Paid Versus Organic

Replies to This ADM Discussion

Permalink Reply by John Curtis on October 14, 2010 at 1:16pm

Why do it: 80% of searchers who will only click organic links. Organic results are heavily favored in the research phase of the buying process. More than 70% of car buyers begin the process online. A PPC and natural results presence works to increase clicks to either place, more so than if only one existed. They work in harmony to brand your dealership for relevant searches.

Track your organic visits. How many organic visits were you getting before SEO on-site implementations? Before SEO efforts off site?

Mark major changes in SEO practices and note that when looking at your analytics. We look at a lot of different things for our auto dealer clients:

Total links gained from start of SEO campaign
Difference in organic traffic (total traffic, depth of traffic, paths of traffic)
New referring traffic

This can get much more in-depth. Remember, SEO is long-term. You're creating a future. Any of your competitors can start running paid search tomorrow and compete with you admirably. They cannot catch up quickly to a well-run SEO campaign. This is the work that pays off in the long run. Search will keep changing: content will become even more important and local search will become the norm. SEO efforts now will pay off later and now.

I could keep writing, but I'll stop. The question wasn't really specific and neither is my answer. Shoot me an email and we can talk at length.

Permalink Reply by Ken Luna on October 14, 2010 at 1:26pm

We can track by Search Engine and Keyword every hit on your web site and which ones generated phone calls with our Click Track product. Please email kluna@teletextsolutions.com if you are interested in seeing a dealer using this.

Thanks, Ken Luna

Permalink Reply by Michael Wise on October 15, 2010 at 8:05am

@ John. Yes, researchers are fine. Bottom funnel shoppers is who we shoot for though. They have the highest closing rate and the best return on advertising investment. Again, hard to draw a line from organic search to moving metal.

Permalink Reply by John Curtis on October 15, 2010 at 9:26am

@ Michael - Understood. But how does being a part of the research phase for the buy affect their end decisions?

You can track every organic keyword click, but parsing out which ones derived from your "SEO efforts" is difficult. It's not like PPC. Neither is radio or TV or outdoor advertising. But those are the past. It comes down to when you get on the bus for natural search marketing. I see it working for our dealer clients. And I think their current investment will pay off even more down the line. We do show our clients the value they are getting from SEO by going through a lot of detail with them frequently. But we don't just have one magic report that shows a simple breakdown. Our campaigns are too complex, as is SEO.

Permalink Reply by Matt Watson on October 15, 2010 at 8:39pm

One of the biggest problems that dealers have is matching website traffic referrals to actual leads on your website. Even more challenging is be able to see in your CRM how many appointments and sales that converted to.

VinSolutions has created some special integrations between our website and CRM to be able to provide this type of reporting. We created the industry's first true website dashboard that combines website analytics (think google analytics reporting), call tracking stats, chat leads, website leads, and CRM conversion stats to appointments and sales. From a single dashboard you can now evaluate the performance of your website!

We are very proud that our website dashboard was selected by dealers as a finalist in the Driving Sales Innovation Cup next week at the Driving Sales Executive Summit. Our VinLens product was also a finalist.

Here is a screenshot of our website dashboard that shows exactly what you are looking for. We also have a report that shows more details with the ability to click right in to the CRM to view the leads.