Leverage Your Existing Website Traffic To Sell More Cars

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Influencer Comment by Lizelle Landino on June 21, 2011 at 8:06pm

This is a great post Brian. If your website conversion is poor, your lead quality and quantity that you get from thousands of leads and website visitors - there has to be something set in place to help the dealer convert those expensive $$ amounts they have invested in those leads and website already. Chat is a great conversion tool ! It really should remind dealers that our websites is now our storefront and remind us of "owning your backyard" first before you jump to the next town.

Comment by Brian Pasch on June 20, 2011 at 9:04am

Justin, I couldn't agree with you more.  Leveraging existing traffic with remarketing, chat, and conversion optimization is a worthy investment for all dealers.  Unfortunately, A/B testing conversion designs is not a short term project and not many dealers I know have the patience to A/B test all their key landing pages.

Comment by Justin Braun on June 20, 2011 at 8:24am

I agree that "Remarketing" is a valuable tool to increase brand awareness, but what about actually converting website visitors into leads once they reach your website?  In addition to engaging customers on your site with live chat and other applications, one must understand why customers come to a site and how they use it.  

 

Conversion Rate Optimization is the next step in the digital marketing process.  Drawing more meaningful visitors deeper into a site and providing them with an engaging call to action, rather than simply nagging at the masses to buy your product, will translate into a significantly higher conversion rate.  I go more in depth on CRO in this blog.

 

 

Comment by Brian Pasch on June 19, 2011 at 1:16pm

Tony

I would also add that as dealers have more marketing assets that can drive traffic to their website, like Facebook Ads, Social Media Engagement, Microsites, Press Releases, etc. all of these funnels can increase the number of unique viistors that a dealer website sees each month, which all increase the retargeting pool.

Comment by Ralph Paglia on June 19, 2011 at 11:03am

Terry - Thanks for calling out the incorrect use of the term "Remarketing"... However, based on the "Automotive Remarketing" magazines I get and eNewsletters as well, the term "Remarketing" as used in the auto industry refers to the sale of used vehicles that come off lease or are traded in at dealerships.

Comment by Tarry Shebesta on June 19, 2011 at 10:45am

Brian Pasch: “As dealers look for new ways to leverage their existing traffic into greater leads and sales, there are three strategies that business owners should embrace and test. The three strategies that we are most excited about today are remarketing (retargeting) campaigns, website chat, and text marketing campaigns.

All three marketing strategies will leverage your existing traffic (website and/or dealership) in new ways to increase your connection with in market consumers.”

I would like to add one more. Prequalifed Payment Marketing

We can address that in a later discussion.

In regards to retargeting (the term remarketing in the auto industry refers to marketing vehicles that you cannot sell on your lot or where a finance company is trying to sell an off-lease/repossessed vehicle), we are doing a version of monthly payment retargeting.

The service encourages the online shopper to click on a payment offer and complete a simple form to instantly see actual payments they qualify for based on their credit and bank lending criteria.

Once they are credit qualified, real payments for all vehicles they view on the site are displayed.

This dramatically improves the consumer’s confidence to buy.

It can also be deployed on other websites where a dealer has inventory.

 

Comment by Ralph Paglia on June 18, 2011 at 4:01pm

Tony makes a valid point... Increasing the number of sites that are available from which to trigger ads using Retargeting pixels is a major development in improving the effectiveness of Retargeting for dealers.  If the population is thin, then a larger net is more likely to find the targeted (Retargeted?) consumers.

Comment by Tony Guarnaccia on June 18, 2011 at 3:56pm

Having worked with Ralph on the BZ retargeting strategy, I agree that retargeting inventory is the biggest challenge facing campaigns at the tier 3 / local level which is why the combination of retargeting with bt makes so much sense. One advantage that dealers have today however is the availability of retargeting across the vast Google network which was not available 3 years ago when BZ pioneered dealer retargeting campaigns. I think the other important development is the use of display advertising exchanges which opens a much larger net to cast for bt and retargeting campaigns, which is one solution that we are leveraging to grow display inventory here at ADP.

Comment by Ralph Paglia on June 18, 2011 at 12:50pm

Brian - Many automotive marketers, car companies and dealerships have used retargeting as an effective tactic within their online marketing strategy for many years.  from 2007 through 2010 the sale of retargeting by BZ Results sales professionals to car dealers posed several challenges to me and the team I played a leadership role within.  One of the biggest challenges was available inventory.  This was because so many dealers who placed orders for Retargeting Campaigns had such low volume of traffic to their primary websites, which we had tagged, that it was difficult to get any meaningful volume of impressions...

 

What we found is that by combining Retargeting tactics with Behavioral Targeting tactics produced the biggest bang for the buck.  

 

There are several large dealer groups in the USA that can generate meaningful volumes of retargeting inventory, and for them a "Pure" Retargeting Campaign makes a lot of sense, but for the thousands of smaller dealerships and groups, in fact the great majority of dealerships, Retargeting works most effectively when combined with Behavioral Targeting.

 

Today, as the Vice President of Digital at Tier 10 Marketing, I have championed the aggressive use of both Retargeting (RT) and Behavioral Targeting (BT) online digital advertising campaigns to produce significant results for our dealer clients.  At Tier 10 we are using RT/BT as tactical components within a fully integrated strategy that delivers a consistent message across 10 channels (Tiers) of advertising media.

Comment by Matthew O'Such on June 17, 2011 at 9:34am

Good tutorial on setting up the retargeting & remarketing campaign. I just got off the phone with a dealership and we were talking about how to do it, I'm going to send them this post.

 

On the flip side of it, they made a good point; You need to start getting the initial traffic to your website to begin with so the campaign can start working for you, and being there in both paid and organic search results will maximize this investment further!