Click To See It Live

A few months back, Napleton Jeep Chrysler Dodge in Kissimmee Florida bought the former Clermont Chrysler Jeep Dodge in Clermont Florida. Obviously they needed a new dealer website, and they were unhappy with their choices.

The entire Napleton group was using Izmo Cars, but they were replaced by Dealer.com on the first of this year. The management was unhappy with this decision, so they opted out of a dealer.com site and kept Izmo on a month to month basis.

Dani Lunsford called us and sad “Hey, why don’t you guys just build us a website”? At first we said that wasn’t something we offer, but after thinking about it we decided to go ahead. Our unique code was already built because of our microsites, so the rest would be easier to put together.

We learned that car dealers don’t have the time to use the tools offered by companies to edit their own websites, they just want to sell cars. They’d rather pick up the phone and ask for a change to be made.

Another factor was templates. Why would you want your website to look like every other dealer website?

To start, we asked them “what do you want this website to do and what do you want it to look like”? The sky was the limit, and after creating an approved layout Patrick Bennett went to work on the coding. He put on his headphones and tuned in just like the guy from The Social Network.

Patrick Bennett is a partner and cofounder of Showroom Logic. This is what makes us so special, most dealer website providers were started by x car guys with contacts. They would have to hire coders to build what they wanted, which usually came from overseas. When the work was done, so were the coders. A good coder is very expensive, so it would be hard to keep one on the payroll if you didn’t make changes all the time. As you can see by any dealer website provider, they hardly make changes at all.

We can make a change in as little as a day, and we will do this for any of our dealers. Some have some great ideas, like a dealer group we’ve been working with in Utah & California. One of the General Managers came up with a great idea, and we will be putting that to life real soon. Check back later for details, my lips are sealed.

Ok, back to the subject. This new website was launched yesterday, and we still have a few tweaks to make in the next week. My 2 favorite things about it is:

Advanced Search Filtering

If you can appreciate a nice web 2.0 layout, you will appreciate this advanced search filtering:

Click To See A Live Demo

If you look on the left you’ll see what I mean. This website has plenty of white space which allows the user to keep clicking by filtering their search.

Advanced Vehicle Detail Page

Clean, Sleek Vehicle Detail Pages

The vehicle detail page itself has a clean look, designed to keep the user engaged. We also make sure to pull similar vehicles at the bottom of the page to keep the visitor clicking. Napleton has the edge from most of the lazy car dealers out there because they shoot actual photographs of their new and used inventory. Most dealers use stock photos, which renders their entire new car inventory useless. People hate stock photos, ask anybody.

We have plenty more to add, and in the next couple of weeks it should be 100%.

Our next launch will be a gigantic multiple rooftop dealer portal that will be based on the IP location of the visitor. This dealer group is in several states, and I am looking forward to the launch. Our coders and design team have been working on this diligently for the past 90 days, and you will soon see some more technology that isn’t available anywhere!

]]> http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/showroom-logic-launches-1st-car-dealer-website.html/feed 3 http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/the-coolest-websites-a-car-dealer-can-advertise-on-for-a-fraction-of-a-penny.html http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/the-coolest-websites-a-car-dealer-can-advertise-on-for-a-fraction-of-a-penny.html#comments Sat, 13 Nov 2010 23:50:36 +0000 Mike http://www.showroomlogic.com/blog/?p=854 There are hundreds of different ways for a car dealer to advertise online, and the most overlooked is Google. Sure, they all bid on the same keywords for search (car dealer, honda dealer, used cars, used car dealer, etc…), but those will cost you 3 – 4 dollars every time somebody clicks it.

I’m talking about the Google Content network, and “eye balls”. All major newspapers participate in Google Adsense, including the New York Times. Other large websites like YouTube and Myspace also participate. Every time a user clicks a Google Ad, the website gets a piece of the action.

Let’s say you’re a Toyota Dealer. If you select the proper keywords your text or image ad will be displayed in an article your local newspaper writes about a Toyota Camry, and it won’t cost you a penny unless somebody clicks it.

This is a fantastic way to not only advertise, but it’s a very effective branding tool. The cool thing is the control you get. When setting up your campaign, you can tell Google to only show your ads in a 20 miles radius of you dealership, or you can choose 10, 30, 100 or even your entire state. You can do the whole world if you want.

We use text ads and image ads for our campaigns, and the image ads get incredible results. So far this month, a car dealer in Tampa received 250,738 impressions for a cost of 0.0024536368639775383069179781285645 per impression. You will not get these numbers

Google Image Ads, Powered By Your Inventory

anywhere else, even on your own website.

The great thing about this is they’re image ads, not text ads. Now you can only pay for clicks, and have hundreds of thousands of impressions showing your logo and your inventory.

Our software creates these ads with every new and used vehicle you have in inventory. When clicked, we can have them go to any website you want. Dealer.com, Izmo Cars, Cobalt, etc…

How for the cool part. Here is a list with screenshots of high traffic websites we can advertise on for a fraction of a penny:

1) Gmail

More and more people are using Gmail these days. When you go to your inbox, you will see Google ads. When you open each email, ads will appear depending on the text used in the email.

True Story: The other day we sold a car to a woman in Tampa Florida. After the sale, I chatted with her to find out exactly where she came from. She was a lead from our website, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to know how she found the website. She was looking for a late model preowned Chrysler Sebring. She found one at a car dealer about 15 miles away, and inquired about it. She got an auto response saying “thank you for your inquiry on the 2008 Chrysler Sebring…..” to her gmail address. When opened, she saw our text ad just like the example below. She clicked it, and ours was a better deal. She showed up and bought it. Now that was cool!

When using the Google Content network, Your Text Ads Will Show Up (Ad Highlighted In Yellow)

2) Motor Trend:

Motor Trend is a very popular website. Here is an article about a Volkswagen Passat. This dealer happened to have one in stock and the ad showed up (image and all) 3,792 times so far this month, for a cost of only $12.92. All viewers were from a 50 mile radius of the dealership.

Motor Trend Showed This Ad 3,792 times for only $12.92 so far this month

3) YouTube

YouTube is the third most popular website on the planet. Google owns YouTube, so of course they’ll put image ads and text ads on there. Check this out:

This Is One Of Thousands Of Videos Your Ads Will Appear On

Here is something even cooler. This text ad for another dealer we service in Orlando Florida comes right over the video:

Look At Napleton's Ad Show Up Inside The Actual Video

4) Car Forums

Car Forums are very popular, and there are thousands of them. Combined together, they provide the opportunity for targeted advertising for pennies.

2 Different Ads Appeared On This Dodge Challenger Forum, Both Were Our Dealers

5) Forbes.com

Forbes.com is a very popular website, and you can also have you ads appear here.

Forbes' Article Mentions a Hummer H2 And Presto!

6) Automotive.com

They do very well in the search engines, and they get a ton of trafffic

This article was about a Volkswagen EOS, and look, Park Auto Mall happened to have one in stock

I could go on and on, but I won’t. Just think of the value of this great tool. All we need is your inventory feed, and we’ll make it happen. Email patrick@showroomlogic.com for more information.

Say goodbye to the tacky FMBL tabs for you dealer’s Facebook Fan Page, and hello to the best application available. There are a few decent apps out there, but we want the users to go directly to your website, not a microsite when they click.

Our New Facebook App Goes Directly To Your Website, Not A Microsite (Click picture for demo)

Download The Application Here

It doesn’t matter who you website provider is. Check out the app for Park Auto Mall. If you click any vehicle, you will go right to the vehicle detail page of their actual website. This great Facebook application will also work with dealer.com, Cobalt and just about any website vendor out their. In fact, as long as they’re not using I-Frames you’re good to go.

How do you get it on your facebook page?

Simple, contact matt(at)showroomlogic.com or call 1.800.683.7940

Look at what the New England Patriots did 2 weeks ago. They traded their star wide receiver to the Minnesota Vikings for a draft pick next year. See?  They’re already thinking about next season. They are planning ahead.

The same applies to developing your internet saturation properly. Besides a properly formatted SEO friendly website, you need fresh backlinks to your website on a weekly basis. Clean backlinks that is, not links from Facebook or Twitter (they don’t count).

It takes time and hard work, but it can be done. I want to use this screen shot as an example. Park Auto Mall has been our client for a year now, and thanks to our process they are reaping the benefits:

For This Long Tailed Keyword Phrase, We Ranked 4 Different Times On The 1st Page (Read below to see how)

The Process:

During the past year we’ve been busy setting up microsites and blogs, and slowly building links to them. Our objective was to use these microsites to rank on Bing & Yahoo, and to pass authority to the dealer’s main website to rank on Google.

Now that each platform is mature, Google is starting to love us so we are getting positive traffic flowing from all 3 search engines.

Once each website achieves positive traffic, we analyze the analytics reports to decide which keyword phrases convert best. To me, a conversion isn’t an email contact. In the car business people tend to do a lot of browsing before they contact a dealer. I am happy with a low bounce rate and many pageviews for each user.

What’s Working Best?

We haven’t had to do any link building to many of these websites in months because of the lack of competition. All of our competition comes from third party websites, not dealer websites. I found what works best is something that most dealers won’t do anyway. So I will go ahead and share my secrets:

1. Youtube Videos: We make a few videos a week at Park Auto Mall ourselves. We use our actual employees, and we have fun doing them. If you visit Park Auto Mall’s You Tube Channel, you will see the views the videos are getting. We’re getting almost as many daily views on YouTube than traffic on our website, so basically our traffic doubled. Do not waste your money with “robo videos”, nobody watches them. Videos like this get lots of needed attention:
2. Tag Your Videos Properly: Be sure to fully tag and title your videos when they are done processing on YouTube. Learn more about tagging YouTube Videos here.
3. WordPress Blogs: We have a few blogs set up, and we provide fresh content for each on a weekly basis from our bloggers. Content is still king, and finding content for a car dealer is easy because you have so many unique vehicles to write about. Besides the content, we embed each video in a blog post after it is fully rendered on YouTube. This will juice up the video itself, and the YouTube Video and the Blog Page will show up in Google searches. Be sure to tweak your WordPress Blog Properly.
4. Backlink Development: The more backlinks you have pointing to your website from different domains (with different IP addresses) the better you will do. The more relevant in the content the linkee is, the better you will rank. It’s that simple. Build links to your website, or have someone else do it. Don’t get too many too fast.
5. Social Networking: Let’s face it, you’re a car dealer and people tend to not like you. Good luck to you if you’re going to rely on your Facebook Fan Page you made for your dealership. You need to get your employees involved,and you can do this without even asking. Simply add out-takes to your videos. Keep the serious stuff at the beginning, and add the fun stuff at the end. People will pass the videos around to all of their Facebook Friends saying “ha ha..look what I did”. Every month or so, we throw a blooper video together and pass that around, like this one:

Tips For Hiring A SEO Firm:

Use A Professional Company:

Unless you truly know what you’re doing, I would suggest using professionals. Be sure to hire a company that has experience in the car business because it’s a different animal than selling socks or real estate. Check their references, and ask to see analytics reports of existing customers. Watch out for the band wagon jumpers, there are many companies out there that offer SEO. The problem is, they have no idea what they’re doing.

Don’t Expect Much For The First Couple Of Months:

Having a successful internet presence takes time. It’s like planting a seed, and it has to be nurtured on a daily basis to grow. That is why I use the Hail Mary pass as an analogy. If you do too much too fast, you risk getting penalties from Google. Don’t do it, it’s not worth it. Google is very smart and they don’t tolerate suspicious backlink surges.

You Get What You Pay For:

If you’re going to shop at the Bargain Basement for SEO services then best of luck to you! Remember, you get what you pay for. Anything under $1,000.oo a month will have no value. there is too much work involved from skilled people. Also, never hire a foreign company, especially companies from India. They are known as ‘The Cesspool Of the SEO Industry” in the SEO Community. Be sure that the US Company you hire doesn’t farm out their work to India either. I’m sure there may be a few decent companies abroad, but it’s not worth the risk. They do a lot of black hat stuff, and they could get you penalized in Google.

OK, I can’t help but to think of Doug Flutie when I hear the term “Hail Mary Pass”, so here it is:

Newest & Fastest Tool For Craigslist

Having an internet sales staff of 6 full time employees gives Mike at Park Auto Mall plenty of help meeting internet shoppers half way. They’ve always been posting their inventory to Craigslist, but it was hard to keep the staff motivated because they know the lead will come to the internet department and whomever answers the phone will get the lead.

With the help of Showroom Logic’s newest Craigslist tool, the problem is solved. Each salesperson can now not only post automatically, but they can have the ads go to any website they want and they can use their own cell phones numbers for the ad.

Since they started using this last week, the amount of self generated leads have quadrupled. Mike says “I usually come home at night and post about 5 vehicles on Craigslist. After I post I always look at who else is posting at the same time. Lately I have been competing with my own staff, and it’s great to see the tool getting used by the hungry ones.”

Mike loves it when they do it from home because it’s a different IP and we don’t have to worry about Craiglist suspending our accounts. Some of them even have their spouses do it.

What I like best about this software is my staff doesn’t have to log in to any website to use the tool, so I don’t have to give them any passwords and they can do it from home as well

“It’s a win win for our dealership and the staff. Some people will click through to our money site, which is what I want. This weekend alone, we had over 2oo people click from Craigslist and the bounce rate was only 8%. The average amount of vehicles looked at was 15 and the average time on site was 13 minutes. Online credit applications are up over 600%, and obviously the leads and appointments are up as well. What I like best about this software is my staff doesn’t have to log in to any website to use the tool, so I don’t have to give them any passwords and they can do it from home as well. They simply go to the posting page on Craigslist and the boxes appear. I have about 6 different vendors that include Craigslist posting tools, but I don’t use any of them. Why would I want to take the time logging into a website’s backend and choosing templates when I don’t have to?”, says Mike.

Mike also does some experimenting. Sometimes he’ll have the add click to one of their high definition YouTube Videos, and sometimes their blog. But he especially likes being able to point to our main money site. “Just because my staff is posting now doesn’t mean I’ll stop”, he says.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the new tool: (Click each to enlarge)

Now Our Car Dealers Have Full Control Over What Website You Want The Viewers To Click To, & What Phone Number To Place On The Ad. The 3 boxes on the top is all you need to fill in. When you click "load" everything fills in automatically

Whichever phone number you included will be displayed on the ad. When a user clicks any of the photos or more details they customer will be brought to whatever url you pout in the box

This Craigslist tool comes with a complete microsite and is available for only $200.00 a month. Contact Patrick Bennett at 801.400.9178 to get started or email us at sales@showroomlogic.com.

White labeling is available.

Look At Your Dealer Stats:

You may be proud that your bounce rate is at 20%. I don’t want to rain on your parade, but look at your top 10 keywords. I would bet that most of them contain your dealer name right? This searches are looking for you, so you can be assured they will not become a bounce. I’m sorry to inform you, but you cannot really credit that with your internet department. These are people driving by your dealership, or perhaps someone who saw your TV ad and forgot what your domain name was. Now I would hope that you rank first on all of your dealership’s queries, but you really can’t count that as seo. That’s a gimme.

The more organic traffic you get, the higher your bounce rate will be:

Here’s the problem. Yourself or a good SEO company will obviously optimize your website or misrosite for local traffic, using city and state related keywords. It wouldn’t make sense to target the word “Chevrolet Dealership”. Not only would it be costly, but why would you want Alaska traffic going to your website if you’re located in Miami Florida? If it was an easy keyword to rank on, I’d say go for it. That would be a great Google Map Phrase to advertise with the local business center, but to rank on that keyword phrase in searches would cost 10′s of thousands of dollars.

The reason why your bounce rate goes up is simple. The more you optimize your website, the more organic traffic you get by accident. This morning, my Orlando Dealer got a visit from a user that searched for light blue toyota sienna 2009 on Google. There was no mention of the word “Orlando”, or “Florida”. Here is another example:

The odds that this click was from the Florida area is pretty slim, therefore this will be a sure bounce. The more of these impressionsyou get, the higher your bounce rate will be. This unique long-tailed search term was number one on Google out of 3/4 of a million websites.

This was an accidental visit, and the odds of that person being located near Florida is pretty slim. That keyword phrase even shows up in Google’s UK Servers. So the odds of this visitor becoming a bounce is favorable.

How a bounce is calculated?

“A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.” – Says Wikipedia

This makes it obvious that you have to be careful which stats program to use. Never trust stats that a vendor gives you. Always use a third party program like Google Analytics. If you use a vendors stats, they can set their bounce rate to be “anyone who enters and stays for more than 2 second will not be a bounce”. I have also found that many stats programs count spiders as visits. That is so wrong! You know how many spiders are out there crawling around? Some shady SEO Companies can write bot codes to crawl your site too, to make it look like human traffic.

This is what Google says about their bounce rate:

“Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.” —Says Google

Now if you were selling CD’s which could be shipped anywhere, this wouldn’t be applicable to you, but you are selling a high dollar items. Cars that many people just won’t buy without kicking the tires, or seeing it in person. Why would somebody from California buy a car in Miami Florida? Unless it’s Jay Leno, I don’t see it happening.

There are factors in other niches as well:

“While bounce rate is a useful tool for e-commerce sites, it is of more questionable value for sites such as news and information, where many visitors go to scan headlines and conduct research, and can find what they want immediately on the entry page. Indeed, for any kind of informational site, sophisticated users are likely to bookmark a page within the site, which then becomes their personal entry page, check it (e.g., for sports scores, the price of pork bellies etc.), then bounce right off. The page will have done its job, but might still have a bounce rate above 80%, bringing up the average for the whole site. For such sites, metrics such as returning visitors vs. new visitors might be more informative and should be used to understand the overall picture better.” —-Says Wikipedia

Read more about Bounce Rates on Wikipedia here.

This is what the image ads will look like

Our new Google Adwords Image Ads will start next week, and you will soon see them all over Florida. Many car dealers opt out of the Google Content Network because of the amount of impressions and clicks. It typically accounts for 60% or more of a dealers PPC Budget.

The content network is more of a branding tool, compared to opting into the search network. This tool will create a better branding presence because people just love photos.

I’m most excited about seeing the cost per click and impression reports. From the existing Google Adwords Content Network, there is an absence of car dealers utilizing the image ads, so we are hoping for a very low cost per click.

Each image ad will pull an image from the actual car listing, and overlay a price. If the article is about a Dodge Ram, the software will find a Dodge Ram in the dealer’s inventory and display the appropriate ad.

I am really excited about this! Once this is done, we will finish our Facebook Ad Application which will basically do the same thing.

Many websites who participate in the Google Content Network display image ads. The fact is, image ads cost less and there aren’t many companies utilizing it, especially car dealers. For this reason, we are launching a new photo image tool for car dealers and Google Adwords.

This tool will generate photo ad campaigns for a car dealer’s entire inventory (new and used). Let’s say MotorTrend writes an article about a 2007 Ford Mustang. Our software will create an image ad that will actually pull an actual image from the dealers website of the vehicle and display it.

This software will create image ads with your actual inventory photograph and display it through the Google Content Network. NOTE: This isn't one of our ads, it's just an example where you ads will show.

We also plan on making this work for Facebook ads as well. The tool is almost done, and it should be up and running in about 2 weeks.

Park Automall in Tampa Bay Florida will be the first dealer using our new tool. They have been using our regular Automated Google Adwords Tool for about 4 months now, and they know the value of it. For this reason, we are creating another website for them that will compete with our existing site, and it will be using the image ads with the regular text ads.

If you don’t know about our current Google Adwords Tool, you should look into it. Google gets 80% of the internet searches. It is the first place every dealer should try and be.

The reason is simple:

Most people search for “Ford Mustang”, “Used Ford Mustang” and “Preowned Mustang” plus a few other search phrases. A car dealer can hire the best SEO Company in the world and try, but you will not rank on keywords like this…ever.

Don’t you think it makes sense to show up on Google every time a user searches for your new and used car inventory?

Think about it. You’re selling cars right? There are thousands of people searching for every make and model you have on a daily basis.

Check Out These Stats:

1. Their ads showed up 5,004,061 different times in the past 30 days. Over 5 million impressions!
2. Just the phrase “Ford Mustang” was searched 6,617 times. 252 people searched for “Ford Mustang For Sale”. The total count for all search strings related to a Ford Mustang was 629,464. If you’re not on that page you are missing the boat.
3. Park Automall has over 200 vehicles in stock, so check out some of the other phrases they owned:

• Suzuki Forenza: 127,111 impressions from all Suzuki Forenza Related Search Strings
• Jeep Wrangler: 292,555 impressions from all Jeep Wrangler Related Search Strings
• Ford F-150: 323,395 impressions from all Ford F-150 Related Search Strings

I could go on and one, but I won’t. It sounds like common sense doesn’t it? The ownership at Park Automall is aggressively involved in all of their advertising. He’s a visionary, and he does things no other dealer does. That is why they lead Tampa Bay in car sales.

His secret weapon is the Google Adwords Campaign. He uses AutoTrader and Cars.com, but only the basic packages available. The Internet Director over their wants to can them both, but the owner believes that every dealer should be listed on their.

Be sure to subscribe to our updates (up a little to the right) so you can see out finished product is dome for our new image ads.

You can also learn more about fishing where the fish by watching this video:

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:

1. For each ad group you make, be sure to have the keywords in your description.
2. 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.
3. Be sure each landing page is optimized. This highly affects your quality score.
4. 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:

1. You must use our landing pages (we get better quality scores)
2. You must send us your inventory feed
3. All leads will instantly go to either an email address or your lead management tool
4. Minimum amount of impressions desired must be at least 500,000 (This will cost $1,000.00)
5. You should provide us with a trackable 800 line for tracking purposes
6. You select your radius (25 miles, 50, 75 or an entire state)

Questions? Send an email to mike@showroomlogic.com