Sia, Moe, Pat and Mike Go over Some Last Minute Details Before the NADA Conference In Las Vegas 2012

websites.

Too many dealer websites are full of text and pictures of cars, yet lack the personal touch of employee photographs.

For this reason, we updated our staff page to show photos of our office support staff so you know who you’re talking to on the phone. Please check it out here.

Normally you have no idea how the competition is doing digitally, but we were shocked when we looked at these numbers. We were able to see all statistics only to realize why this rooftop needed a new GM. This is a classic example of old school General Managers running dealerships while spending most of their budget on television, print and mailers and neglecting their digital presence.

The first thing we did was look at the backend of dealer.com to see what kind of leads and traffic they were getting. The number wasn’t good at all, and here are some screenshots to prove my case:

This Store Only Received 78 Leads This Month

Our store received 391 leads so far. A Huge Difference

As far as traffic goes, we use a unique combination of SEO, Google PPC, Blogs with Unique Content and “social signals” from websites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to obtain the most relevant visitors possible. We were very excited to see the difference in traffic as well:

This website only received 1,569 visitors this month.

Compared To The Other Numbers This Website Saturates & Dominates Their Market

Now I’m not going to tell you exactly how I do it, but I’ll give you something to think about. I’ll also show you what we do different and maybe you can figure it out, but it’s obvious it makes a difference.

First I want to show you how strong this Hyundai Dealership’s website is by showing you a few examples. I could search all day with West Palm Beach Hyundai keywords, but I’m not going to go that route. That would be way too easy.

Note: Before I perform any of these searches, I clear my cache and delete all cookies so the results aren’t biased. Always do this when checking rankings. I also use a browser I don’t normally use, like Safari.

The first search I did I kept my location where I am now, which is in Miami. I did this just to show this search has nothing to do with my location. Not only are we number one for that search, Google gave us sitelinks. Very rarely will you see a car dealer get sitelinks unless it’s their dealer name. Sitelinks issued from Google is the ultimate pat on the back.

I went ahead and did another search flipping the keywords around and look, still number one and more sitelinks. This time I changed my zip code to West Palm Beach so I could show you our AdLogic Google Adword’s  Tool in action.

I flipped the keyword phrases, yet we're still first and we still have sitelinks. You can also see our adlogic tool in action.

Now I’ll start with a long tail keyword search, but I’m not going to make the easy West Palm Beach searches, I’ll make it harder by including “Florida” instead of “West Palm Beach”. This Hyundai Dealership sells a lot of Hyundai Genesis’, but they are aggressive and they want even more sales. They asked us to emphasis on Hyundai Genesis related keywords, which we did:

Thanks To YouTube, SEO and AdLogic We Dominate The Page 4 Times

Before Microsites were killed off by Google, we used to use the Hyundai Genesis website shown towards the bottom to help with sales. A while ago we decided to put our resources elsewhere, yet it still shows up on good searches like this.

Here is a tougher keyword phrases:

This is a great keyword phrase to rank on, and we're there 3 different times

So here is one more, then I’ll show you a little of how we do this:

Here is a good ranking for another Hyundai 2012 Model. Notice the YouTube Video again? That's our very own Danielle from Showroom Logic

Our formula consists of a unique blend of old school Dealer SEO and some modern methods:

1. Backlinks: In today’s internet world, backlinks still play a key role in search engine placement. Dofollow links are definitely the best, but I’ve seen nofollow links help as well. It’s really hard to find good juicy backlinks for car dealers, but they’re out there.
2. Social Signals: Think of a social signal almost the same as a backlink, only they are coming from social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. All of these links are nofollow, but Google crawls the heck out of them and find these links pointing to your website. That is why we have our Twitter and Facebook Tool, and it helps out a lot. Our Facebook inventory app goes directly to the vehicle detail page of every vehicle, and all of the search engines crawl them.
3. YouTube Videos: Besides the social signals you can get from YouTube, you must remember that more people search YouTube than Yahoo or Bing. It is the second largest search engine in the world. I’ll be the first to say that robo videos don’t work, but if you do them yourself with a real person your YouTube Channel will take it’s course. A good way to judge a dealer’s YouTube channel is video views, but what makes it truly successful is having people favorite, like and comment on your videos. How often does someone like or comment on your robo video? Robo videos are spam, and Google knows it. People don’t want to see commercials on there either. I know a dealer that spends $2,000.00 a month on these spammy commercials that target long tail keyword searches that nobody searches for.

Just so you know I’m not blowing smoke about the videos, look at this report. This is just the past 30 days:

More People Watched These Videos Than Visited The Dealers Website

Google Self Driving Car - Click To Enlarge

Original Source: http://www.aptusinsurance.com/google-driverless-car.html

Certified Google Adwords Partner

During the past year, Showroom Logic has been collecting and storing massive amounts of data regarding Google Pay Per Click advertising from our AdLogic software. Some important metrics collected were cost per click (CPC), Click Thru Ratio (CTR), Average Placement and conversions.

From our own Google Adwords accounts, this data comes from over 896 million impressions and $4,402,084.75 dollars spent.

To make our product even better, we recently obtained the largest scarcity index in the automotive industry. We cannot tell you from who, but this will be announced in the near future (hopefully in time for the NADA in Las Vegas next month).

Now that we had so much pertinent data, we had to figure out what to do with it. Last month we hosted a think tank with qualified people from all over the car business and outsiders familiar with other industries. After a couple of days, we came up with this:

Showroom Logic's New Algorithm

This week we brought all of our programmers to Miami along with the most respected Google PPC Guru in the United States. Together we finalized our new algorithm and it will be up and running by February 1st for the 2012 NADA Convention in Las Vegas.

If you want to learn more about our product please contact Matt Weinberg at the phone number above right to arrange a meeting at the NADA Convention. If you don’t plan on attending please contact Matt to schedule a phone call or webinar. We also invite you to visit the Homenet Booth at NADA to learn more about it.

There are many car dealers out there who manage their own Google Adwords Accounts. Here are a few reasons why you should allow Showroom Logic to manage your account:

1. Direct Technical Support From Google: We have a team of 4 from Google that helps us manage our clients accounts. We have direct phone numbers and email addresses, so issues can be resolved quickly.
2. Google Adwords Certified Teams: Our teams are well trained and Google Adwords Certified.
3. Transparency: With AdLogic, you will have full access to your Google Adwords Accounts, giving you the freedom to enable your own campaigns if you’d like. If you ever cancel AdLogic, your Google Account is still yours.
4. HIGHER Click Through Ratios & LOWER Cost Per Clicks: Many people don’t realize the complex ranking system Google has. This is known as a “quality score”. Every keyword and phrase you bid on is examined by many different factors, including the landing page, the CTR of the ad and many other factors. To the average user it may seem like a simple auction because Google asks you how high you want to pay for each click. Google cares about it’s user experience, so this is not true. If you have a better quality score than your competition, your add will appear before them AND you will earn a lower cost per click. Our algorithm can save you thousands of dollars in just one month.

Showroom Logic is always working to make our products better, and below is a perfect example. This particular car dealer was doing their own Google PPC campaign for used cars until they hired us. We added our campaigns on December 31, 2011 and they paused their campaigns on December 26th of 2011.

Comparing AdLogic To Traditional Google PPC

If you compare the data you will see how much money we already saved them. They paid $904 in just 10 days of running ads on Google. We came in and produced the same amount of clicks for a little over $300.00 in the same amount of days.

Our next blog post will be about tracking conversions properly and how Bounce Rate in Google Analytics is irrelevant in the car industry.

After reading about Google’s latest algorithm update, I started poking around to see if any major car related websites took a hit. Although I’m not a big fan of Alexa Rank, I do visit Alexa.com to see other data.

What I found was interesting:

30% Of Internet Users Come From Google Before They Visit AutoTrader, and 29% Go Back To Google After They Visit AutoTrader

Now it’s common knowledge that AutoTrader dominates as far as traffic goes, and they’ve secured the number one Google Organic Serp listing for “used cars” and other highly relevant search terms. For obvious reasons, a car dealer should at least have their inventory on AutoTrader. It’s well worth the money.

So what advertising should come next? Cars.com or local newspaper classified sites? In my opinion you should be advertising on Google. Matter of fact that should be the first choice, because it’s no secret that 80% of car buyers start out on Google.

If you look at the above screenshot, 29.85% of AutoTrader’s visitors go back to Google after they visit AutoTrader.com. If you think about it, that’s a lot of people.

Here’s another interesting screenshot I took while researching Cars.com:

Cars.com Data Was very Similar

For this reason alone, you should be advertising on Google with Google Adwords. I’m sure most dealers have attempted to create and manage their own campaigns, but without a lot of research and conversion data the cost per click will usually be twice the amount as an AdLogic Google Campaign.

Another important factor is support. Have you ever tried to call Google for help? Good luck if you haven’t, it just won’t happen. We are lucky to be a partner with Google, and with that we get 4 Google reps that we can call directly with any issues or questions.

Every 3 months we either visit Googleplex or they come to our Miami Office and share some very valuable data with us. This allows us to continuously improve AdLogic.

We have some huge changes in our algorithm coming on January 1st, 2012. Some the the features include:

1. Better New Car OEM Campaigns: We’ve been collecting data from millions of searches, and we now know what keyword phrases convert into a lead or phone call better than ever. Now we can adjust the bid on every single keyword depending on the conversion rates.
2. Scarcity Index: We have exclusive rights to the automotive industries largest scarcity index, and we rolled this into our algorithm as well. Now we can adjust bids depending on the popularity and price of a dealer’s vehicle.
3. Aged Inventory: We can also give our dealers the flexibility to stop running ads on vehicles that have been on their lot for any X amount of days.

If your in the car business and you don’t know who Tom Stuker is, you need to get out from under your rock. Tom and his team

You Will See Him Pulling Up To A Dealership In This Car

have helped over 15,000 struggling car dealerships in his career. To show how busy he is, he recently logged in his 10 millionth airline mile and he was even featured on CNN.

The new reality show is properly titled “Car Lot Cowboy“, showing Tom and his two assistants help struggling car dealers change their ways. I was lucky enough to be involved in an episode in Florida, but I had to sign contracts to secrecy. I can’t say anything until they do.

I will say this about Tom Stuker: The guy is legit. I was skeptical at first, but after meeting him and seeing him in action he earned my respect. It is my belief that even if this series only lasts one season, car dealers will buy the DVD collection and use it for training. It’s that good.

During the filming I was involved in, the cameras and microphone booms followed us around for 6 straight days. It took a while to get used to, but the whole experience was fun.

“The episodes shot to date feature both new and used dealerships in New Jersey, Florida, New Orleans, South Carolina and California. One hour-long episode features a Chryslerdealer who rebuilt in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and runs a food bank to help the community. Another dealer he attempts to help prefers attractive but untrained women in the showroom over knowledgeable sales staff.”

From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20111209/AUTO01/112090353/Reality-show-tackles-struggling-auto-dealers#ixzz1g4MnzmzN

Be on the lookout for it’s January 2012 debut on Spike TV.

News Miami Location For Showroom Logic

This week we opened up at 13155 SW 134th Street, Unit 107 in Miami Florida.