I have been lucky enough to work with Google Ads campaigns in the automotive and motorcycle industry since 2014.
In many cases, dealers follow, in part or in full, the marketing guidelines set by the national marketing department of the car or motorcycle brand they distribute.
Most of the time, search campaigns are organised and managed on a national level, i.e. if a person searches for "Renault Paris", Renault will run search campaigns on Google Ads so the ad is shown to the user and directs them to the website of the local dealer.
If you have a dealership and you work with offers, used vehicles, leasing, new model launches, etc., Google Ads display campaigns will be of great help to you.
What's the difference between search and display campaigns for dealerships?
In search campaigns, the user searches for a keyword (in the example above, "Renault Paris", and the closest Renault dealer in Paris is displayed).
In display campaigns, the user is not searching for you that the time and will see our ad on websites or apps.
Important detail about Google Display Network from Google Ads:
Google Ads appear on over 650,000 apps, and the Google Display Network reaches over 90% of internet users across the globe.
Google owns the world's largest online display advertising network.
But who will see my display ads?
The audience that we will define.
We can segment people within X km of your dealership, of a certain age, at a certain time or on a certain day, by gender, by interest, by keywords and by behaviour. Campaigns can be ongoing (generic dealership campaigns, for example) or for defined periods (offers, new models, seasonal stock, etc.).
For example, if you're a Yamaha dealer, we can create a target audience of all the people who have visited websites of competing brands or specific motorcycle models, or people who are thinking of buying a motorcycle.
We also create remarketing audiences. This could be, for example, all users who have visited your dealership's website in the last 30 days.
In addition, if you have an email list of leads / customers, we can create a new audience with this data and add it to the remarketing campaign.
Let's sum up with an example:
If you want to advertise a new model that has just arrived, with display campaigns, we can show visual advertisements of the specific model to people near your venue who are potentially interested in this model, to people who have already seen your website and to customers/leads who already know you (from the email list).
A few facts and figures:
Click-through rate or CTR shows how often people click your ads vs how many times they are shown. This metric is a good indicator of how well your keywords match your advertisement.
Google Display Ads have an average CTR of 0.46% across industries. In all the display campaigns we manage for dealers, the average CTR of our campaigns is always over 1%, more than double the worldwide average:
Google Ads for Dealerships display campaign ads are a very effective tactic for any product that is visual in nature, like cars and motorcycles.
On to the next conversion!
Dean.