June 7, 2024 • 62 mins
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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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to the POMCAST.
In this episode, we'rediscussing strategies and
tactics for maximizing thereturn on your investment in
paid search ads yes, and alsoimproving that return on your ad
spend, of course, roi.
(00:21):
We're joined again by thefounder and CEO of Premier
Online Marketing out of Austin,texas, mike Schaub Yep.
He's our expert and you'll beeducated once again by his
insights, tips and real-worldexamples, which will definitely
help you and your businessoptimize your paid search
campaigns effectively.
So, without further ado, mike,how are you, by the way?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
How are things?
Doing great, doing great.
It's a beautiful 100 degree dayin Austin, texas, can't
complain.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah, boy, I'll tell you, the storms have been
rolling through Texas here thelast couple of weeks.
Right, indeed, they have.
Yeah, well, speaking of stormyweather, there are a lot of
dealers out there and for thosejoining the episode, either
listening and or watching we'rereally going to talk and try to
contextualize this episode.
Today, a lot around theautomotive industry and for
(01:12):
dealers and 2020, and really itstarted probably in 2023,
there's a lot of stormy weatherfor dealers as they try to get
their arms back around themarketplace being much more
competitive.
So I'm excited to get into thequestions today and I really
want to start.
I like to start most of theseepisodes with you, which, to you
and I probably feel a littlebit elementary.
(01:32):
Sometimes we fly right pastthings like can you, does a
dealer even know what ROASstands for?
And a lot don't.
So I just want to start there.
Could you explain what returnon ad spend actually is and why
it's really important for beingable to evaluate your ad
performance?
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, so return on ad spend, roas or a lot of people
say ROI, but essentially it'syour profit margin that you make
above the cost of youradvertising.
So if you have a cost per weanthat is too high, you will have
a lower return on ad spendbecause the amount of money that
you needed to spend to go getthat traffic, to get that lead
(02:15):
and get that sale ultimately itkind of cut into the margin.
So obviously you want to haveas good of an ROAS as possible
so you can have the highestmargin health possible.
But yeah, that's return on adspend.
You want to make sure thatyou're not running a negative
(02:38):
profitability campaignassociated with the channel but
there won't be a lot of leads orthe cost per lead will be so
high that when you end up doingthe math on a, say, a campaign
that has a cost per lead of ahundred bucks or more, you're
like, okay, well, it takes 20leads to sell this bike or this
car and the margin on that caror motorcycle is $2,000 or less.
(03:00):
Or in that ballpark, so you caneasily less, or in that
ballpark.
So you can easily, very, veryeasily spend too much money on
traffic or spend it in the wrongplaces and have a negative
borrowing campaign, meaning thatyou're actually spending money
for every car that you sell.
So that's a pretty crazyconcept.
(03:22):
Can you think about badmarketing management, like if
you were the finance manager ofa dealership and you're writing
a $500 check and giving it tothe buyer of every car that you
sold, because that's how muchmoney you use?
But sometimes it can be veryhard to evaluate it.
It's hard to kind of reallypinpoint where the waste is.
(03:43):
So that's kind of a huge partof the work that I've been doing
and the work that we do here atPremier.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, all of that's so critical and I don't think a
lot of dealers, and I'm going toback up and not just say that
this episode is really valuablefor car dealers and also for
power sports.
If you're a dealer sellingmotorcycles, atvs, side-by-sides
, what am I thinking of is apersonal watercraft.
These are also really importantconcepts for power sports
(04:13):
dealers, and so you're justsharing some things that I don't
think I've ever actually hearda dealer themselves articulate
themselves, articulate, um howyou, you could be in uh kind of
this uh negative equity around.
You're actually spending moreum to acquire these
opportunities or to actuallysell the units and, um, without
(04:34):
knowing that boy, you end up ina real ugly place when it comes
down to looking at your p&lstatement absolutely and kind of
one other thing on that.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
It's not like the business as usual right now,
where it's may 8 24, the, theamerican consumer is about as
squeezed as they have been.
Consumer debt is at all-timehighs, financing is all-time
highs, so if there were a timewhere your buyer might just sit
it out and try to keep the theclunker running for one more
(05:05):
year or whatever, now is thattime.
So you have people that aregoing to be doing a lot more
window shopping, less buying,and that increases the costs for
everybody.
I think one other thing to noteon ROI for your marketing is
that it really should be whatleans your decisions around,
where you allocate yourresources, your spend your
(05:26):
keywords that you've been onspecifically, where you target,
where you don't target, um, soyou can run your ads for maximum
profitability yeah, those arereally, really great tips.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
I'm guessing that the the beginning of all this, like
just setting up campaigns, isso critical.
Like what would the keycomponents of making sure that
these campaigns for for searchare set up correctly, I guess to
give yourselves the best chancefor success, so that you don't
run into some of these kind ofpositions of negative equity or
(06:02):
just kind of setting yourself upto pour gas on the fire and
burn through budget when youdon't need to be?
Can you share some of thosethings Like just successful, I
guess, initial setup strategies?
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, starting out correctly is literally so
important.
And the biggest issue that Isee with fall of digital
marketing campaigns is theagency that we're typically
competing against.
Applying their template andbest judgment, which is kind of
external from what the customerhas.
They try to impress thecustomer and show them hey,
(06:35):
we're targeting, you know thestandard 20 mile radius around
the dealership or if it's arural area, maybe it's 50 miles.
We have these different adtypes that are that are in place
, but it's extremely rare thatwe'll actually see campaigns set
up in a way that they can besuccessful and then become more
successful.
So, a few things that we lookat and we do.
(06:58):
An recommendation and this isby no means going to be the full
list, but just kind of the mainkey items is to dive deep into
your CRM to understand yourcustomer.
No, cheap markets are createdthe same, and I think we talked
a little bit about the Bentleysand Highland Park versus
Mesquite last episode.
That's a great example.
(07:20):
Where have your customershistorically been selling?
Obviously, if it's a brand newdealership to market, it's a
different scenario and you aregoing to have to use the best
judgment and all of that.
But typically when we work witha dealership.
We're working with a store thathas worked with a lot of other
agencies.
They're kind of sick and tiredof getting a 7 out of 10, and
(07:40):
that's not working for them.
So when they come to us,they're looking for more control
.
We're looking toward granularityand I have never had a
circumstance where I've asked acustomer hey, have you leveraged
your CRM data or first partydata to enhance the targeting of
your campaigns?
The answer is always no.
It's just not a question that'sbeing asked often enough.
(08:00):
But if you have a dealershipthat's been around for a few
years five years plus eventhey're going to have so many
transactions by zip code thatyou can leverage to, um, better
target your customer, um,they're going to tell you, it's
going to tell you who thecustomer profile is for that
dealership, and they're verydifferent.
You know four dealers.
For instance, we will fourdealers in west texas and we
(08:22):
will book one in aspen.
So it's like they're not thesame person, they're not the
same buyer everywhere.
So it's.
You know you have to really bedialed into.
What is the information we havein our CRM that we don't look
at and don't leverage?
And that is the most valuabledata mine for getting in front
of that demographic data.
Another thing that's reallyimportant is to build with
(08:46):
control in mind.
So what a bad implementationlooks like and stick with the
Ford dealership example would befor them to have a branch
campaign, which would beGlenwood Springs Ford, have a
dealer terms campaign, whichwould be like Ford dealership
near Aspen or for dealershipveil you know that is actually
(09:08):
where the vast majority of thesearch volume is.
But then typically what you seeis they have an inventory
campaign where sedans, suvs andtrucks are all jammed into one
campaign and they're just likewell, that's the inventory
campaign.
You want to throw everything inthere, but the problem is, uh,
most dealerships don't carrythose units evenly, so you need
(09:29):
to be able to ratchet spend upand down based on what they
carry, especially over the lastfew years, with inventory being
super inconsistent.
That would be the funny thing.
I'm going to account, do anaudit and be like you're
spending most of your money on,you know, ford edge or, uh, some
lower value when you want to bespending your money on f-150s
(09:52):
but you actually don't have acampaign that's set up for that.
So back to the.
The way to do it is you want tomake sure that you're
segmenting by products and youwant to be as granular as
possible.
You want to avoid having asituation where you have more
than a few hundred keywords in acampaign.
It's very rare that you'regoing to have more than, say,
(10:12):
300 keywords in a campaign thatare all really relevant to each
other as a category.
So what we recommend issplitting out campaigns by
products and making sure thatyour ad groups are really tight.
So a good example would be newFord F-150, 2024 Ford F-150, you
(10:36):
know 2024 Ford F-150 for sale.
You know those are differentkeywords.
You know those are differentkeywords.
They all are Ford F-150keywords, but they should all be
in separate ad groups becauseyou want to arrive your ad as a
response to the specificquestion that they're asking.
Most of the people will justsearch Ford F-150, buy Ford
F-150.
They'll kind of be very shorttail.
(10:58):
But you want to make sure thatyou have all of those ad groups
split out.
You want to make sure that yourSUV spend is certainly not
messing with your sedan spend orvice versa.
So you're going to want to makesure you have that all split up,
and the main reason for that isyou can control audiences at
the campaign level.
You control your spend at thecampaign level and one of the
(11:18):
biggest pain in the asses thatI've ever had to deal with in my
career running ads is when yougo into a campaign that has a
thousand keywords and you have abunch that are performing
really well, but they'redifferent product categories and
they've been running for a longtime because dealercom set it
up five years ago and they havea bit of a calcistry to them.
(11:42):
So you're like, ah, I reallydon't want to mess with this
campaign styled in and optimized, but if I want to control SUV
spend, I need to move these sixadverts down the campaign over
here and then are starting fromscratch.
So you kind of want to beginwith the end in mind and just
have a really robustsegmentation strategy for your
dealership or for any of theproducts that you offer.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
I remember well.
Now it's several years ago.
This was well.
Let me just give two points ofreference, because I've known
you for a long, long time and Iknow that, going back into your
first few years in digitalmarketing, that wasn't a topic
the single keyword, ad groups,or I don't know if it's even
(12:28):
called that now, but I do knowthat you built a multimillion
dollar digital marketing, mostlyaround paid search, for a
pretty big company in the autoindustry.
That's still around today and Iremember at that time you were
advocating and waving the flagfor single keyword ad groups and
(12:48):
that just account setup.
It was a lot of this, butyou're even sharing more detail
now.
So I can one thing I would justfor people that are tuning in
and listening on this topicGoogle continues to advocate
ease of use in their platform.
That was the original inceptionof Google AdWords for the small
business, small medium-sizedbusiness owner.
(13:10):
Hey, now there's something youcan do yourself.
And then they realize well, no,the automotive, power sports
verticals, rv verticals, marineverticals the more they also
want business owners in thosecategories.
(13:31):
So if you're a dealer of any ofthose industries that I just
mentioned, google wants you tobelieve that the platform now,
with options like performance,max campaigns, that it's all,
just jump in there.
Even yourself, like you, canfigure it out like it's it's
really doable.
But it's not really true andI'm not going to say that
(13:51):
google's purposely trying todeceive businesses that way.
But it is still reallyimportant for businesses to
understand that and you'vementioned things like this
before.
But the institutional knowledge, the, the, the experience of,
of being able to say, well, Iwas there in the beginning of
all of this and this is how it'schanged to today, is so
(14:15):
important so that you don'twaste money, so that you don't
chase things that are fool'sgold like well, I'm dependent on
the co-op payback, so that'swhy I'm going to do this.
That's like the worst decisionever, and yet it's still a thing
for a lot of dealers.
And so I love how you go intothese details.
It's really important.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
I'm going to light 70% of your budget on fire so
you can get half of it back.
That's the co-op argument whichis it's interesting, and the
problem specifically with thoseco-op programs is nobody that
has ever done any digitalmarketing at all makes the
decision on who the vendor poolgets to be.
That's based on who bought thebest steak dinner or took their
(14:55):
clients to Sapphires in Vegas orsomething, but it's definitely
not based on a robust audit ofall providers.
We actually just had asituation with Genesis recently
where we tried to get into theirprogram.
They've only got three agenciesin there and none of them are
good, and we're like, hey, we'redoing this incredible work.
We've provided them with a casestudy.
(15:16):
We're a brand new store in avery difficult market for
Genesis.
This is such an expensiveproduct.
They were just not interested.
They're like we're not pursuingthis.
At that time, I'm like yourclient.
The dealership owner is askingyou guys, uh, for this
opportunity.
Let's at least have aconversation.
But anyway, I could.
(15:37):
I could uh go on and that Idon't want to get too off track.
But yeah, it's, it's super.
The the issue that I have atgoogle as a platform right now
is that it's um, they don't tellyou how to do things correctly.
Again, let's talk abouttargeting.
I think probably your adtargeting is the most important
aspect of getting the right typeof customers.
(15:59):
You want to make sure that yourspend is allocated more to the
zip code than to the city, oreven to the micro radii than the
zip code, depending on more tothe zip code than to the city,
or even to the micro radii thanthe zip code, depending on how
big the zip code is.
Also, for businesses that offerfinance, you actually cannot
target by zip code, so we usesomething called micro radii.
But basically, what we're goingto do is we're going to take a
look at data for sales.
(16:20):
We're going to look at all time, we're going to look at revenue
by zip code and that would tellus where we need to spend more
of the money.
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
(16:40):
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% moreon a quick from Aspen than
rifle Colorado?
Yes, I would, you know.
So it's really.
It's just having that kind ofintelligence and aligning your
targeting with what works andthat always kicks the crap out
(17:01):
of the standard 25 mile radius.
That's still the mantra that'skind of being preached to a lot
of dealers, and I can see itbased on the implementations
that I've been auditing.
But your targeting should notjust be a big round circle, it
should have a ton of littlecircles and it should have a lot
of red in it too, so you cancorrectly target and also
(17:23):
exclude customers that are notright for your business or brand
.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah, it makes sense, all the sense in the world, and
it makes me think about myolder days of being.
You know, most of my days backthen were always centered around
paid search for several yearsof my career than there was, and
(17:53):
then, of course, okay, that'sgreat for people that really
wanted to do that.
Then just radius targeting andall of that has evolved.
And what you just shared, thatis extremely important for
business owners to understandthat.
If you have no understanding ofthat, how would you even know
what types of conversations orquestions to ask your provider
to hold them accountable?
Because anybody out there thatcan get away with not being
(18:16):
accountable to these things isgoing to do it.
But the way to combat that isfor business owners to really be
consuming knowledge, just likewhat you're sharing.
So, anyway, I don't want tostop you.
You're still talking aboutthings that are core to this
kind of setup thing I think isvery critical.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Right, I would say the other one that we see wrong.
A lot is correct tracking andcorrect audience gathering.
So Google Analytics and GoogleTag Manager are also tools that
are not super-nupriciary forwhere you have to have someone
that really knows how to do it.
Most dealership implementationsare not correct and if they are
(18:52):
correct, at some pointdealercom or dealer on or some
company will make the update tothe platform, platform Y, and
everyone gets a little faster tothe platform or whatever.
But oftentimes there's GoogleTag Manager codes who get
stripped out.
We'll just we'll go from havingconversion track in one month
to zeros 15 days into the nextmonth and we're trying to figure
(19:14):
out what happened.
But basically, correct trackingimplementation means I am
tracking the different ways youcan make a phone call and
tracking phone calls withindigital marketing.
There's actually threedifferent ways that you get that
one call.
One is the call from the ad.
That's the easiest one to trackand that's super easy.
Then the next one, which is alittle harder to track, is an on
(19:35):
click, which is I'm clicking ona mobile phone number, uh, on a
mobile, uh dealership websiteor business website.
And then the other one is I'mdynamically, uh, I'm on my
laptop, like I am right now, andI see the number and it's
dynamically swapped.
Oftentimes they'll have one ofthose tracked, but not all three
(19:57):
, so they're missing really highconversion data.
90% of all the leads thatconvert to car sales for most
dealerships.
Most businesses are coming fromthe phone, not form anymore.
I think people are tired ofleaving their emails with
businesses and getting spammedwith stuff that they're not
interested in anymore, so thephone is definitely the main
place.
Shifting over to forms, youwant to make sure and again,
(20:20):
this is a challenge withdealership websites where they
have a lot of iframes, whereyour iframe like it's hard to
track something that's in aniframe Sometimes you can only
track the start of the formsubmission.
So that's what a lot of peopledo and they're like, hey,
congratulations, I got you 300form fills and the reality is
you really only got 30, becausesomeone starting the button or
(20:42):
fat fingering the button orsomething like that is not the
full completion giving thatinformation to someone to follow
up on from a form.
The other aspect of this will becorrect audience tracking,
where there's kind of differenttypes of audiences that you can
track.
You can target people based onuser activity.
(21:04):
So I go to the website, I spendmore than the website benchmark
, which is probably about twoand a half minutes.
So you could have like a highlyengaged audience where it's all
the people that are above twoand a half minutes.
Um, so you could have like ahighly engaged audience where
it's all the people that areabove two and a half minutes.
That's a.
That's an audience that youcould create, an audience of
everyone that is converted andthat's a great audience to have.
Then you have an audience ofeveryone that's got to all of
(21:25):
your trucks pages and then allyour finance pages.
It's really important that youhave those things tracked, and
that's when we show whitebridging.
What we see most of the time andit always really frustrates me
when this happens is they'lljust do more marketing against
all users.
All users is like nothing.
It's what.
Who is it?
You know there's probably twothirds of the business that a
(21:47):
dealer should get is service andparts.
What you're, if you set that upincorrectly, you're going to be
remarketing new car ads tosomeone that just bought a car
and maybe they're just lookingfor parts or whatever, and then
you're wasting impressions onthem.
So that's an important thing toreally bear in mind is that you
want to make sure that you'redoing your marketing
(22:08):
intelligently.
And then, of course, there'sdynamic for marketing as well.
Whereas I saw this vehicle, nowthat vehicle is following me
across the web, which I think isanother really great way to do
that.
But if you have correct audiencetracking for instance, all
converters you can layer thatinto your Google Ads account and
say, hey, for all the peoplethat are in this all converters,
audience find me more peoplelike that.
(22:29):
We're bid on this type of user.
So it gives you a reallypowerful signal, um, that you
have to set up the right wayagain.
You kind of have to begin withthe end in mind, and, uh, it's.
That one is a really importantone too.
The other aspect of audiencetracking, um that we don't
typically see a lot of um isfirst party data or it's not
(22:52):
updated frequently enough.
I mean, if I were doing aimplementation for a new account
, I would probably start withokay, we're uploading all of
your new car sales data and allof your used car data, and then
all your service, your fixedoffs data, separate and um.
You know you're going to havethat whole list in there.
So if you want to targeteveryone, that's fine, but you
(23:15):
can find similar users.
You can target those peopleexplicitly.
A great example would be withone customer we're actually
targeting for buyback.
We're targeting sold unitspeople that bought units from
these dealerships five years ago.
So we're saying, okay, we don'twant to target anyone now with
(23:36):
this ad.
We want to target people thatwe have sold and serviced these
bikes so we know they're great.
We want to target those peopleand we're looking for vehicles
above a certain threshold so youcan upload all of that
information into the web.
It takes a lot of work.
The data security part isreally important.
You kind of have to have aclient that's willing to work
with you through that.
(23:56):
But that can be the massivegame changer and that's like you
know.
That'll be a situation whereyou'll get like a 20% before
it's boost out of that onechange alone.
It's a very powerful.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
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 withforms that are not native to
(24:42):
your website platform and you'respending heavily on paid search
.
In fact, I can think of anexample, I'm just not going to
say it so it's captured on herebut somebody that spends a lot
of money, so much that paidsearch is their number one
source of traffic and what thereporting shows to this company
is that they're getting hundredsof conversions.
(25:04):
And you just explained and Ithink it's really important to
reemphasize the point that ifthat's the case in your business
, where it looks like, wow, weget 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 drivingthrough paid search and it's
showing you hundreds of, youknow, key moments or whatever
(25:27):
key events or whatever GA4s callthem now, but you're equivalent
of you know what we all wouldthink is a conversion and you're
like no way it's because it'sjust tracking the, the beginning
, or they opened that particularform, and the reality is is
that you may actually be gettingzero conversions.
That's right.
Um, very, very important.
It's great.
(25:47):
This is really good stuff.
I hope the audience is enjoyingit as much as I am.
I'm learning.
If I'm learning stuffug, then Ican guarantee you sure as shit
car dealers and power sportsdealers and RV dealers and
marine dealers there's going tobe so much stuff here they could
literally load up an arsenaland give their crappy vendors a
(26:08):
really bad day.
I want to switch, if you're okay.
I want to move in and ask youpick your brain a little bit on
keyword research and selectingkeywords.
Some people think that keywordresearch is an age-old topic,
but there is so much depth andimportance to understanding this
, depending on what kind ofcompany you are, and so could
(26:30):
you share a little bit on someof the factors that should be
considered when you're trying todo keyword research and
selecting what you're going toactually because your money is
going to go towards this stuffCan you share a little bit about
that?
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Again, beginning with the end in mind, you want to
funnel as much of your spend tothe geo that you are physically
located in.
If I am a dealership in AustinTexas, I should not be spending
more money in Georgia than I amin Austin Texas, texas.
I should not be spending moremoney in Georgia than I am in
Austin Texas.
So, keywords that areconcatenated with Austin Alaris
dealership Austin,harley-davidson dealership
(27:01):
Austin, ford dealership Austinthose are going to you're going
to want to make sure that youhave a really good, robust list
of that.
And then you go into the micromarkets Westlake, lakeway you
know the more fluid areas, orthe areas that your business,
where your customers are, andthat crm data will put you in
the right direction.
There's um, but yeah, um, interms of keyword research.
(27:23):
I mean you want to have a goodmix of like short tail keywords
for one fit for an f-150lightning, but then you're going
to also want to have some ofthe longer tail and
geo-indicated versions as well.
The search volume will mostlyaccrue at the short tail, but
there is still a tremendousamount of people that will say a
couple more words that willindicate that they're not just.
(27:46):
They don't just know that theywant a florida club 50.
They know where they want to goand that's just a really great
signal that they're in marketfor you and that business is
winnable.
Finance is one that I reallydon't see very often in human
research.
You definitely want to be goingout to finance A lot of.
(28:06):
It's funny.
There are some brands that aremostly finance driven.
For instance, there are not aton 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 alot of units sold and you
wouldn't think of yourself asthat person, but a lot of people
(28:29):
are primarily financialshoppers, especially in the
lower uh you know kind ofquartile of the market.
So that's a really importantone, you know.
As far as like tools, there's somany different ones SEMrush.
I think the most importantthing is to build a really
strong list of inventory-relatedkeywords, segment them by trend
(28:50):
level, you know, and then lookat your alpha products.
You know you might have beforea dealership that sells 10 edges
a year and a hundred, andf-150s are way more than that.
Then the f-150 needs to haveits own keywords, it needs to be
its own campaign, because thatis the top moving product and
you want to make sure that youcan control the targeting and
(29:11):
everything at that level.
But yeah, you know, looking atproducts, looking at your
primary target areas and thenlooking at the sub-markets,
those are all things that you'regoing to want to make sure that
you have in there.
A lot of what we hear is thatthe broadband kind of covers
everything and it does.
You know, like if we just ranFord F-150, we would get Rifle,
(29:32):
we would get Ford F-150 AspenVail, 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 todifferentiate and have these
different types of keywords.
And then also, you know, goingback to that Ford dealer example
, you can say, hey, we're thisFord dealership in Glenwood
Springs.
You know, we tell them hey,we're answering your question,
(29:54):
you want to be sold to an asset.
Here we are.
We work with people all thetime, so you can really kind of
hyper-target your messagingbased on the keywords that your
users are trying.
One other thing, though, tonote I don't know how much
you've looked at Google IO forkind of the big unveil they did
of search, uh, basicallysearches that are enhanced with
(30:17):
ai.
I actually foresee long tailkeywords 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 inkind of a dumb way and be like
hey, like what's, what's theFord?
You know the new Ford truckmodel?
Okay, we're getting informationof what that is.
(30:37):
Where can I go get it, you know, and you'll see this kind of
multi-search touch point to kindof get to that refined query.
So you're going to see the longtail keywords, I think, being a
lot more utilized.
Because I think being a lotmore utilized because Google
makes more money when people domore searches.
They have a revenue per searchmodel.
(30:59):
So if they can take the buyerjourney from hey, I'm looking
for an F4 to F1 50 near me, I'mgoing to search the 10 blue
links, click on a few differentads, or you know, basically when
that person does a search,another ad is triggered.
It's another opportunity forthem to, you know, serve ads, so
(31:19):
that is how they make the money.
So I really feel that AI isgoing to kind of extend the
search for any products kind ofstrategically, because that's
how you can better monetizeGoogle search.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
I can see that, um, a couple of points you made in
there.
I love you using the mitsubishiexample.
I think that's really a perfectexample to help people learn
from, and I think it's alsointeresting that mitsubishi, um,
although they haven't been ableto quite, uh, capitalize on it
the way that a couple of otherbrands did, but very similarly
to mitsubishi, hyundai and Kiaused to be an example of a
(31:56):
disposable lighter as well.
Like, I don't really want a carlike that on one of these cars.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
They had to slap a five-year, 100,000-mile, no
questions asked warranty uponthat.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Yeah, but it's interesting because it bought
them the time and you know,clearly they made all kinds of
business decisions other thanjust having the time to do it,
but they did buy themselvesenough time to create a place in
the marketplace to be a, youknow, a business economical
right it was uh, you can savemoney and still, you know, have
(32:30):
four wheels and a steering wheel.
And look at those two brandsnow.
I mean, just are they?
They've done amazing things.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
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 andover Honda to a pretty
substantial amount.
So there's always a hook foryour brand and you just need to
(32:59):
kind of lean into it.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeah for sure, absolutely true.
Again, just kind of movingthrough some of this, although
it's great, I mean we could stayon any one of these categories
for a long period of time.
But I want to get into a littlebit to um kind of ad copy and
creative.
Um.
Some of the best practices, Isuppose, are tactics for writing
(33:23):
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 Ithink it's far more important
than just you know the path ofleast resistance.
But what are your thoughts onad copy?
How important is it?
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Super important.
I mean, that's another kind ofthing that I wish Google gave a
little bit more clarity on.
Right now we're using RSAs.
We're migrating on fromextended text ads.
I don't even think you can addthem anymore, so it's all just
RSAs which have a ton ofheadlines and description lines.
(34:01):
You let Google's AI enginefigure that out, but what I see
sometimes is an RSA that hasmultiple lines that say the same
thing, because they really wantthat to be in the ad and they
didn't pin that particularheadline.
So you'll see the ad servedwith come get your uh, come get
(34:22):
your financing.
Apply for your finance now talkto 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, notall three of those variations,
so that's a really importantfactor.
I mean, the most importantthing is you want to get some of
the dealer speak in there.
(34:43):
Every dealership has adifferent way of speaking to
their audience, has a differentway of speaking to their
audience.
For instance, tri-state Ford ofAmarillo is number one
competitor.
For the last, I think, 50 yearsit's been Gene Messer Ford in
Amarillo and their slogan is wedon't mess around.
So it's like they're playing ontheir name.
(35:03):
So that's something that theywanted in there.
A lot of dealerships have to beunique, 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 whateverthe brand messaging is that they
typically have, but outside ofthat, you want to make sure that
your, your ctas and valuepropositions are really on point
.
You know, for instance, we'retalking about a truck.
(35:26):
You want to talk about theengine in one of the ad lines.
You want to be talking abouthow many miles you can go on one
charge if it's an EV.
You want to really talk aboutthe NPG on all those things.
That is a line for each one.
If you're looking for somethinga little bit more general, like
(35:46):
Ford dealership near me, me thenyou talk about what you have to
sell.
But you want to avoidrepetitive copy and you always
want to have two ads runningbecause you can leapfrog for
that way typically the way thatworks for us when we're
optimizing ad copy again, you'relooking at this all based on
the account being built theright way and it's not 500
(36:07):
keywords with one ad that kindof speaks to everything.
This is ad copy that speaksdirectly to people that are
looking for hana series.
You know so you, you can putall that stuff in there, the,
you know your dealership promiseyour, you know the, the mpg of
the crB capacity and luggagecapacity, all that kind of stuff
(36:30):
.
But then you want to haveanother app that's kind of
similar and you play themagainst each other and when you
have the decided winner which Ithink takes about a thousand
impressions to figure out, thatcan take two weeks, that can
take one day.
It really depends on the marketand how much traffic you're
getting through your accounts.
But yeah, what we do is weactually leapfrog, we kind of
(36:51):
leapfrog optimization modelwhere we'll take the better
performing ad and they copy inthat.
That's kind of similar but alittle bit better from the
viewpoint of our ad manager, andthat's how we incrementally get
the ads moving in the rightdirection.
Quality score is not as big of adeal as it used to be.
It used to be this incrediblething that if you wrote an ad
(37:15):
with a bunch of basicallykeyword stuff that graphed out
of your ads, you paid a lowerCPC and you did, and that worked
for a really, really long timeand it works less well now.
So you don't necessarily wantto do that, but you want to make
sure that the keyword of theproduct 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
(37:37):
the description lines so peopleknow that this ad is not, you
know, uh, a general honda dealerad.
It's a crb ad.
So those are some of the bestpractices for A-B testing.
Obviously, outside of justrunning split tests within ad
groups, you can also create asphere, miss, where you will try
a bunch of other differentthings that you can try
(37:59):
different audience segments.
You can try hey, we're doingthese ads against different
A-types and stuff and see whichone wins.
But the thing that's a key tosuccess in A-B testing is that
you want to make sure thatyou're clear on what's the
timeframe or the data timeframethat you want to be assessing ad
performance in.
(38:19):
If you have an ad that's onlygotten 200 impressions, then you
probably don't have enough datato make the optimization and
then you'll over-optimize youraccounts.
That quality score keepsresetting.
So you have to be cautious andkind of methodical with how you
do that.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Yeah, Again really good tips makes me think of
things from the past.
I'm like you know, just qualityscore, Just I kind of gave me a
little bit of anxiety there fora second, just kind of gave me
a little bit of anxiety therefor a second.
Just all of these differentthings that you end up as a
business chasing.
But in the case of car dealers,power sports dealers and a lot
(39:03):
of businesses, for me it's thereason why I have to emphasize
the importance of who you'rechoosing to do this on your
behalf.
I'm a big always have been, butvery, very big fan of businesses
, being smart enough to know howto choose someone that can do
things that they would never beable to do on their own, on
(39:23):
their behalf, Almost treating itas if these businesses are our
businesses.
We're trying to chase the typeof success that we'd want if we
owned your business.
That's how good we are at whatwe're doing, and when I listen
to you share these things insuch great detail, it just makes
me think of how important thatis.
I think it's extremely valuablefor people tuning in.
So I know you talked a littlebit already on targeting
(39:46):
audience segmentation.
I don't know if you have anymore thoughts on that before I
pick your brain a little bitalready on targeting audience
segmentation.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
I don't know if you have any more thoughts on that.
Um, before I pick your brain alittle bit on on tracking, yeah,
um, I think, in terms of, like,audience segmentation, it
really obviously totally dependson who on that crm and those
people are and what type ofdifferent buyer you have.
If you're a motorcycle dealer,let's say you sell polaris bikes
, indian triumph, uh, canon, allunder one roof, you have many
(40:16):
different types of buyers andyou need to segment your
products accordingly.
But even within like smallerlineup brands like ford, there
is a huge discrepancy in thetype of buyer between someone
who's looking for a $25,000sedan and someone that's looking
for an $85,000 lifted Pronto.
(40:37):
Those are different humanbeings shopping for the same
brand.
They have different incomelevels.
So, again, I think the benefitof having a segmented structure
where you have sedans over hereand you have your SUVs over here
or higher ticket items, thatway you can do things like bid
up or down based on the income.
And sometimes I mean I don'tthink you ever really need to
(41:02):
exclude the top 10% of incomeearners, because if someone is
looking for a Camry, a camrythat's fine if they're
multi-millionaire or whateverlike, but what you do really
need to focus on if you'relooking at luxury products, um,
you want to exclude the bottom50 of the emers as much as you
can, just because there's somuch meat on the bone with that
(41:24):
top 50.
That's who you sell all yourcars to and you will,
incidentally, get a lot of thattraffic anyway.
And you will anyway becausepeople are removing our viewers
of control.
You used to be able to beincredibly precise to the street
.
I remember with the Huffinesgroup in Plano, we would draw
lines like on streets, where wewould target here and wouldn't
(41:48):
overlap in some other viewership.
That level of control is not.
It's not really happening.
So you have to know that, evenif you do everything perfectly,
you are going to get some mocktraffic.
You're going to get some peoplewho Google didn't know what
income level they were in.
They were in others, so theysaw your ad and they wasted your
money, or maybe not.
But that's a really importantfactor is segmenting your
(42:11):
audience based on the incomelevel for the product that
you're selling.
Yeah, I think that's the mainthing.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
I love those examples and I think it's really
important for the audience.
Whether you're selling cars andtrucks and SUVs or you're
selling motorcycles, I thinkthis also applies in the RV
industry.
I'm an RV owner as of last yearnot quite a full year of owning
a travel trailer which I love.
It's so, so fun, not a have tohave, just kind of can you have.
(42:39):
And I'm old now, Mike, so don'tmake fun of me.
But but even knowing thedifferences between you know,
jayco versus Winnebago versusyou know, Keystone there's so
many brands and differences, butnot getting too far into RV.
I think for the audience it'sreally important whether I guess
I would focus mostly onautomotive and power sports
(42:59):
dealers, but in power sports, mygoodness, it's rare that you're
just Harley Davidson or you'rea powerhouse Honda store and so
you're only Honda product.
It's much more common thatyou're like the Ride Now stores,
where you have multiple brandsunder just about every single
one of your rooftops and, mygoodness, not only is that an
opportunity for segmentation andproper targeting, it's almost
(43:22):
should be a mandate.
Like, yeah, you don't even wantto start to spend money if you
have 10 brands uh, you know,from ducati to suzuki.
Yeah, those are two verydifferent buyers.
The guy who's got the money fora really hot italian product
like ducati versus hey, it mightbe my first bike and I'm
(43:42):
getting a suzuki or a kawasaki.
That's important.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
So I love that you share on that, because I think
it's really important his thingis when he's like audience
segments apply for motorcycleenthusiasts, which I'm like,
okay.
Well, I'm going to sue all themotorcycles that have been sold
in the United States.
Most of them are probably under$9,000.
That's probably the minority ofbikes that are in that $30,000
to $50,000 territory which, ifyou're an Indian dealer, that's
(44:06):
all you sell.
Territory which, if you're anIndian viewer, that's all you
sell.
Their base level, indian chiefI 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 ofgeneral settings and you're kind
(44:27):
of moneying, you're targetingfor people that are looking for
a cdo with people that arewithin a calisopi audience.
Those people are not going tofit.
You're not going to move thatperson over.
So I think that's that's a veryimportant factor as well yeah,
I totally agree.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
It's, uh, one of those points that just kind of
needs to be stressed over andover and over for those power
sports dealers, because theydon't all understand that or
maybe they understand it, butthe depth is really important.
Tracking, measuring performance, of course, is really really
important.
Do you have recommendations orsome things that you might say
(45:11):
in terms of tools or metricsthat businesses should be
looking at, tracking andmeasuring for performance?
I love that you share the kindsof things.
That's why I'm asking aquestion like this, because you
are equipping the businessowners to have really insightful
conversations, right, andthere's just not enough of that
and all serving all theseindustries.
So what are your thoughts onmaybe helping businesses around,
(45:33):
how they would track, ormetrics to measure?
Speaker 2 (45:36):
right.
I mean, obviously, googleanalytics is free, if what most
people shouldn't use.
You have your crm that'shopefully set up correctly, and
you have the blast.
You have kind of two systemsthat that work and are both
tracking, typically within gtn,but they'll say different things
.
So you you at least within astandard google ads
(45:58):
implementation you get blasttracking, you get analytics and
you can kind of cross referenceeach other.
Um, however, not a huge fan ofanalytics G4 for a number of
reasons, the main one beingthere are no more views.
You don't have the ability tocreate a Google Analytics
account anymore and say, hey,this is the raw data view, this
(46:20):
is the POM view, this is thefilter view, where we filter out
all the traffic for our IP,which makes a lot of sense,
especially in dealerships, whereyour team is on the website all
the time, visiting your websitehundreds of times a day.
That absolutely will inflateyour metrics.
And again, if you're doing allusers or marketing, guess who
(46:42):
you're marketing to your ownstaff.
So, yeah, that is definitelyreally important.
We're starting to actuallyexplore with other analytics
systems as well.
There's a couple of ones outthere Clauseable is one that
we're going to be piloting,sheep Analytics is another one,
and these are already kind ofcookie-less, because what we're
(47:03):
facing right now is thedeprecation of cookies.
Luckily, thank God, it waspostponed for another year.
Uh, because google doesn't have.
They have not figured this outand they keep warning us as
agency and saying hey, if youdon't have your first party
matched in here and all thestuff, you're gonna lose this
ability to track.
And it's just like you meanyou're taking away our ability
(47:23):
to track users, like you'regiving us less than civility
into what moves the needle thatabsolutely benefits google, like
it just you know there's a lotof changes.
There's a lot of changes theycould make to make your
marketing more precise, but theless precise they make in
marketing, the more you have tospend.
So and that is absolutely a factand there are absolutely cases.
(47:46):
Um, I was reading a SearchEngine Journal article on
basically the case that Googlehas versus a bunch of plaintiffs
in different states and they'retalking about how Google
absolutely rinsed the auctions,the removal of search terms
under 10 impressions every month, every month.
(48:10):
There's just a lot of things andthat doesn't benefit dealers
when they made their searchterms change a couple of years
ago where basically the datathreshold 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 10impressions, it won't show it,
it'll just say it was thatkeyword.
Less than 10 impressions, itwill just it won't show it,
(48:30):
it'll just say it was thatkeyword.
It will not show you thosesearch terms.
And for us, when we're doingour keywords plus minus sprint
which is when we remove where weadd negative keywords for stuff
that doesn't make sense, forinstance, for F-150 lift kit or
something like that, if you getone or two impressions or clicks
on that a month, you're notgoing to actually know where
you're wasting your money, sothat's definitely a very
(48:52):
important thing to know.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
Yeah, I think for me it's been amusing to watch
Google.
I wasn't surprised at all thatthey punted that implementation
for another year, because Ihaven't seen them say anything
that would indicate that theyfigured out how to not actually
shoot themselves in the foot interms of it's gonna cost them
money, like it's gonna eat intorevenue when you take away, uh,
(49:18):
some of those trackingcapabilities like that.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
So it's they had turtledove, they've had all
these different things which Ijust don't think work.
And then some of them aren'tgdpr compliant.
So they're really looking for asolution.
They'll work in the States andbe compliant with California law
and then also international law.
So that's tough for them.
But it would be really cool ifyou could have a setting Like,
(49:42):
say, I'm in Texas, we're acookie-free state, and then you
have all of the options totarget people the way you have
been.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
And then other different options, but the
tool's not quite as there.
It's not there yet.
Yeah they'll figure somethingout, and so it's always fun to
kind of watch all the differentgoings on within this digital
era.
You had just a few minutes backyou were talking about, you
know, ai and search and I Ithink that's an area where
Google will probably stay reallydominant.
Only because I don't know ifyou noticed this and this is a
bit of a tangent, but for peoplethat are interested, rand
(50:15):
Fishkin of Moz fame and nowSparkToro he posted just I don't
think it was last week, it's inthe last few days, but he, sam
Altman or somebody it wasn't sam, but somebody was just saying
all these glowing things abouthow, yeah, you're gonna go to
chat gpt and you know it's gonnado better on search.
(50:38):
And they literally said go dothese types of searches, one of
which was like find me somegreat places for lunch in town.
And so rand did it in chat gptI think what are we at 4.5?
And he's like give me recommendsome great places for lunch in
seattle, and half of them wereclosed or not open and he wrote
back.
(50:58):
I love how rand just kind of wonhe's.
I think he learned so much fromthe maz experience.
He's a really prettytransparent um guy, but he was
like this this is garbage.
Like this is awful, all thesebusinesses are terrible.
And he then posted his sequencewith ChatGPT of basically
telling it these businesses areclosed and we're like oh I'm
sorry, let me get you a few more, and then it would same thing.
(51:20):
So we'll see.
Hopefully Google leads on that.
That should be a place relativeto AI, that they would be the
leader.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
I think something wasn't on the agenda today, but
AI in search is absolutely goingto gobble up a couple of
verticals.
I don't think it's going to hitauto car sales that heavily,
but I think it will massivelyimpact fixed stocks.
When you think about whatGoogle has done historically
with verticalized search andpartners, back in the day if you
(51:54):
were a travel agent for anairline, you would list with
Expedia or whatever.
Then Google came out withGoogle Flights.
What do you think happened toall the traffic that used to go
to TripAdvisor, that used to goto Hotelscom?
All of those companies becamesubstantially less valuable.
(52:16):
I worked with someone thatactually witnessed this
firsthand when they were workingon Hard Rock Casino advertising
and then you could book yourstay natively in Google and your
flight like pretty muchnatively.
That traffic didn't.
You didn't go to the website.
You lost that opportunity toremark it.
So I don't think that that'sgoing to be necessarily a threat
(52:39):
for, like local searches or forlike, say, you know, unit or
inventory searches for for cars,for any search that's like hey,
how do I, how, what's the bestway to change an oil filter
there that you're absolutely notgoing to be going to those
content you're not going to begoing to the places where the
content is coming from.
Let's put it that way you'regoing to be getting a distilled
(53:00):
version of that that keeps yousearching and interacting,
because that is again what'sgoing to be triggering the
impressions which I mean.
It's good, job security ads arenot going anywhere.
I was kind of worried the otherday when I I thought that you
know, gpt, fire or whatever wasgoing to have a search engine in
it.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
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 isso much nuance, and especially
when you start to get into theniches and then the niches
(53:39):
within the niches I say this allthe time, I feel like a broken
record on so many things, as Ijust say them all the time,
almost every day but theautomotive industry, the power
sports industry okay, those aretwo niches alone.
Okay, well, you get into theautomotive industry and then
what's your niche?
What?
Are you a CRM provider?
Okay, what's your niche?
Are you a DMS provider?
(54:00):
Are you a digital marketingprovider?
Are you a digital marketingprovider 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 knowall of those things before you
even start thinking about howmany salespeople you need or
what your marketing strategy is,and you know what channels
you're going to, you know spendmoney in, what ones you're going
(54:23):
to try to optimize organically,and there's just so much to be
thought of.
And when I think about AI, aboutAI, I think, well, the nuance
within all of those Niches.
There's still an extremelyimportant Part of the human
Relationship with AI.
That's still Going to be thechampion.
Now that doesn't mean that wewon't see some things Develop
like, oh, it'll blow me away,but I'm seeing so many things
(54:46):
Around.
Graphic creation and videoCreation and the things you can
do with mid-journey are stillblowing my mind.
It seems like every couple ofweeks I'm like it does what now?
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 notworried and I'm playing around
(55:09):
with AI stuff and reading andconsuming every single day.
I'm not worried about any of itbeing able to do the things
that you've talked about just onthis episode anytime soon.
I would, as a business owner, Iwouldn't turn it over to oh
yeah, let's let AI do it when Ihave somebody like you and your
business that knows things thatAI doesn't understand the nuance
(55:30):
of.
So but let me get back on trackjust a couple more minutes
before I'm going tounfortunately have to land the
plane, but I want to get yourthoughts on a couple more things
before we close.
One on optimizing Optimizationand ad fatigue are a lot and
I'll give you an either or, ifyou'd rather.
I would love to know yourthoughts on when people just get
(55:52):
kind of tired.
I say this a lot you canfatigue your audience with your
ad copy, with email campaigns,all those types of things.
So yeah, we have enough timefor you to choose one or the
other.
If you want to talk onoptimization or kind of add
fatigue, or if you feel like youcan hit both, I'd love your
thoughts.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
Fatigue is.
You should be modifying yourads frequently.
So with new copy it shouldreflect what's on their website
and where you're going to getmore.
Ad fatigue is in display.
It's in social ads, marketingads, and you should be changing
those out at least on aquarterly basis, ideally on a
(56:32):
monthly basis.
You shouldn't be getting fresh,creative and hitting people
with different formats.
That's, that's how you handlethe ad fatigue.
I don't really think of adfatigue too much associated with
search ads.
Search ads do work the best,but I don't know if people
remember necessarily what was inline for whatever.
So I think ad fatigue is morekind of the visual.
(56:55):
Obviously it applies to TV orany kind of video advertising.
You absolutely want to changethings up fairly frequently,
just real quick on optimizing adcampaigns.
In our workflow we have about22 different things we do, but
kind of the categories that youragency needs to be looking at
or you need to be looking atin-house is time of day bid
(57:18):
adjustments.
What does our ad schedule looklike?
When are we serving our ads?
Are we spending our money wherewe typically have higher
density of conversions?
How does that look?
You want to be looking at thatonce a month at least.
You also want to be applying amonthly kind of audit spread to
your audience's income levelsand making whatever changes you
(57:41):
can to get more of what'sworking.
You definitely want to look attargeting and say, hey, over the
last 30 to 90 days, thisparticular zip code has been our
absolute winner from aconversion standpoint, or these
fine zip codes.
Was that the case last month ormonth to date?
(58:01):
You want to make sure thatyou're really looking at those
things, because sometimes therecan be a change things, because
sometimes there can be a changeand, um, you know and you've
dealership love and then all ofa sudden there's just a ton of
intent that kind of disappearsfrom an area that might have
been kind of a neighboring as acover market for both of you.
So geos is something you needto be looking at all the time.
You need to be excludingkeywords that don't make sense
(58:22):
for your business all the time,and when you do exclude them,
you should probably add them toan exclusion template, because
sometimes, uh, you'll find thetruth spread out in a hundred
different places.
So for us, we have more than ahundred dealerships that we work
with and if we look singularlyat one store.
We might not get enough data onkeyword waste, but we'll get a
(58:45):
little piece for one dealer,then we'll get something from
another.
We'll get a little piece forone dealer, then we'll get
something from another and kindof in aggregate, we'll make our
negative keyword lists smarter,more robust, with the
understanding that ourvisibility has dropped by at
least half.
So those, I think, are the mainelements Not over-optimizing to
(59:09):
brand or spending too much onbrand.
You might have to spend like10% and then not ensure spending
the rest of your budget betweenbill or tours and inventory.
You need to, on a monthly basis, be looking at your incentives,
making sure that that's in yourad copy.
Any kind of finance specialsthose are super compelling,
always they are now, they'realways the number one most
valuable feature, even maybeincluding your creative.
(59:31):
Those are kind of high level tobe the main things that we
would look at in an organization.
Speaker 1 (59:39):
Once again, awesome, awesome stuff For the audience
listening and or watching.
You can have a one-on-oneconversation with Mike, and
those are totally free.
I can't imagine how much longerthey will be.
Just kidding, mike's verygracious with his time and you
literally can have a one-on-oneconversation.
(01:00:00):
If you want to get in contactwith him, go to
premieronlinemarketingcom, butwe've been cleared to land the
plane.
So, hey, look at that.
Another great place to park,another great episode.
We appreciate the comments andquestions from the audience, so
please, please, feel free toshare.
Your feedback helps us deliverepisodes like this that are
relevant.
This also includes yourcomments.
(01:00:22):
Might be a question orsomething that you want us to
dig in on on future upcomingepisodes, so feel free to jump
into the comments, especially ifyou see this content on places
like LinkedIn, facebook,instagram and definitely YouTube
.
Until next time, thanks fortuning in.
We'll see you soon right hereon the Palmcast.
Speaker 2 (01:00:43):
Thanks, Shaw.
Speaker 1 (01:00:45):
Thanks, Mike.
Welcome back to the POMCAST.
In this episode, we'rediscussing strategies and
tactics for maximizing thereturn on your investment in
paid search ads yes, and alsoimproving that return on your ad
spend, of course, roi.
(00:21):
We're joined again by thefounder and CEO of Premier
Online Marketing out of Austin,texas, mike Schaub Yep.
He's our expert and you'll beeducated once again by his
insights, tips and real-worldexamples, which will definitely
help you and your businessoptimize your paid search
campaigns effectively.
So, without further ado, mike,how are you, by the way?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
How are things?
Doing great, doing great.
It's a beautiful 100 degree dayin Austin, texas, can't
complain.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Yeah, boy, I'll tell you, the storms have been
rolling through Texas here thelast couple of weeks.
Right, indeed, they have.
Yeah, well, speaking of stormyweather, there are a lot of
dealers out there and for thosejoining the episode, either
listening and or watching we'rereally going to talk and try to
contextualize this episode.
Today, a lot around theautomotive industry and for
(01:12):
dealers and 2020, and really itstarted probably in 2023,
there's a lot of stormy weatherfor dealers as they try to get
their arms back around themarketplace being much more
competitive.
So I'm excited to get into thequestions today and I really
want to start.
I like to start most of theseepisodes with you, which, to you
and I probably feel a littlebit elementary.
(01:32):
Sometimes we fly right pastthings like can you, does a
dealer even know what ROASstands for?
And a lot don't.
So I just want to start there.
Could you explain what returnon ad spend actually is and why
it's really important for beingable to evaluate your ad
performance?
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, so return on ad spend, roas or a lot of people
say ROI, but essentially it'syour profit margin that you make
above the cost of youradvertising.
So if you have a cost per weanthat is too high, you will have
a lower return on ad spendbecause the amount of money that
you needed to spend to go getthat traffic, to get that lead
(02:15):
and get that sale ultimately itkind of cut into the margin.
So obviously you want to haveas good of an ROAS as possible
so you can have the highestmargin health possible.
But yeah, that's return on adspend.
You want to make sure thatyou're not running a negative
(02:38):
profitability campaignassociated with the channel but
there won't be a lot of leads orthe cost per lead will be so
high that when you end up doingthe math on a, say, a campaign
that has a cost per lead of ahundred bucks or more, you're
like, okay, well, it takes 20leads to sell this bike or this
car and the margin on that caror motorcycle is $2,000 or less.
(03:00):
Or in that ballpark, so you caneasily less, or in that
ballpark.
So you can easily, very, veryeasily spend too much money on
traffic or spend it in the wrongplaces and have a negative
borrowing campaign, meaning thatyou're actually spending money
for every car that you sell.
So that's a pretty crazyconcept.
(03:22):
Can you think about badmarketing management, like if
you were the finance manager ofa dealership and you're writing
a $500 check and giving it tothe buyer of every car that you
sold, because that's how muchmoney you use?
But sometimes it can be veryhard to evaluate it.
It's hard to kind of reallypinpoint where the waste is.
(03:43):
So that's kind of a huge partof the work that I've been doing
and the work that we do here atPremier.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, all of that's so critical and I don't think a
lot of dealers, and I'm going toback up and not just say that
this episode is really valuablefor car dealers and also for
power sports.
If you're a dealer sellingmotorcycles, atvs, side-by-sides
, what am I thinking of is apersonal watercraft.
These are also really importantconcepts for power sports
(04:13):
dealers, and so you're justsharing some things that I don't
think I've ever actually hearda dealer themselves articulate
themselves, articulate, um howyou, you could be in uh kind of
this uh negative equity around.
You're actually spending moreum to acquire these
opportunities or to actuallysell the units and, um, without
(04:34):
knowing that boy, you end up ina real ugly place when it comes
down to looking at your p&lstatement absolutely and kind of
one other thing on that.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
It's not like the business as usual right now,
where it's may 8 24, the, theamerican consumer is about as
squeezed as they have been.
Consumer debt is at all-timehighs, financing is all-time
highs, so if there were a timewhere your buyer might just sit
it out and try to keep the theclunker running for one more
(05:05):
year or whatever, now is thattime.
So you have people that aregoing to be doing a lot more
window shopping, less buying,and that increases the costs for
everybody.
I think one other thing to noteon ROI for your marketing is
that it really should be whatleans your decisions around,
where you allocate yourresources, your spend your
(05:26):
keywords that you've been onspecifically, where you target,
where you don't target, um, soyou can run your ads for maximum
profitability yeah, those arereally, really great tips.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
I'm guessing that the the beginning of all this, like
just setting up campaigns, isso critical.
Like what would the keycomponents of making sure that
these campaigns for for searchare set up correctly, I guess to
give yourselves the best chancefor success, so that you don't
run into some of these kind ofpositions of negative equity or
(06:02):
just kind of setting yourself upto pour gas on the fire and
burn through budget when youdon't need to be?
Can you share some of thosethings Like just successful, I
guess, initial setup strategies?
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, starting out correctly is literally so
important.
And the biggest issue that Isee with fall of digital
marketing campaigns is theagency that we're typically
competing against.
Applying their template andbest judgment, which is kind of
external from what the customerhas.
They try to impress thecustomer and show them hey,
(06:35):
we're targeting, you know thestandard 20 mile radius around
the dealership or if it's arural area, maybe it's 50 miles.
We have these different adtypes that are that are in place
, but it's extremely rare thatwe'll actually see campaigns set
up in a way that they can besuccessful and then become more
successful.
So, a few things that we lookat and we do.
(06:58):
An recommendation and this isby no means going to be the full
list, but just kind of the mainkey items is to dive deep into
your CRM to understand yourcustomer.
No, cheap markets are createdthe same, and I think we talked
a little bit about the Bentleysand Highland Park versus
Mesquite last episode.
That's a great example.
(07:20):
Where have your customershistorically been selling?
Obviously, if it's a brand newdealership to market, it's a
different scenario and you aregoing to have to use the best
judgment and all of that.
But typically when we work witha dealership.
We're working with a store thathas worked with a lot of other
agencies.
They're kind of sick and tiredof getting a 7 out of 10, and
(07:40):
that's not working for them.
So when they come to us,they're looking for more control
.
We're looking toward granularityand I have never had a
circumstance where I've asked acustomer hey, have you leveraged
your CRM data or first partydata to enhance the targeting of
your campaigns?
The answer is always no.
It's just not a question that'sbeing asked often enough.
(08:00):
But if you have a dealershipthat's been around for a few
years five years plus eventhey're going to have so many
transactions by zip code thatyou can leverage to, um, better
target your customer, um,they're going to tell you, it's
going to tell you who thecustomer profile is for that
dealership, and they're verydifferent.
You know four dealers.
For instance, we will fourdealers in west texas and we
(08:22):
will book one in aspen.
So it's like they're not thesame person, they're not the
same buyer everywhere.
So it's.
You know you have to really bedialed into.
What is the information we havein our CRM that we don't look
at and don't leverage?
And that is the most valuabledata mine for getting in front
of that demographic data.
Another thing that's reallyimportant is to build with
(08:46):
control in mind.
So what a bad implementationlooks like and stick with the
Ford dealership example would befor them to have a branch
campaign, which would beGlenwood Springs Ford, have a
dealer terms campaign, whichwould be like Ford dealership
near Aspen or for dealershipveil you know that is actually
(09:08):
where the vast majority of thesearch volume is.
But then typically what you seeis they have an inventory
campaign where sedans, suvs andtrucks are all jammed into one
campaign and they're just likewell, that's the inventory
campaign.
You want to throw everything inthere, but the problem is, uh,
most dealerships don't carrythose units evenly, so you need
(09:29):
to be able to ratchet spend upand down based on what they
carry, especially over the lastfew years, with inventory being
super inconsistent.
That would be the funny thing.
I'm going to account, do anaudit and be like you're
spending most of your money on,you know, ford edge or, uh, some
lower value when you want to bespending your money on f-150s
(09:52):
but you actually don't have acampaign that's set up for that.
So back to the.
The way to do it is you want tomake sure that you're
segmenting by products and youwant to be as granular as
possible.
You want to avoid having asituation where you have more
than a few hundred keywords in acampaign.
It's very rare that you'regoing to have more than, say,
(10:12):
300 keywords in a campaign thatare all really relevant to each
other as a category.
So what we recommend issplitting out campaigns by
products and making sure thatyour ad groups are really tight.
So a good example would be newFord F-150, 2024 Ford F-150, you
(10:36):
know 2024 Ford F-150 for sale.
You know those are differentkeywords.
You know those are differentkeywords.
They all are Ford F-150keywords, but they should all be
in separate ad groups becauseyou want to arrive your ad as a
response to the specificquestion that they're asking.
Most of the people will justsearch Ford F-150, buy Ford
F-150.
They'll kind of be very shorttail.
(10:58):
But you want to make sure thatyou have all of those ad groups
split out.
You want to make sure that yourSUV spend is certainly not
messing with your sedan spend orvice versa.
So you're going to want to makesure you have that all split up,
and the main reason for that isyou can control audiences at
the campaign level.
You control your spend at thecampaign level and one of the
(11:18):
biggest pain in the asses thatI've ever had to deal with in my
career running ads is when yougo into a campaign that has a
thousand keywords and you have abunch that are performing
really well, but they'redifferent product categories and
they've been running for a longtime because dealercom set it
up five years ago and they havea bit of a calcistry to them.
(11:42):
So you're like, ah, I reallydon't want to mess with this
campaign styled in and optimized, but if I want to control SUV
spend, I need to move these sixadverts down the campaign over
here and then are starting fromscratch.
So you kind of want to beginwith the end in mind and just
have a really robustsegmentation strategy for your
dealership or for any of theproducts that you offer.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
I remember well.
Now it's several years ago.
This was well.
Let me just give two points ofreference, because I've known
you for a long, long time and Iknow that, going back into your
first few years in digitalmarketing, that wasn't a topic
the single keyword, ad groups,or I don't know if it's even
(12:28):
called that now, but I do knowthat you built a multimillion
dollar digital marketing, mostlyaround paid search, for a
pretty big company in the autoindustry.
That's still around today and Iremember at that time you were
advocating and waving the flagfor single keyword ad groups and
(12:48):
that just account setup.
It was a lot of this, butyou're even sharing more detail
now.
So I can one thing I would justfor people that are tuning in
and listening on this topicGoogle continues to advocate
ease of use in their platform.
That was the original inceptionof Google AdWords for the small
business, small medium-sizedbusiness owner.
(13:10):
Hey, now there's something youcan do yourself.
And then they realize well, no,the automotive, power sports
verticals, rv verticals, marineverticals the more they also
want business owners in thosecategories.
(13:31):
So if you're a dealer of any ofthose industries that I just
mentioned, google wants you tobelieve that the platform now,
with options like performance,max campaigns, that it's all,
just jump in there.
Even yourself, like you, canfigure it out like it's it's
really doable.
But it's not really true andI'm not going to say that
(13:51):
google's purposely trying todeceive businesses that way.
But it is still reallyimportant for businesses to
understand that and you'vementioned things like this
before.
But the institutional knowledge, the, the, the experience of,
of being able to say, well, Iwas there in the beginning of
all of this and this is how it'schanged to today, is so
(14:15):
important so that you don'twaste money, so that you don't
chase things that are fool'sgold like well, I'm dependent on
the co-op payback, so that'swhy I'm going to do this.
That's like the worst decisionever, and yet it's still a thing
for a lot of dealers.
And so I love how you go intothese details.
It's really important.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
I'm going to light 70% of your budget on fire so
you can get half of it back.
That's the co-op argument whichis it's interesting, and the
problem specifically with thoseco-op programs is nobody that
has ever done any digitalmarketing at all makes the
decision on who the vendor poolgets to be.
That's based on who bought thebest steak dinner or took their
(14:55):
clients to Sapphires in Vegas orsomething, but it's definitely
not based on a robust audit ofall providers.
We actually just had asituation with Genesis recently
where we tried to get into theirprogram.
They've only got three agenciesin there and none of them are
good, and we're like, hey, we'redoing this incredible work.
We've provided them with a casestudy.
(15:16):
We're a brand new store in avery difficult market for
Genesis.
This is such an expensiveproduct.
They were just not interested.
They're like we're not pursuingthis.
At that time, I'm like yourclient.
The dealership owner is askingyou guys, uh, for this
opportunity.
Let's at least have aconversation.
But anyway, I could.
(15:37):
I could uh go on and that Idon't want to get too off track.
But yeah, it's, it's super.
The the issue that I have atgoogle as a platform right now
is that it's um, they don't tellyou how to do things correctly.
Again, let's talk abouttargeting.
I think probably your adtargeting is the most important
aspect of getting the right typeof customers.
(15:59):
You want to make sure that yourspend is allocated more to the
zip code than to the city, oreven to the micro radii than the
zip code, depending on more tothe zip code than to the city,
or even to the micro radii thanthe zip code, depending on how
big the zip code is.
Also, for businesses that offerfinance, you actually cannot
target by zip code, so we usesomething called micro radii.
But basically, what we're goingto do is we're going to take a
look at data for sales.
(16:20):
We're going to look at all time, we're going to look at revenue
by zip code and that would tellus where we need to spend more
of the money.
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
(16:40):
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% moreon a quick from Aspen than
rifle Colorado?
Yes, I would, you know.
So it's really.
It's just having that kind ofintelligence and aligning your
targeting with what works andthat always kicks the crap out
(17:01):
of the standard 25 mile radius.
That's still the mantra that'skind of being preached to a lot
of dealers, and I can see itbased on the implementations
that I've been auditing.
But your targeting should notjust be a big round circle, it
should have a ton of littlecircles and it should have a lot
of red in it too, so you cancorrectly target and also
(17:23):
exclude customers that are notright for your business or brand
.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah, it makes sense, all the sense in the world, and
it makes me think about myolder days of being.
You know, most of my days backthen were always centered around
paid search for several yearsof my career than there was, and
(17:53):
then, of course, okay, that'sgreat for people that really
wanted to do that.
Then just radius targeting andall of that has evolved.
And what you just shared, thatis extremely important for
business owners to understandthat.
If you have no understanding ofthat, how would you even know
what types of conversations orquestions to ask your provider
to hold them accountable?
Because anybody out there thatcan get away with not being
(18:16):
accountable to these things isgoing to do it.
But the way to combat that isfor business owners to really be
consuming knowledge, just likewhat you're sharing.
So, anyway, I don't want tostop you.
You're still talking aboutthings that are core to this
kind of setup thing I think isvery critical.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Right, I would say the other one that we see wrong.
A lot is correct tracking andcorrect audience gathering.
So Google Analytics and GoogleTag Manager are also tools that
are not super-nupriciary forwhere you have to have someone
that really knows how to do it.
Most dealership implementationsare not correct and if they are
(18:52):
correct, at some pointdealercom or dealer on or some
company will make the update tothe platform, platform Y, and
everyone gets a little faster tothe platform or whatever.
But oftentimes there's GoogleTag Manager codes who get
stripped out.
We'll just we'll go from havingconversion track in one month
to zeros 15 days into the nextmonth and we're trying to figure
(19:14):
out what happened.
But basically, correct trackingimplementation means I am
tracking the different ways youcan make a phone call and
tracking phone calls withindigital marketing.
There's actually threedifferent ways that you get that
one call.
One is the call from the ad.
That's the easiest one to trackand that's super easy.
Then the next one, which is alittle harder to track, is an on
(19:35):
click, which is I'm clicking ona mobile phone number, uh, on a
mobile, uh dealership websiteor business website.
And then the other one is I'mdynamically, uh, I'm on my
laptop, like I am right now, andI see the number and it's
dynamically swapped.
Oftentimes they'll have one ofthose tracked, but not all three
(19:57):
, so they're missing really highconversion data.
90% of all the leads thatconvert to car sales for most
dealerships.
Most businesses are coming fromthe phone, not form anymore.
I think people are tired ofleaving their emails with
businesses and getting spammedwith stuff that they're not
interested in anymore, so thephone is definitely the main
place.
Shifting over to forms, youwant to make sure and again,
(20:20):
this is a challenge withdealership websites where they
have a lot of iframes, whereyour iframe like it's hard to
track something that's in aniframe Sometimes you can only
track the start of the formsubmission.
So that's what a lot of peopledo and they're like, hey,
congratulations, I got you 300form fills and the reality is
you really only got 30, becausesomeone starting the button or
(20:42):
fat fingering the button orsomething like that is not the
full completion giving thatinformation to someone to follow
up on from a form.
The other aspect of this will becorrect audience tracking,
where there's kind of differenttypes of audiences that you can
track.
You can target people based onuser activity.
(21:04):
So I go to the website, I spendmore than the website benchmark
, which is probably about twoand a half minutes.
So you could have like a highlyengaged audience where it's all
the people that are above twoand a half minutes.
Um, so you could have like ahighly engaged audience where
it's all the people that areabove two and a half minutes.
That's a.
That's an audience that youcould create, an audience of
everyone that is converted andthat's a great audience to have.
Then you have an audience ofeveryone that's got to all of
(21:25):
your trucks pages and then allyour finance pages.
It's really important that youhave those things tracked, and
that's when we show whitebridging.
What we see most of the time andit always really frustrates me
when this happens is they'lljust do more marketing against
all users.
All users is like nothing.
It's what.
Who is it?
You know there's probably twothirds of the business that a
(21:47):
dealer should get is service andparts.
What you're, if you set that upincorrectly, you're going to be
remarketing new car ads tosomeone that just bought a car
and maybe they're just lookingfor parts or whatever, and then
you're wasting impressions onthem.
So that's an important thing toreally bear in mind is that you
want to make sure that you'redoing your marketing
(22:08):
intelligently.
And then, of course, there'sdynamic for marketing as well.
Whereas I saw this vehicle, nowthat vehicle is following me
across the web, which I think isanother really great way to do
that.
But if you have correct audiencetracking for instance, all
converters you can layer thatinto your Google Ads account and
say, hey, for all the peoplethat are in this all converters,
audience find me more peoplelike that.
(22:29):
We're bid on this type of user.
So it gives you a reallypowerful signal, um, that you
have to set up the right wayagain.
You kind of have to begin withthe end in mind, and, uh, it's.
That one is a really importantone too.
The other aspect of audiencetracking, um that we don't
typically see a lot of um isfirst party data or it's not
(22:52):
updated frequently enough.
I mean, if I were doing aimplementation for a new account
, I would probably start withokay, we're uploading all of
your new car sales data and allof your used car data, and then
all your service, your fixedoffs data, separate and um.
You know you're going to havethat whole list in there.
So if you want to targeteveryone, that's fine, but you
(23:15):
can find similar users.
You can target those peopleexplicitly.
A great example would be withone customer we're actually
targeting for buyback.
We're targeting sold unitspeople that bought units from
these dealerships five years ago.
So we're saying, okay, we don'twant to target anyone now with
(23:36):
this ad.
We want to target people thatwe have sold and serviced these
bikes so we know they're great.
We want to target those peopleand we're looking for vehicles
above a certain threshold so youcan upload all of that
information into the web.
It takes a lot of work.
The data security part isreally important.
You kind of have to have aclient that's willing to work
with you through that.
(23:56):
But that can be the massivegame changer and that's like you
know.
That'll be a situation whereyou'll get like a 20% before
it's boost out of that onechange alone.
It's a very powerful.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
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 withforms that are not native to
(24:42):
your website platform and you'respending heavily on paid search
.
In fact, I can think of anexample, I'm just not going to
say it so it's captured on herebut somebody that spends a lot
of money, so much that paidsearch is their number one
source of traffic and what thereporting shows to this company
is that they're getting hundredsof conversions.
(25:04):
And you just explained and Ithink it's really important to
reemphasize the point that ifthat's the case in your business
, where it looks like, wow, weget 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 drivingthrough paid search and it's
showing you hundreds of, youknow, key moments or whatever
(25:27):
key events or whatever GA4s callthem now, but you're equivalent
of you know what we all wouldthink is a conversion and you're
like no way it's because it'sjust tracking the, the beginning
, or they opened that particularform, and the reality is is
that you may actually be gettingzero conversions.
That's right.
Um, very, very important.
It's great.
(25:47):
This is really good stuff.
I hope the audience is enjoyingit as much as I am.
I'm learning.
If I'm learning stuffug, then Ican guarantee you sure as shit
car dealers and power sportsdealers and RV dealers and
marine dealers there's going tobe so much stuff here they could
literally load up an arsenaland give their crappy vendors a
(26:08):
really bad day.
I want to switch, if you're okay.
I want to move in and ask youpick your brain a little bit on
keyword research and selectingkeywords.
Some people think that keywordresearch is an age-old topic,
but there is so much depth andimportance to understanding this
, depending on what kind ofcompany you are, and so could
(26:30):
you share a little bit on someof the factors that should be
considered when you're trying todo keyword research and
selecting what you're going toactually because your money is
going to go towards this stuffCan you share a little bit about
that?
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Again, beginning with the end in mind, you want to
funnel as much of your spend tothe geo that you are physically
located in.
If I am a dealership in AustinTexas, I should not be spending
more money in Georgia than I amin Austin Texas, texas.
I should not be spending moremoney in Georgia than I am in
Austin Texas.
So, keywords that areconcatenated with Austin Alaris
dealership Austin,harley-davidson dealership
(27:01):
Austin, ford dealership Austinthose are going to you're going
to want to make sure that youhave a really good, robust list
of that.
And then you go into the micromarkets Westlake, lakeway you
know the more fluid areas, orthe areas that your business,
where your customers are, andthat crm data will put you in
the right direction.
There's um, but yeah, um, interms of keyword research.
(27:23):
I mean you want to have a goodmix of like short tail keywords
for one fit for an f-150lightning, but then you're going
to also want to have some ofthe longer tail and
geo-indicated versions as well.
The search volume will mostlyaccrue at the short tail, but
there is still a tremendousamount of people that will say a
couple more words that willindicate that they're not just.
(27:46):
They don't just know that theywant a florida club 50.
They know where they want to goand that's just a really great
signal that they're in marketfor you and that business is
winnable.
Finance is one that I reallydon't see very often in human
research.
You definitely want to be goingout to finance A lot of.
(28:06):
It's funny.
There are some brands that aremostly finance driven.
For instance, there are not aton 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 alot of units sold and you
wouldn't think of yourself asthat person, but a lot of people
(28:29):
are primarily financialshoppers, especially in the
lower uh you know kind ofquartile of the market.
So that's a really importantone, you know.
As far as like tools, there's somany different ones SEMrush.
I think the most importantthing is to build a really
strong list of inventory-relatedkeywords, segment them by trend
(28:50):
level, you know, and then lookat your alpha products.
You know you might have beforea dealership that sells 10 edges
a year and a hundred, andf-150s are way more than that.
Then the f-150 needs to haveits own keywords, it needs to be
its own campaign, because thatis the top moving product and
you want to make sure that youcan control the targeting and
(29:11):
everything at that level.
But yeah, you know, looking atproducts, looking at your
primary target areas and thenlooking at the sub-markets,
those are all things that you'regoing to want to make sure that
you have in there.
A lot of what we hear is thatthe broadband kind of covers
everything and it does.
You know, like if we just ranFord F-150, we would get Rifle,
(29:32):
we would get Ford F-150 AspenVail, 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 todifferentiate and have these
different types of keywords.
And then also, you know, goingback to that Ford dealer example
, you can say, hey, we're thisFord dealership in Glenwood
Springs.
You know, we tell them hey,we're answering your question,
(29:54):
you want to be sold to an asset.
Here we are.
We work with people all thetime, so you can really kind of
hyper-target your messagingbased on the keywords that your
users are trying.
One other thing, though, tonote I don't know how much
you've looked at Google IO forkind of the big unveil they did
of search, uh, basicallysearches that are enhanced with
(30:17):
ai.
I actually foresee long tailkeywords 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 inkind of a dumb way and be like
hey, like what's, what's theFord?
You know the new Ford truckmodel?
Okay, we're getting informationof what that is.
(30:37):
Where can I go get it, you know, and you'll see this kind of
multi-search touch point to kindof get to that refined query.
So you're going to see the longtail keywords, I think, being a
lot more utilized.
Because I think being a lotmore utilized because Google
makes more money when people domore searches.
They have a revenue per searchmodel.
(30:59):
So if they can take the buyerjourney from hey, I'm looking
for an F4 to F1 50 near me, I'mgoing to search the 10 blue
links, click on a few differentads, or you know, basically when
that person does a search,another ad is triggered.
It's another opportunity forthem to, you know, serve ads, so
(31:19):
that is how they make the money.
So I really feel that AI isgoing to kind of extend the
search for any products kind ofstrategically, because that's
how you can better monetizeGoogle search.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
I can see that, um, a couple of points you made in
there.
I love you using the mitsubishiexample.
I think that's really a perfectexample to help people learn
from, and I think it's alsointeresting that mitsubishi, um,
although they haven't been ableto quite, uh, capitalize on it
the way that a couple of otherbrands did, but very similarly
to mitsubishi, hyundai and Kiaused to be an example of a
(31:56):
disposable lighter as well.
Like, I don't really want a carlike that on one of these cars.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
They had to slap a five-year, 100,000-mile, no
questions asked warranty uponthat.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Yeah, but it's interesting because it bought
them the time and you know,clearly they made all kinds of
business decisions other thanjust having the time to do it,
but they did buy themselvesenough time to create a place in
the marketplace to be a, youknow, a business economical
right it was uh, you can savemoney and still, you know, have
(32:30):
four wheels and a steering wheel.
And look at those two brandsnow.
I mean, just are they?
They've done amazing things.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
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 andover Honda to a pretty
substantial amount.
So there's always a hook foryour brand and you just need to
(32:59):
kind of lean into it.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeah for sure, absolutely true.
Again, just kind of movingthrough some of this, although
it's great, I mean we could stayon any one of these categories
for a long period of time.
But I want to get into a littlebit to um kind of ad copy and
creative.
Um.
Some of the best practices, Isuppose, are tactics for writing
(33:23):
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 Ithink it's far more important
than just you know the path ofleast resistance.
But what are your thoughts onad copy?
How important is it?
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Super important.
I mean, that's another kind ofthing that I wish Google gave a
little bit more clarity on.
Right now we're using RSAs.
We're migrating on fromextended text ads.
I don't even think you can addthem anymore, so it's all just
RSAs which have a ton ofheadlines and description lines.
(34:01):
You let Google's AI enginefigure that out, but what I see
sometimes is an RSA that hasmultiple lines that say the same
thing, because they really wantthat to be in the ad and they
didn't pin that particularheadline.
So you'll see the ad servedwith come get your uh, come get
(34:22):
your financing.
Apply for your finance now talkto 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, notall three of those variations,
so that's a really importantfactor.
I mean, the most importantthing is you want to get some of
the dealer speak in there.
(34:43):
Every dealership has adifferent way of speaking to
their audience, has a differentway of speaking to their
audience.
For instance, tri-state Ford ofAmarillo is number one
competitor.
For the last, I think, 50 yearsit's been Gene Messer Ford in
Amarillo and their slogan is wedon't mess around.
So it's like they're playing ontheir name.
(35:03):
So that's something that theywanted in there.
A lot of dealerships have to beunique, 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 whateverthe brand messaging is that they
typically have, but outside ofthat, you want to make sure that
your, your ctas and valuepropositions are really on point
.
You know, for instance, we'retalking about a truck.
(35:26):
You want to talk about theengine in one of the ad lines.
You want to be talking abouthow many miles you can go on one
charge if it's an EV.
You want to really talk aboutthe NPG on all those things.
That is a line for each one.
If you're looking for somethinga little bit more general, like
(35:46):
Ford dealership near me, me thenyou talk about what you have to
sell.
But you want to avoidrepetitive copy and you always
want to have two ads runningbecause you can leapfrog for
that way typically the way thatworks for us when we're
optimizing ad copy again, you'relooking at this all based on
the account being built theright way and it's not 500
(36:07):
keywords with one ad that kindof speaks to everything.
This is ad copy that speaksdirectly to people that are
looking for hana series.
You know so you, you can putall that stuff in there, the,
you know your dealership promiseyour, you know the, the mpg of
the crB capacity and luggagecapacity, all that kind of stuff
(36:30):
.
But then you want to haveanother app that's kind of
similar and you play themagainst each other and when you
have the decided winner which Ithink takes about a thousand
impressions to figure out, thatcan take two weeks, that can
take one day.
It really depends on the marketand how much traffic you're
getting through your accounts.
But yeah, what we do is weactually leapfrog, we kind of
(36:51):
leapfrog optimization modelwhere we'll take the better
performing ad and they copy inthat.
That's kind of similar but alittle bit better from the
viewpoint of our ad manager, andthat's how we incrementally get
the ads moving in the rightdirection.
Quality score is not as big of adeal as it used to be.
It used to be this incrediblething that if you wrote an ad
(37:15):
with a bunch of basicallykeyword stuff that graphed out
of your ads, you paid a lowerCPC and you did, and that worked
for a really, really long timeand it works less well now.
So you don't necessarily wantto do that, but you want to make
sure that the keyword of theproduct 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
(37:37):
the description lines so peopleknow that this ad is not, you
know, uh, a general honda dealerad.
It's a crb ad.
So those are some of the bestpractices for A-B testing.
Obviously, outside of justrunning split tests within ad
groups, you can also create asphere, miss, where you will try
a bunch of other differentthings that you can try
(37:59):
different audience segments.
You can try hey, we're doingthese ads against different
A-types and stuff and see whichone wins.
But the thing that's a key tosuccess in A-B testing is that
you want to make sure thatyou're clear on what's the
timeframe or the data timeframethat you want to be assessing ad
performance in.
(38:19):
If you have an ad that's onlygotten 200 impressions, then you
probably don't have enough datato make the optimization and
then you'll over-optimize youraccounts.
That quality score keepsresetting.
So you have to be cautious andkind of methodical with how you
do that.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
Yeah, Again really good tips makes me think of
things from the past.
I'm like you know, just qualityscore, Just I kind of gave me a
little bit of anxiety there fora second, just kind of gave me
a little bit of anxiety therefor a second.
Just all of these differentthings that you end up as a
business chasing.
But in the case of car dealers,power sports dealers and a lot
(39:03):
of businesses, for me it's thereason why I have to emphasize
the importance of who you'rechoosing to do this on your
behalf.
I'm a big always have been, butvery, very big fan of businesses
, being smart enough to know howto choose someone that can do
things that they would never beable to do on their own, on
(39:23):
their behalf, Almost treating itas if these businesses are our
businesses.
We're trying to chase the typeof success that we'd want if we
owned your business.
That's how good we are at whatwe're doing, and when I listen
to you share these things insuch great detail, it just makes
me think of how important thatis.
I think it's extremely valuablefor people tuning in.
So I know you talked a littlebit already on targeting
(39:46):
audience segmentation.
I don't know if you have anymore thoughts on that before I
pick your brain a little bitalready on targeting audience
segmentation.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
I don't know if you have any more thoughts on that.
Um, before I pick your brain alittle bit on on tracking, yeah,
um, I think, in terms of, like,audience segmentation, it
really obviously totally dependson who on that crm and those
people are and what type ofdifferent buyer you have.
If you're a motorcycle dealer,let's say you sell polaris bikes
, indian triumph, uh, canon, allunder one roof, you have many
(40:16):
different types of buyers andyou need to segment your
products accordingly.
But even within like smallerlineup brands like ford, there
is a huge discrepancy in thetype of buyer between someone
who's looking for a $25,000sedan and someone that's looking
for an $85,000 lifted Pronto.
(40:37):
Those are different humanbeings shopping for the same
brand.
They have different incomelevels.
So, again, I think the benefitof having a segmented structure
where you have sedans over hereand you have your SUVs over here
or higher ticket items, thatway you can do things like bid
up or down based on the income.
And sometimes I mean I don'tthink you ever really need to
(41:02):
exclude the top 10% of incomeearners, because if someone is
looking for a Camry, a camrythat's fine if they're
multi-millionaire or whateverlike, but what you do really
need to focus on if you'relooking at luxury products, um,
you want to exclude the bottom50 of the emers as much as you
can, just because there's somuch meat on the bone with that
(41:24):
top 50.
That's who you sell all yourcars to and you will,
incidentally, get a lot of thattraffic anyway.
And you will anyway becausepeople are removing our viewers
of control.
You used to be able to beincredibly precise to the street
.
I remember with the Huffinesgroup in Plano, we would draw
lines like on streets, where wewould target here and wouldn't
(41:48):
overlap in some other viewership.
That level of control is not.
It's not really happening.
So you have to know that, evenif you do everything perfectly,
you are going to get some mocktraffic.
You're going to get some peoplewho Google didn't know what
income level they were in.
They were in others, so theysaw your ad and they wasted your
money, or maybe not.
But that's a really importantfactor is segmenting your
(42:11):
audience based on the incomelevel for the product that
you're selling.
Yeah, I think that's the mainthing.
Speaker 1 (42:17):
I love those examples and I think it's really
important for the audience.
Whether you're selling cars andtrucks and SUVs or you're
selling motorcycles, I thinkthis also applies in the RV
industry.
I'm an RV owner as of last yearnot quite a full year of owning
a travel trailer which I love.
It's so, so fun, not a have tohave, just kind of can you have.
(42:39):
And I'm old now, Mike, so don'tmake fun of me.
But but even knowing thedifferences between you know,
jayco versus Winnebago versusyou know, Keystone there's so
many brands and differences, butnot getting too far into RV.
I think for the audience it'sreally important whether I guess
I would focus mostly onautomotive and power sports
(42:59):
dealers, but in power sports, mygoodness, it's rare that you're
just Harley Davidson or you'rea powerhouse Honda store and so
you're only Honda product.
It's much more common thatyou're like the Ride Now stores,
where you have multiple brandsunder just about every single
one of your rooftops and, mygoodness, not only is that an
opportunity for segmentation andproper targeting, it's almost
(43:22):
should be a mandate.
Like, yeah, you don't even wantto start to spend money if you
have 10 brands uh, you know,from ducati to suzuki.
Yeah, those are two verydifferent buyers.
The guy who's got the money fora really hot italian product
like ducati versus hey, it mightbe my first bike and I'm
(43:42):
getting a suzuki or a kawasaki.
That's important.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
So I love that you share on that, because I think
it's really important his thingis when he's like audience
segments apply for motorcycleenthusiasts, which I'm like,
okay.
Well, I'm going to sue all themotorcycles that have been sold
in the United States.
Most of them are probably under$9,000.
That's probably the minority ofbikes that are in that $30,000
to $50,000 territory which, ifyou're an Indian dealer, that's
(44:06):
all you sell.
Territory which, if you're anIndian viewer, that's all you
sell.
Their base level, indian chiefI 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 ofgeneral settings and you're kind
(44:27):
of moneying, you're targetingfor people that are looking for
a cdo with people that arewithin a calisopi audience.
Those people are not going tofit.
You're not going to move thatperson over.
So I think that's that's a veryimportant factor as well yeah,
I totally agree.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
It's, uh, one of those points that just kind of
needs to be stressed over andover and over for those power
sports dealers, because theydon't all understand that or
maybe they understand it, butthe depth is really important.
Tracking, measuring performance, of course, is really really
important.
Do you have recommendations orsome things that you might say
(45:11):
in terms of tools or metricsthat businesses should be
looking at, tracking andmeasuring for performance?
I love that you share the kindsof things.
That's why I'm asking aquestion like this, because you
are equipping the businessowners to have really insightful
conversations, right, andthere's just not enough of that
and all serving all theseindustries.
So what are your thoughts onmaybe helping businesses around,
(45:33):
how they would track, ormetrics to measure?
Speaker 2 (45:36):
right.
I mean, obviously, googleanalytics is free, if what most
people shouldn't use.
You have your crm that'shopefully set up correctly, and
you have the blast.
You have kind of two systemsthat that work and are both
tracking, typically within gtn,but they'll say different things
.
So you you at least within astandard google ads
(45:58):
implementation you get blasttracking, you get analytics and
you can kind of cross referenceeach other.
Um, however, not a huge fan ofanalytics G4 for a number of
reasons, the main one beingthere are no more views.
You don't have the ability tocreate a Google Analytics
account anymore and say, hey,this is the raw data view, this
(46:20):
is the POM view, this is thefilter view, where we filter out
all the traffic for our IP,which makes a lot of sense,
especially in dealerships, whereyour team is on the website all
the time, visiting your websitehundreds of times a day.
That absolutely will inflateyour metrics.
And again, if you're doing allusers or marketing, guess who
(46:42):
you're marketing to your ownstaff.
So, yeah, that is definitelyreally important.
We're starting to actuallyexplore with other analytics
systems as well.
There's a couple of ones outthere Clauseable is one that
we're going to be piloting,sheep Analytics is another one,
and these are already kind ofcookie-less, because what we're
(47:03):
facing right now is thedeprecation of cookies.
Luckily, thank God, it waspostponed for another year.
Uh, because google doesn't have.
They have not figured this outand they keep warning us as
agency and saying hey, if youdon't have your first party
matched in here and all thestuff, you're gonna lose this
ability to track.
And it's just like you meanyou're taking away our ability
(47:23):
to track users, like you'regiving us less than civility
into what moves the needle thatabsolutely benefits google, like
it just you know there's a lotof changes.
There's a lot of changes theycould make to make your
marketing more precise, but theless precise they make in
marketing, the more you have tospend.
So and that is absolutely a factand there are absolutely cases.
(47:46):
Um, I was reading a SearchEngine Journal article on
basically the case that Googlehas versus a bunch of plaintiffs
in different states and they'retalking about how Google
absolutely rinsed the auctions,the removal of search terms
under 10 impressions every month, every month.
(48:10):
There's just a lot of things andthat doesn't benefit dealers
when they made their searchterms change a couple of years
ago where basically the datathreshold 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 10impressions, it won't show it,
it'll just say it was thatkeyword.
Less than 10 impressions, itwill just it won't show it,
(48:30):
it'll just say it was thatkeyword.
It will not show you thosesearch terms.
And for us, when we're doingour keywords plus minus sprint
which is when we remove where weadd negative keywords for stuff
that doesn't make sense, forinstance, for F-150 lift kit or
something like that, if you getone or two impressions or clicks
on that a month, you're notgoing to actually know where
you're wasting your money, sothat's definitely a very
(48:52):
important thing to know.
Speaker 1 (48:55):
Yeah, I think for me it's been amusing to watch
Google.
I wasn't surprised at all thatthey punted that implementation
for another year, because Ihaven't seen them say anything
that would indicate that theyfigured out how to not actually
shoot themselves in the foot interms of it's gonna cost them
money, like it's gonna eat intorevenue when you take away, uh,
(49:18):
some of those trackingcapabilities like that.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
So it's they had turtledove, they've had all
these different things which Ijust don't think work.
And then some of them aren'tgdpr compliant.
So they're really looking for asolution.
They'll work in the States andbe compliant with California law
and then also international law.
So that's tough for them.
But it would be really cool ifyou could have a setting Like,
(49:42):
say, I'm in Texas, we're acookie-free state, and then you
have all of the options totarget people the way you have
been.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
And then other different options, but the
tool's not quite as there.
It's not there yet.
Yeah they'll figure somethingout, and so it's always fun to
kind of watch all the differentgoings on within this digital
era.
You had just a few minutes backyou were talking about, you
know, ai and search and I Ithink that's an area where
Google will probably stay reallydominant.
Only because I don't know ifyou noticed this and this is a
bit of a tangent, but for peoplethat are interested, rand
(50:15):
Fishkin of Moz fame and nowSparkToro he posted just I don't
think it was last week, it's inthe last few days, but he, sam
Altman or somebody it wasn't sam, but somebody was just saying
all these glowing things abouthow, yeah, you're gonna go to
chat gpt and you know it's gonnado better on search.
(50:38):
And they literally said go dothese types of searches, one of
which was like find me somegreat places for lunch in town.
And so rand did it in chat gptI think what are we at 4.5?
And he's like give me recommendsome great places for lunch in
seattle, and half of them wereclosed or not open and he wrote
back.
(50:58):
I love how rand just kind of wonhe's.
I think he learned so much fromthe maz experience.
He's a really prettytransparent um guy, but he was
like this this is garbage.
Like this is awful, all thesebusinesses are terrible.
And he then posted his sequencewith ChatGPT of basically
telling it these businesses areclosed and we're like oh I'm
sorry, let me get you a few more, and then it would same thing.
(51:20):
So we'll see.
Hopefully Google leads on that.
That should be a place relativeto AI, that they would be the
leader.
Speaker 2 (51:30):
I think something wasn't on the agenda today, but
AI in search is absolutely goingto gobble up a couple of
verticals.
I don't think it's going to hitauto car sales that heavily,
but I think it will massivelyimpact fixed stocks.
When you think about whatGoogle has done historically
with verticalized search andpartners, back in the day if you
(51:54):
were a travel agent for anairline, you would list with
Expedia or whatever.
Then Google came out withGoogle Flights.
What do you think happened toall the traffic that used to go
to TripAdvisor, that used to goto Hotelscom?
All of those companies becamesubstantially less valuable.
(52:16):
I worked with someone thatactually witnessed this
firsthand when they were workingon Hard Rock Casino advertising
and then you could book yourstay natively in Google and your
flight like pretty muchnatively.
That traffic didn't.
You didn't go to the website.
You lost that opportunity toremark it.
So I don't think that that'sgoing to be necessarily a threat
(52:39):
for, like local searches or forlike, say, you know, unit or
inventory searches for for cars,for any search that's like hey,
how do I, how, what's the bestway to change an oil filter
there that you're absolutely notgoing to be going to those
content you're not going to begoing to the places where the
content is coming from.
Let's put it that way you'regoing to be getting a distilled
(53:00):
version of that that keeps yousearching and interacting,
because that is again what'sgoing to be triggering the
impressions which I mean.
It's good, job security ads arenot going anywhere.
I was kind of worried the otherday when I I thought that you
know, gpt, fire or whatever wasgoing to have a search engine in
it.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
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 isso much nuance, and especially
when you start to get into theniches and then the niches
(53:39):
within the niches I say this allthe time, I feel like a broken
record on so many things, as Ijust say them all the time,
almost every day but theautomotive industry, the power
sports industry okay, those aretwo niches alone.
Okay, well, you get into theautomotive industry and then
what's your niche?
What?
Are you a CRM provider?
Okay, what's your niche?
Are you a DMS provider?
(54:00):
Are you a digital marketingprovider?
Are you a digital marketingprovider 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 knowall of those things before you
even start thinking about howmany salespeople you need or
what your marketing strategy is,and you know what channels
you're going to, you know spendmoney in, what ones you're going
(54:23):
to try to optimize organically,and there's just so much to be
thought of.
And when I think about AI, aboutAI, I think, well, the nuance
within all of those Niches.
There's still an extremelyimportant Part of the human
Relationship with AI.
That's still Going to be thechampion.
Now that doesn't mean that wewon't see some things Develop
like, oh, it'll blow me away,but I'm seeing so many things
(54:46):
Around.
Graphic creation and videoCreation and the things you can
do with mid-journey are stillblowing my mind.
It seems like every couple ofweeks I'm like it does what now?
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 notworried and I'm playing around
(55:09):
with AI stuff and reading andconsuming every single day.
I'm not worried about any of itbeing able to do the things
that you've talked about just onthis episode anytime soon.
I would, as a business owner, Iwouldn't turn it over to oh
yeah, let's let AI do it when Ihave somebody like you and your
business that knows things thatAI doesn't understand the nuance
(55:30):
of.
So but let me get back on trackjust a couple more minutes
before I'm going tounfortunately have to land the
plane, but I want to get yourthoughts on a couple more things
before we close.
One on optimizing Optimizationand ad fatigue are a lot and
I'll give you an either or, ifyou'd rather.
I would love to know yourthoughts on when people just get
(55:52):
kind of tired.
I say this a lot you canfatigue your audience with your
ad copy, with email campaigns,all those types of things.
So yeah, we have enough timefor you to choose one or the
other.
If you want to talk onoptimization or kind of add
fatigue, or if you feel like youcan hit both, I'd love your
thoughts.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
Fatigue is.
You should be modifying yourads frequently.
So with new copy it shouldreflect what's on their website
and where you're going to getmore.
Ad fatigue is in display.
It's in social ads, marketingads, and you should be changing
those out at least on aquarterly basis, ideally on a
(56:32):
monthly basis.
You shouldn't be getting fresh,creative and hitting people
with different formats.
That's, that's how you handlethe ad fatigue.
I don't really think of adfatigue too much associated with
search ads.
Search ads do work the best,but I don't know if people
remember necessarily what was inline for whatever.
So I think ad fatigue is morekind of the visual.
(56:55):
Obviously it applies to TV orany kind of video advertising.
You absolutely want to changethings up fairly frequently,
just real quick on optimizing adcampaigns.
In our workflow we have about22 different things we do, but
kind of the categories that youragency needs to be looking at
or you need to be looking atin-house is time of day bid
(57:18):
adjustments.
What does our ad schedule looklike?
When are we serving our ads?
Are we spending our money wherewe typically have higher
density of conversions?
How does that look?
You want to be looking at thatonce a month at least.
You also want to be applying amonthly kind of audit spread to
your audience's income levelsand making whatever changes you
(57:41):
can to get more of what'sworking.
You definitely want to look attargeting and say, hey, over the
last 30 to 90 days, thisparticular zip code has been our
absolute winner from aconversion standpoint, or these
fine zip codes.
Was that the case last month ormonth to date?
(58:01):
You want to make sure thatyou're really looking at those
things, because sometimes therecan be a change things, because
sometimes there can be a changeand, um, you know and you've
dealership love and then all ofa sudden there's just a ton of
intent that kind of disappearsfrom an area that might have
been kind of a neighboring as acover market for both of you.
So geos is something you needto be looking at all the time.
You need to be excludingkeywords that don't make sense
(58:22):
for your business all the time,and when you do exclude them,
you should probably add them toan exclusion template, because
sometimes, uh, you'll find thetruth spread out in a hundred
different places.
So for us, we have more than ahundred dealerships that we work
with and if we look singularlyat one store.
We might not get enough data onkeyword waste, but we'll get a
(58:45):
little piece for one dealer,then we'll get something from
another.
We'll get a little piece forone dealer, then we'll get
something from another and kindof in aggregate, we'll make our
negative keyword lists smarter,more robust, with the
understanding that ourvisibility has dropped by at
least half.
So those, I think, are the mainelements Not over-optimizing to
(59:09):
brand or spending too much onbrand.
You might have to spend like10% and then not ensure spending
the rest of your budget betweenbill or tours and inventory.
You need to, on a monthly basis, be looking at your incentives,
making sure that that's in yourad copy.
Any kind of finance specialsthose are super compelling,
always they are now, they'realways the number one most
valuable feature, even maybeincluding your creative.
(59:31):
Those are kind of high level tobe the main things that we
would look at in an organization.
Speaker 1 (59:39):
Once again, awesome, awesome stuff For the audience
listening and or watching.
You can have a one-on-oneconversation with Mike, and
those are totally free.
I can't imagine how much longerthey will be.
Just kidding, mike's verygracious with his time and you
literally can have a one-on-oneconversation.
(01:00:00):
If you want to get in contactwith him, go to
premieronlinemarketingcom, butwe've been cleared to land the
plane.
So, hey, look at that.
Another great place to park,another great episode.
We appreciate the comments andquestions from the audience, so
please, please, feel free toshare.
Your feedback helps us deliverepisodes like this that are
relevant.
This also includes yourcomments.
(01:00:22):
Might be a question orsomething that you want us to
dig in on on future upcomingepisodes, so feel free to jump
into the comments, especially ifyou see this content on places
like LinkedIn, facebook,instagram and definitely YouTube
.
Until next time, thanks fortuning in.
We'll see you soon right hereon the Palmcast.
Speaker 2 (01:00:43):
Thanks, Shaw.
Speaker 1 (01:00:45):
Thanks, Mike.
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