Auto Dealers Should Not Be Retargeting All Web Visitors
When dealers wake-up and discover that their retargeting campaigns are not sending engaged shoppers back to their website they will STOP retargeting everyone who visited their website.
The PCG Engagement Project has been generating a tremendous amount of rich data that is providing ground-breaking insights for auto dealers who want to spend smarter for online advertising campaigns in 2017.
Here are four paid advertising campaigns that provide valuable insights about display and remarketing campaigns:
Sadly, the results of these four campaigns are very typical for dealers in the United States; dealers are paying for online ad campaigns that have low engagement rates. We have hidden the name of this dealer's agency because this is a common problem and not specific to one ad agency.
PCG has defined and published dozens of consumer engagement events that are recorded in Google Analytics. Common shopper engagement events include a page scroll, clicking through a vehicle photo gallery, watching a video, clicking on a lead form button, chatting with the dealer, texting, or calling.
Should We Retarget All Website Visitors?
Retargeting campaigns are designed to follow consumers with display/video ads on the Internet after they visit your dealership's website. The majority of dealers in the U.S. are targeting 100% of the consumers that visit their website. Retargeting campaigns are big money for Google and advertising agencies. Until now, there has not been any clear evidence that retargeting 100% of the consumers who visit your website is a bad idea. Let me be the first to tell you: It is a bad idea!
When a consumer visits a dealership website and triggers ZERO PCG engagement points, on any page, we increment the Zero Engagements per Page (ZEP) metric in VistaDash.
Why would you follow a consumer with retargeting ads when they never demonstrated interest in your vehicles?
Consumers with no engagement points (triggering a ZEP counter to increment) never looked at one photo, never watched a single video, never clicked on any lead form button, and they never even scrolled down a page! Wouldn't it be better to retarget consumers who engaged with your vehicle pages?
Retargeting Waste
In the first retargeting campaign 461 consumers (or bots) clicked on the retargeting ads and 93.28% did not trigger one engagement point when they returned. Do you see how quickly advertising dollars can be burned up with bad retargeting strategies? The second retargeting campaign was also bad; 86.11% of the returning traffic never ENGAGED with the dealer's website content.
If your dealership is retargeting the wrong people (or bots) in the first place, why would you expect the second time around to be much different?
Good News - Retarget Engaged Shoppers
One of the benefits of dealers who join the PCG Engagement Project is that they can now refine their retargeting budgets to include only engaged shoppers. PCG's engagement tracking protocols can now create retargeting lists in Google Analytics that any competent advertising agency can use in Google AdWords for retargeting.
Let me be clear; PCG engagement scores are NOT only based on what page the consumer viewed. Retargeting lists should depend on the page a consumer viewed and what they did on the page. If the consumer had ZERO engagement points, while visiting a VDP, they should not be followed with an ad about that vehicle. Why?
Keep in mind that your initial advertising campaigns can send a consumer to a Vehicle Detail Page (VDP), whether it was the right landing page or not. So it would be silly to retarget consumers just because they landed on a VDP. If the consumer viewed the photos of the vehicle, clicked on the specifications, or clicked on a trade-in button, then they are a good candidate to retarget with that vehicle data.
Dealers are wasting money on display and retargeting campaigns. They can't see the waste because they are only looking at QUANTITY metrics and not QUALITY metrics. Look at the ZEP scores for the Display campaigns; they are either poorly designed strategies or represent high levels of BOT traffic.
Eliminate Waste - Guaranteed!
Join the PCG Engagement Project today, get your website tagged to measure engagement, and start making business decisions based on quality metrics. Dealers can download the full discussion document and specifications on the PCG Engagement Project here: https://bit.ly/PCGEngageSpecs.
We guarantee that dealers using VistaDash will be able to identify at least 20% waste in their online advertising campaigns! Dealers who want to take advantage of this money-back guarantee, should contact Dan Webb at 732-500-1081.
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Vice President, Product at autoTRADER.ca
7 年What's great to see is that specialists are starting to agree that Leads, as a KEY performance indicator is short sighted and frankly the wrong KPI to monitor in understanding the success of dealer’s marketing efforts. A number of studies performed last year by autotrader.com, autoTRADER.ca and CarProof.ca all pointed to an overwhelming sum (approx. 2/3’s) of consumers make their first point of contact at the dealership. They do not call, they do not submit a lead. What’s even more interesting, is that this percentage is increasing. Consumers are less likely to call, submit a request for information, or chat. Another telling study I was involved in, where we took a random set of ~600,000 vehicles sold in Canada over 14 months, across ~1300 dealer sites, we found that only 16% received a lead form submission off their respective VDP. In another probabilistic model, when examining data features such as supply and demand curves, seasonality, localization, Make, Model, Trim, year, price, odometer and merchandising practices, we found that on mass, qualified VDP views had substantial greater correlations than leads in predicting turn times for those vehicles - more than double the impact. Essentially, if you want your vehicles to turn faster, then you should drive more qualified traffic to the VDP’s. "Qualified" being the key. …and stop focusing on leads as the core metric! As such, it’s absolutely critical to understand consumer behavior, across multiple devices, from different locations, and most importantly tie that behavior to those actions (on site) to create a probabilistic model of ACTUAL In Market Shoppers… then target those shoppers that will drive those "on site" actions, that ultimately will sell more cars, in a shorter span. If you are a dealer and are still using leads, as a single or even as your most important measure in gauging the success of your marketing efforts, it’s time to rethink your strategy. This may have worked 5 years ago, but not anymore.
Sales Manager at Garber AutoMall
7 年Great work PCG. It is absolutely about quality. You can run 'free beer' ads, and drive clicks to any page on your site. The key is motivating buyers to visit your store. Does your PPC team meet with your BDC team, or are they two silos blaming each other while your sales stay flat?
Experienced Sales & Marketing SaaS Professional | Specializing in Google Ads, SEO, Social Media & Data Analytics | Sustainability and EV Advocate
7 年I think you raise a really valid point here. I think our industry needs better analytics as to what metrics lead to sales. Just a thought though, I feel if a landing page is properly set up a consumer does not always need to click, watch or scroll as the information they need is right in front of them. Perhaps someone who just sees that a particular used vehicle is in stock and drives to the dealership. Or someone who sees a TV ad for a specific lease offer or APR and verifies it on a VDP. Is there a way to account for those people who actually are engaged but don't hit any of your triggers? I'm sure they are a statistically small amount but just curious as to your thoughts.
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7 年How do you feel about the AT.com or Cars.com 360 campaigns?