simply deleted the cars as they were sold I would not only have dead pages in the search engines, I would have a blog full of dead links.
Another words, I would never have received this visit if I didn’t properly handle my sold inventory. After a certain amount of time, we will remove this car. However, when we create our 301 redirect we will send it to the closest matching car.
The next time Napleton gets a Camaro in stock, that vehicle will get some good link juice!
Our Showroom Logic Microsites are custom coded, and we have so many features similar to this in our code. We love competition and we love technology, that is why our software and our efforts will propel your dealership to the top in your city.
White Labeling is available. Email mike@showroomlogic.com for more info.
AutoTraders Trade In Market Place A Great Way To Get Leads And Quality Cars
One of the dealers I service signed up for Autotraders Guaranteed Trade-In Marketplace last month. They wanted my help in promoting in for the Orlando Florida area.
I currently run 2 blogs for them, plus a microsite. Each blog post I do performs well in the search engines, plus each post is sent out as Facebook and Twitter Updates.
I was a bit skeptical at first, because I felt it was AutoTrader’s way of getting backlinks from many dealers to further juice up their website. Lately, Autotrader has been getting their butts kicked in the serps from companies like Cars.com and LemonFree.com.
Before I did anything I checked out where the affiliate link would go. I was relieved to discover that it went to a page with no external links or internal links pointing to AutoTrader.com. On the second page of the process there were some links, but they were using Java Script so I wasn’t worried about giving them any link love.
If they were doing this to get backlinks, I would of included the “nofollow” tag. For now, everything seems legit…but they can always change it later on.
After adding it to their car blog and a few other places, I noticed some decent traffic from the keywords I selected. Last week when I was talking with the internet sales director, I expressed my concern about “due credit”.
If I am going to flow traffic to this program, I hope AutoTrader isn’t going to get all of the credit. I sincerely hope that AutoTrader monitors where these leads actually come from, and offers the data to each dealer.
So far, it seems like a great program. They’ve received some quality leads and purchased some decent vehicles from the public. I think it’s a great idea, for two reasons:
- Autotrader will guarantee the amount to the dealers if there is a miscalculation.
- The prospect doesn’t have to trade in the vehicle, they can just sell it outright if they wish.
I would definitely recommend this program. At a cost of a bit more than a G a month, I see big potential in this. I would love to see some comments or concerns from others about this program.
Rogue Car Dealers Using Software To Automatically Flag Other Dealers On Craigslist
This Dirty Little Tool Will Flag Any Post You Want
Craigslist is a great way for an aggressive internet sales manager to get some decent leads. Last week, one of the dealers I service was complaining about getting flagged. He thought it was odd because he was getting flagged so fast.
Craigslist never has told us how many different people it takes to have a listing flagged, but many people feel it’s between 8 and 11. The flagging needs to come from all different IP addresses. This dealer was getting flagged in minutes, and there was no way that 8 to 11 people were sitting around waiting for him to post just so they could flag his listings.
Even with semi automatic posting tools, it still takes some time to post your listings. It can be very frustrating if you spend a better part of your morning posting your new or used inventory online only to get flagged later on.
The problem is there is now software available to have anyone flagged you wish. This software will hide behind a proxy so all of your flags will come from a different ip address, so it will look genuine to Craigslist. I blurred out the name of the software just because I think it’s garbage. If you look at the screen shot, you simply copy and paste all of the url’s you want to flag.
This is a dirty trick, and I would never endorse such a black hat method. If you see this happening toyou, lay low for a while. I post many times for many different dealers, and I don’t get flagged. Here are a couple of tips to prevent flagging:
1) Do not post a whole bunch of cars at once. This annoys people, and you will only catch the attention of the rogue dealer and the genuine people who will flag you for real.
2) Post no more than 5 vehicles a day, and do it either early in the morning or later on at night. I usually wait until after 10:00PM because the other dealers are sleeping. My best results come from posting on a Saturday night. Many people browse the car listings on a Sunday morning because they are bored. How do I know this? We use live stats, and it will tell me when somebody visited out website from a Craigslist posting.
Watch Your Traffic Come In Live. These are only the people that clicked through to our website. This doesn't count the hundreds of people who just clicked the ad.
One Craiglsist posting will stay live for 90 days, and it’s important to realize that. Craigslist has a keyword search tool, so one post will get 90 days of traffic. If you posted a 2008 Ford Mustang anyone who searches for that term will see your ad. It’s also important to remember that Craigslist posts show up in Google searches.
If you post 5 vehicles a day, that’s 150 cars a month. If you use a posting tool, be sure it includes multiple links to your website. What you really want is to get the user off of Craigslist and send them to your website. That’s what our tool is designed for, and it works.
For one of my dealers in Florida, I average about 300 visitors to their website a month from Craigslist alone. Showroom Logic also tracks impressions. You can easily do this as well if you host the image on your own server. Let’s say you post a 2007 Dodge Ram. The Ram will have it’s own image name, and you can look at your weblog to see how many hits it received.
One of my dealers has a 2007 Jeep Wrangler that received 3,000 hits so far, so that goes to show you how many people are looking. Some states like Utah don’t really use Craigslist, but Orlando Florida is one of the hottest markets in the country for Craigslist.
If your dealership doesn’t have a good Craigslist tool than I recommend you sign up for Showroom Logic. For only $300.00 a year, your live inventory can be added to our network of websites and you will have unlimited use of our Craigslist tool.
Send mike@showroomlogic.com an email to get started. We currently service any car dealership (new or used) in the United States.
How To Add Vehicle Inventory To Facebook Fan Page Or Personal Page
This is an example of what your Facebook Fan Page will look like if you follow these directions (Click to see it live)
Facebook is currently the second largest website in the world. Next to Google, it can be a very powerful source. The great thing about Facebook is it’s price, which is free.
This post is designed to help internet sales managers beef up their fan and inventory pages. Before I proceed, I want to share the numbers that Facebook shares on their press page.
- Facebook has more than 400 million active users
- Half of them log on to Facebook EVERY DAY
- More than 35 million people update their Facebook Pages every day
- A total of 60 million updates occur every day on Facebook
- There are over 3 billion photos uploaded to Facebook every month
- More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
- Only 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
- More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
- Average Facebook user has 130 friends
- Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
- Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook WOW!
- Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
- Average user becomes a fan of 4 Pages each month
- There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
- People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
I really hope you’re getting the big picture by now. Facebook is a great way of networking, and if everyone at your car dealership gets involved you could see a spike in sales.
Think about this. Besides your internet department, you have numerous amounts of sales people. Chances are, many of them have personal Facebook pages. As the stats above mentioned, the average Facebook user has 130 friends. If your dealership has a team of 10 salespeople and they all get involved, this will result in your inventory being displayed to 1,300 different people every week. The great thing is these aren’t just “people”, they are friends of your sales staff.
There are many conflicting ideas from social media sales consultants as how a dealer should utilize Facebook. Many feel they should simply have a tab on their Facebook Fan Page to display a link to their inventory.
I strongly disagree with this. The problem is simple. When you build a Fan Page the hardest thing is to obtain fans. Let’s say you work hard and get yourself 300 fans. How do you plan on getting them to come back to look at your inventory? You are forced to send them all emails when you have something cool to share. But, how often is that? Weekly, monthly?
This is why I am a big fan of inventory status updates. Most car dealers update their inventory on a weekly basis. If you automated your new inventory with your status updates, your inventory will be in the face of those 1,300 people plus all of your Facebook Fans every single week.
Whichever Facebook solution you like best, I will show you how to do it. I would recommend using both methods.
Facebook Directions:
1) Before we even start with your inventory, let’s beef up your page a bit. Facebook allows your image to be 200 pixels wide by 494 pixels tall. If you have access to Photoshop or Gimp, you can easily do this yourself. Gimp is a free open source graphics editor, and you can download it here.
Note how Park Automall took advantage of this taller image: Park Automall’s Facebook Fan Page
2) Now lets work on your inventory tab. This particular dealer likes to promote just one vehicle, with hopes that they will click to the website. If a user clicks any of the smaller images that is exactly what will happen. The visitor will now be on their microsite.
The first step is to add the tab to your Facebook Page. Here are some easy directions:
- Log on to your Facebook account. If you’re adding this to your fan page, go to that page.
- In the Facebook search page, search for Static FBML, then click the Static FBML application link (or click here)
- Now click the “view application” link on the right.
- Close to the top on the left hand side (under the little logo), click “add to my page”.
- The box that appears will show you your personal page, and any Fan Pages you are an administrator of. Click your desired account.
- Now you can simply go to that page and click “edit page” on the left.
- Scroll down a bit and you will see FBML listed under application. Click “edit”.
- Now you will see a big empty box. In the small field on the top, name it accordingly. Whatever you call it is what the tab will be named when viewing your page.
This large box is for FBML Code. Known as Facebook Markup Language, it is very similar to HTML. If you ever built websites in the 90’s using Microsoft Frontpage or Dreamweaver, you will find those programs once again to be very helpful. So now, you have 3 choices:
- Use your Craiglist Posting Tool if you have one. Copy the code to your clipboard and simpleypaste it into the box (press control and “V” or right click over box and click “paste”). There is one number you will need to find and change. You want the page to fit on your Facebook Page, so you will have to find it and change it yourself. In this case, it was towards the top of our code that the Showroom Logic tool generates. By default it was “750″, meaning 750 pixels wide. I manually changed this to “550″. 550 pixels is the perfect width for your Facebook page.
This example shows that your FBML code will look like
- Use an old version of Microsoft Frontpage or something similar. Generate your own html and paste it into the box. Remember, you won’t be able to upload any images, so be sure to properly link to any images you include.
Here is an easier example. I hosted this image on a Wordpress Blog. Click to see the Dealers Fan Page)
- Use an online WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get”. There are many free ones online, including this one. Play around with it. When your done, click source on the top left of the box and copy that code. Now paste it into your FBML box.
Click save and you’re done! Now test it out. This is what ours looks likes when finished:
The Finished Product. When any thumbnail is clicked, the user is now on your website!
So that wasn’t so hard was it? Now let’s create status updates with your inventory and or blog posts. I like this feature because it updates other people’s walls as well, and it’s great in your face advertising.
This can be done on a personal Facebook Page or a Fan Page. There are 2 ways to accomplish this. If you want to use a free third party application like RSS Graffiti, you can read about that here.
Otherwise, you can utilize your “notes” feature on Facebook. Ultimately your Facebook Fan Page will look like this:
This is an example of what your Facebook Fan Page will look like if you follow these directions (Click to see it live)
The important thing to note is the fact that these updates will also appears on your Fan’s wall.
So, let’s do it:
- Be sure you are logged into Facebook, and click here.
- Simply copy your RSS Feed url and paste it into this box. That’s it! Save it and your done.
This example shows how we mashed 6 different RSS Feeds into 1 using Yahoo Pipes
We go a bit further with our clients, and you can do this yourself as well. We not only include their inventory, but their blogs. To accomplish this from more than one source, just create a Yahoo Pipes Account and you can mash 2 or more RSS feeds into one. For Napleton, we use their inventory RSS, and 2 different blog RSS feeds. You can even include your YouTube RSS feeds!
Just play around with pipes for a while, you should be able to figure it out. After you mash them together, Yahoo Pipes will give output one RSS Feed for you to paste in your Facebook Notes section.
If you have any questions, feel free to comment below. Private questions can be sent to mike@showroomlogic.com.
Evidence Of The Power Of Backlinks To A Car Dealers Website
Goerge W. Bush Was Google Bombed?
If you ask any internet sales manager or director in the car business this one question, it is most likely they will say the same thing:
What is the single most important factor in optimizing a car dealer website?
Most will say keywords, Title Tags, etc… My answer has always been backlinks, and I finally have the evidence to prove it. But first, let me give you the most famous example that happened a while back.
During George W. Bush’s presidency a bunch of webmasters got together and linked to his biography website with the link text saying “miserable failure“. We call this a Google Bomb because what the link text says (anchor text) is one of the most important factors in optimizing any website.
What happened was simple. Anyone who searched Google for the term “miserable failure” was presented with the top 2 organic (free) listings pointing to the actual White House Website. The second listing went directly to George W’s biography page. So, was the official website of the White House optimized for the term “miserable failure”? Certainly not.
Google had to make some dramatic changes to it’s algorithm to keep this from happening in the future, and even Google’s Matt Cutts said the change was “completely algorithmic” and “we’re not going to claim it’s 100 percent perfect”.
After Google made this change a new tactic hit the world of SEO, and it was referred to as “Google Bowling“. To beat the competition, a rogue SEO company would bombard their competition with a massive amount of links from low quality websites pointing to a website. This would trigger a Google penalty that would kick them off their desired listings. This is why you never want to build too many links too fast.
Google did place a defensive mechanism in their algorithm to combat this. I know this because it happened to me. I put a shady alleged DMOZ editor in his place on a popular forum, and the next day he tried to Google Bowl me back when I was in the seafood industry. To my relief, it did not work. Thanks Google, good looking out!
Anyway, to prove how important backlinks are, I found a query I can use as an example. I was Googling the term “used cars in Orlando” this morning and I found a Ford dealer in Orlando Florida that came up on page 2 for this term.
Normally when you Google any term, you will see the keywords in bold in the website’s title tag and description. With Orlando Florida being one of the hottest used car areas in the United States, I was shocked to see that this was number 11:
This Google Search Didn't Even Have Any Keywords In It
If you notice, the words Orlando or Florida aren’t even mentioned in the display. If you Google that term, you will see websites with great keywords even on page 10.
This is an example of how powerful backlinks can be. There are many websites out there that will check your backlinks. I like Backlink Watch because it shows the bad links with the nofollow attribute.
You can click that term to learn more about nofollows, but basically any nofollow link will not pass relevancy to your website The same goes for javascript links (search engine bots don’t even try to read java scripts). If you plan on obtaining backlinks to your website, you should learn the difference.
A great website to check your current backlinks is Back Link Watch. You can also check your competition’s backlinks. Any backlink you find with the term “nofollow” next to it you should disregard.
For example, this particular dealer had many backlinks from yellowpages.com, but they are all nofollow. These backlinks won’t provide any SEO benefit to the dealers website.
There were some juicy backlinks from Netlook, an Orlando Used Car Listing Website, and some miscellaneous directories shown for this car dealer.
As an internet sales manager it is your job to acquire backlinks. There are thousands of directory websites out there that are free, and there are also some juicy paid directories like Business.com and the Yahoo Directory. Each of the two cost $300.00 a year, but you will get your moneys worth in Organic Traffic.
Keywords are still important, and I cannot believe that this dealer in Orlando doesn’t have any keywords in their title tag. I don’t blame them for being naive, so I would blame the vendor that built their website. The first thing they should have done was put the proper title tags on the homepage.
If you are an internet sales manager, I suggest you subscribe to this blog on the top right. We will provide you with a wealth of information on a weekly basis so you can personally take your dealership to the top!
If you have any suggestions for a topic, send an email to mike@showroomlogic.com.
Our Google Adwords Tool Performs So Well It Is Now Guaranteed By Showroom Logic
Since the inception of our automated Google Adwords tool for car dealers, we have come to realize how powerful this tool really is. We have had the opportunity to see stats from previous marketing companies hired by dealers to manage their Google Pay Per Click Campaign.
After the initial 30 days of tweaking, our campaigns perform so well all of our dealers pay less than half per click than they’re used to paying. During this short month of February, one of our dealers received over 3.8 million impressions. Their average cost per click was only $1.10, having received a total of 3,625 clicks.
If you do the math that’s almost $4,000.00 in Google Fees. Are they complaining? No! They actually called me and asked me to increase their campaign to a 75 mile radius. This campaign alone is selling over 30 extra cars a month!
There are a few companies that try our method, but they don’t have the secret weapon we have. Our secret weapon is co-founder of Showroom Logic Patrick Bennett. You can see him in person speaking at The SMX West conference in March.
Now that we have this program fully tweaked, we are prepared to offer our guarantee. After 60 days, if our campaign doesn’t outperform your current or past Google Adwords Campaign you can use it for FREE Until it does. Here are the facts:
- The reports we match must be actual reports from Google itself (no Marketing Company Spreadsheets)
- Budget amounts must match (We recommend always starting with a $2,000.00 monthly budget).
- We guarantee that our cost per click will be less than what you pay now.
- Our software can be used with your current website, or a Showroom Logic microsite.
- Our software is only $500.00 a month (no contracts)
Most people go to Google first, it’s a fact. Get the traffic for every new and used car on your lot before anyone else does.
Call Mike direct at 863-666-0130 for more information.