So you’re the Internet Manager, General Manager or owner of a dealership and also the responsible party for increasing lead volume for your dealership. The options for spending a marketing & advertising budget are endless ranging from newspaper to TV to radio ads. You want to make sure you’re smart about where you invest your money and that you get the most bang for your buck.
Starting a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign with Google Adwords is probably the most effective way to reach targeted car shoppers online and drive website traffic to increase your leads immediately.
SEO vs. Pay-Per-Click
Instead of wasting your dealership marketing budget using traditional methods of advertising, PPC advertising allows you to reach customers that are already looking for your vehicles or are interested in your dealership service center. Although, organic SEO is a valuable web marketing strategy, it can be inconsistent and hard to keep up with ever changing algorithms of search engines and SEO techniques. If you’re looking for immediate results, SEM or Search Engine Marketing is much more effective than organic SEO for a number of reasons which we’ll cover later on in this article.
What is PPC?
Before we get started, I’ll quickly cover the basics of what PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is. According to Wikipedia, “Pay-per-click (PPC), also called cost per click (CPC), is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked.” In layman’s terms it’s a form of online advertising that allows you to buy your way to the top of search results pages. When you perform a search on Google, the results that show at the very top with the small green “Ad” box are all ads called Google AdWords. Every time these ads are clicked, the company displaying the ad is charged.
With this form of advertising you choose or target keywords or phrases you would like your dealerships website to be associated with and decide how much you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
As with most advertising, the more money you are willing to spend through Pay Per Click, the higher your site is likely to appear in the results for the keywords or phrases you select.
Why your dealership should use PPC advertising
