Bidding on your dealership's name in searches? Maybe you shouldn't.

Are you concerned with the high number of service calls and leads that come from your dealership’s paid search campaigns?

If you are, then start by asking your paid search vendor if they are buying your dealership’s name.

Many vendors bid on a dealership’s name as a part of their paid search strategy to artificially inflate click-through rates and lower the overall cost per click of a paid search campaign. If a potential customer goes to a search engine and searches for your dealership name, then it makes sense that a paid ad at the top of the search results would see a very high click-through rate and a very low cost per click due to how relevant that ad is to the searcher. High click-through rates and a low cost per click mean happy dealership clients for Paid Search Vendors.

It also makes sense that a large portion of shoppers that search for a dealership’s name are interested in the Service department since the majority of foot traffic for any dealership is for Service. Same story, though - a paid search report that shows a lot of calls and a low cost per conversion keeps dealerships happy.

However, this “bid on the dealership name” strategy creates a shell game of shifting clicks that would have gone to your organic listing over to a paid ad, resulting in a higher paid search bill for the dealership without generating any more overall traffic.

MXS is a company that focuses heavily on website search engine optimization. Because of this focus, we spend a lot of time within Google Analytics on behalf of our clients. We often see that a dealership's “miraculous” rise in paid search performance came with a correlating decline in their organic traffic. This trade-off effectively means that the dealership cannibalized their no-cost organic traffic simply to pay for it via paid search ads focusing on their dealership name.?

The bottom line is that dealerships must ensure that their paid search vendors are not needlessly cannibalizing their organic traffic by shifting those clicks to paid search campaigns. Paid search is a great tool in a dealership’s marketing tool belt, but it isn’t the right tool for every situation. A poor paid search strategy can cost dealerships thousands and thousands of dollars without moving the needle. In the quest to sell more vehicles, buying the dealership’s name is unlikely to succeed.?