The importance of integrated Search Engine Marketing for the automotive industry in 2010
In my first blog post about the automotive sector I said: ‘...companies still have the opportunity to find one or the other potential customer. The only question is how?’, I have to underline the term ‘find’ and I have to revise the ‘who is finding who process’! What about potential customers who find the right car manufacturer or the right dealer while searching on major search engines? Adding pay-per-click (PPC) to its advertising mix, such as ‘Google Adwords’, brands or dealers can some how reach their major goals ‘hassle free’. A right search engine marketing (SEM) approach should be the key to success.
PPC efficiency for the automotive industry
The automotive industry is no longer able to accomplish their goals with TV, printed or radio ads alone. Goals such as ‘test drives, requesting brochures or product awareness can be reached very easily once you know how to create a right pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. Sometimes carrying ‘offline strategies’ to the online world may work out quiet well, but most of the time the defined keywords and corresponding text ads are wrong chosen because the online prospects are using different search queries to find a brand, a brands new car or even a dealership. The right keyword management, the right keyword grouping combined with negative keywords and the right text ad grouping can help you to increase the relevancy of search queries and ensure a high return of investment (ROI).
Since a policy change from Google on the use of trade marked terms to trigger search engine ads, it’s now possible for advertising companies to use another’s trade mark to trigger its own ads. With this change it is highly recommended to use competitor keywords, such as brand names or specific car models. But it makes more sence if you use competitors car model keywords which are listed in the same car segment/ classification. If your brand model is a class D car use your competitors class D name, if it’s a SUV use your competitors SUV model name and so on….. The impact of Google’s trademark and the cost to brand owners is a topic which will be mentioned in a different blog post in the near future!
Using Google’s search engine with the right set of keywords automotive brands or dealers can reach the right targeted audience. With the option to select Google’s Search Partners as an available network in addition to Google Search the number of your target audience increases dramatically. Google Search partners are web pages who use Google’s search technology. For example AOL or T-Online are such search partners. Google Search Partner pages have a ‘enhanced by Google’ or a ‘powered by Google’ next to the search box.
The list of Google’s Content Network partners is immense. Categorized into different verticals content partner pages allow Google to place ads using different ad formats. For the automotive industry different ad formats such as image or video ads are very important. It helps prospects to engage with a brand or specific type of brand model visually and increases awareness. With contextual targeting, Google automatically targets the ads to the most relevant sites and page placements based on a given page’s content and the chosen keywords which are dealing with the automotive industry. Ads with different ad formats can be shown on automotive forum pages, automobile magazines, news pages, motor sport pages, blogs etc.
Sometimes it’s possible that a manufacturers or a dealers ad is shown on content network pages which are not ‘exactly’ related to the brand or the product. For example a sports car manufacturer wouldn’t appreciate it if his ad is shown on a content network page which is dealing with cars powered with electricity, solar energy or regenerative fuel cells. Sports car prospects would rather avoid these pages and the logical consequence would be to exclude wrong content pages from the content list. Excluding wrong pages can improve the quality score of your AdWords campaigns.
After defining the right target group prospects can be reached on non related automotive pages as well. Let’s say the manufacturer’s or the dealer’s car model is a sporty looking coupe type of car, not so expensive like a real sports car, but sporty enough to get bought by the target group premium male 25-44 year old. This target group can be reached on lifestyle pages, on finance pages, social networks etc. Like on the other Google Content pages, it’s allowed to place ads with different formats on placement pages as well. With placement targeting the Google AdWords user himself decides where his ads have to appear and where don’t. It is not the Google AdWords system who automatically targets the ads to the most relevant sites. Because it’s non related Google AdWords costs-per-clicks (CPC) can be higher than costs-per-clicks (CPC) on Google’s content network. So watch out!
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