The POMCAST
A digital marketing podcast focused on local lead generation strategies and insights. Your search for in depth discussions, tips and tactics has led you to the right place.
The POMCAST
Keyword Categories and Strategies For Automotive and Powersports Dealers
Enhance your understanding of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) with the expert insights of Mike Shaug, Founder and CEO of Premier Online Marketing. This episode offers a thorough examination of PPC campaigns tailored to the automotive and power sports industries, beginning with an in-depth analysis of the buying funnel. Mike provides a detailed exploration of essential keyword categories, ranging from high-volume, low-intent keywords to highly targeted, high buyer-intent keywords. He covers industry terms, dealer-specific phrases, and finance-related keywords, emphasizing the importance of aligning your budget and goals for maximum effectiveness.
Discover how to optimize your new vehicle PPC campaigns to attract high-intent traffic. Mike shares his expertise on incorporating leasing terms, trim lines, and specific model years to engage car enthusiasts ready to make a purchase. Learn how promoting upcoming models, such as the 2025 Toyota 4Runner, can generate leads even before the vehicles are available. Mike also provides valuable advice on optimizing keywords for used car campaigns, stressing the importance of updating keyword lists based on current inventory and understanding the benefits and limitations of dynamic campaigns.
In our comprehensive discussion on budget allocation and finance strategies, you will learn how to manage your ad spend effectively by targeting geo-specific dealer terms and finance keywords that indicate purchase readiness. We also address the necessity of brand defense strategies to safeguard your traffic from competitors.
Lastly, we analyze inefficiencies in the automotive industry's advertising spend, highlighting common pitfalls in current digital marketing practices and frustrations with Google's platform. This episode is essential for anyone aiming to master their PPC strategy and enhance their digital marketing efforts in the automotive sector.
Premier Online Marketing helps businesses grow through smart SEO, content, and search strategies. Learn more at www.premieronlinemarketing.com
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Hello and welcome back to the Palmcast. Today we're going to focus on a niche in the PPC, the search engine marketing, the SEM world. That's right, our favorite topic usually Keyword categories, and I'm really I think this is not only an important subject, but I think it once again will allow Mike, for you to really give some more detail, get into the weeds. It's important for car dealers, it's important for power sports dealers, it's really important probably for every business that's using Google Ads. But if you think about boosting your visibility, driving traffic, increasing sales opportunities which are three of the probably biggest reasons why any business and your business for those of you tuning in and listening and or watching that's why you're doing Google ads, and this episode is going to help deliver some insights for you that you definitely don't want to miss.
Speaker 1:You're probably coming back for information here, because you know it's not just surface level or boilerplate stuff that appeases you, but it really gives you insights into things that can help you get smarter about your campaigns, whether you're managing them yourself or someone else is doing it on your behalf. So it's not a podcast without our super expert, founder CEO at Premier Online Marketing, mike Schaug. How are you doing, mike? I'm doing great. How are you? I'm doing good, really good, looking forward to another great episode. I want to start I know you have some thoughts around buying funnel things that get talked about top of funnel and I really want to start there by just kind of opening up but just get your thoughts there on just kind of setting the stage for what we're going to be talking about today with keyword categories.
Speaker 2:So I this conversation is going to be primarily focused on car dealerships and motorcycle dealerships, power sports and auto, but this can be applied to a lot of other industries. I'll probably do one specifically on real estate and apartments soon. But in a nutshell, every business that requires traffic to meet its business goals has different levels of intent or keyword categories that serve them at different parts of the funnel. And obviously we're all familiar with the funnel. We've got the very top of the funnel, which is lowest intent, highest volume, the costs for it tends to be like medium to high. And you have mid funnel, which is a little further down, a little bit more clarity on what that customer is potentially looking for, that if the volume is lower, the lower you go down the funnel, there are less people in that category. Then you have bottom of funnel, which is high intent, low volume, super high cost and high ROI, and then finally, at the very, very end, you already got the customer.
Speaker 2:So retention is really the finish line of that buying funnel. And something that comes out a lot when I do audits is what are the kind of keyword categories that I should go after? So there are a number of different categories that I want to put forward in this conversation and kind of talk about what stage of the funnel they fit into and where you should invest your money and probably where you should not. So that's that's my uh feel on the funnel. Do you want me to jump straight into category number one?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I want to do one little thing just to help the audience understand that there are a handful of categories that you're probably familiar with, and because we're going to focus mostly for automotive and power sports dealers. There are always people in an audience where they don't want to raise their hands and say, well, I'm not really sure which ones they are. And because I know on this episode we're going to talk about keyword categories that people probably not really considered or heard of. So, just very quickly for the audience, I'm going to tell you we're going to talk about what generic terms are for an industry. So there are always industry generic terms and we'll give you some examples of those. That's a dealer or new car dealership or best SUV, and I'm going to let you get into more descriptions of these. But then another keyword category is new inventory, used inventory, dealer terms, finance keywords, brand-related keyword terms A lot of times, and you and I have been in this for a long, long time.
Speaker 1:We really have almost a pioneering history of paid search within these industries. That's why I think what you share on these episodes is so critically important, because you can actually get into the depth that really matters. Get into the depth, that really matters. But in the case of all of these keywords, that is where I think most people have either a lack of knowledge or perhaps that, but a deep level of interest of like well, why does it matter? So, going back up to the top of this list, let's just hand it back over to you. Specifically, on industry generic keywords, how do you see these? Like dealer and new car dealership Are they contributing to the visibility and the reach of a car dealer's Google Ads campaign?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if I'm a car dealership I'm going to probably care about six different keyword categories. The first on that list and this list is going to kind of conform to high funnel to low funnel. So at the very top of the funnel we have industry generic. So what would that be? Car dealer, car lot, you know. Second chance car buyer, you know car auction. Car, you know like super generic stuff that doesn't say I know what type of car I want. It's not even indicating like a brand or sometimes, most of the time, not even a type of car, like a truck or whatever, although you can get like new car dealer, used car dealer, motorcycle dealer, you know car sales. It's super generic. It's top of funnel. There is a ton of search volume. Surprisingly, it's kind of interesting, given the amount of information we have about the automotive industry and a lot of the industries we serve, how many people still are at that top of funnel level.
Speaker 2:The thing to note about generic or industry generic terms is we don't recommend going after them at all unless you have an extremely large budget. And the reason why that's important is there's a tremendous amount of search volume at the top of funnel level for a new car dealer. But if I'm a Subaru dealer or a Honda dealership, I'm going to want to invest and capture that user when they're a lot closer to the end of the funnel and capture that user when they're a lot closer to the end of the funnel. So yeah, that's kind of. The first category is industry generic terms. Basically, what it says about a customer is I'm looking for a car, I'm looking for the car that I can afford, I don't care what brand it is. It doesn't really tell the car dealership if this is a high or low quality user to potentially go after. So that's why we tend to steer people away from the top of the funnel because there's so much mid and bottom funnel traffic that you can go after. That is going to have a significantly higher ROI for you.
Speaker 1:So not a lot of clarity when you're that far up and it can get really expensive. Yeah, so how about some strategies that dealers would be potentially want to looking at They'd want to be looking at to optimize bids on things that are like high competition, things like new SUV or buy a new truck, things like that?
Speaker 2:Okay. So if you have more than $50,000 a month to spend, you know, let's say you're in the $20,000 to $25,000 range then, yeah, allocate $3,000, $4,000 towards generic. You could test a small campaign with it to see how it performs. But again, set up the campaign correctly so you have all of your themes correctly. Maps don't have new car dealership and used car dealership in the same ad group so you can kind of pause keywords and ad groups that aren't performing for you. Um. So definitely, running search is is one way to do it.
Speaker 2:It is expensive though, like I said before, a better way to leverage that type of top of funnel traffic is actually build those keyword lists out for YouTube. So YouTube has much lower CPCs than Google search does right now. That could change. But if I have, if I'm being on a keyword like car lot or buy here, pay here finance or something like that, that click on Google ads or on the Google search results will cost me five to ten dollars sometimes, depending on the market, whereas on um, on youtube, that click will be a matter of cents. So if you're going to be going for super broad, low intent keywords, make sure that you're leveraging the medium that does it in the most cost effective way. So google search would not be choice number one for me. It would actually be YouTube.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's a great tip right there Certainly a great tip. Are there ways to potentially think okay, we need to have a balance right Between you know how how we're basically going after generic keywords versus the more specific longer tail type of keywords, keywords versus the more specific, longer tailed type of keywords. Is there a happy medium here?
Speaker 2:Again, it really depends on how much budget you have, because the other keyword categories that I'm going to show you next have a tremendous amount of search volume and you're going to get more ROI out of it. So, again, my note on generic would be don't do it. Or, if you do note on generic would be don't do it. Or, if you do, leverage a lower cpc medium like youtube to do it. Or, you know, have a small search campaign to test it out before expanding?
Speaker 1:would this? Would there be anything for, uh, somebody who's just got a new franchise? Or if they're ever like a in a buy sell and they're going to change the name of the dealership, is that a place where generic might be a? Absolutely don't mess with it there. Or maybe you do want to carve out, especially if you're budget planning. Is there anything in those two type of scenarios where you might consider generic because you need all traffic?
Speaker 2:Right. I mean, well, if you're going through kind of an awareness phase where a brand is changing or you're opening a new franchise or buying a franchise or something like that, you want as many people to know about the change as possible. So, for a period of time, that is where that sort of more top of funnel approach could make sense. Because, let's say, it's a new harley name, it's in dealership uh, people are going to know that dealership by a different name when they won't know it by any name at all because it's a brand new franchise. And in that case you might want to bid on a keyword motorcycle dealer, cruiser dealer, uh you know. Or very all these different permutations of kind of I'm looking for something harley-ish that I would send to you to hit the user with a really compelling ad 15, 30 seconds, one minute and that would be a great way to engage that person.
Speaker 2:Because the thing about generic is it's really hard to ascertain timeline. If someone is saying car dealer or motorcycle dealer, that doesn't tell me that they have any kind of intensity or urgency around making the transaction. So, yeah, yeah. So you just want to make you know your if you need to introduce your brand or reintroduce your brand to a lot of people. That would be the one place I would consider it. I would still go, though, um, I would. I would focus more on, on the next category, war, which I can jump over to to now if we're ready.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. On generic, I think people you're hearing Mike say there is some use case, but sparingly and make sure you have the right amount of budget for it, because you could burn through a lot of money. The category is very broad, sitting at the very top of the. In this case we're talking using the analogy of funnel. That means that, yeah, there's a lot of stuff up there, but it's highly competitive, highly expensive and you got to be smart. So, yeah, great, great stuff. Yeah, let's get to the next keyword category.
Speaker 2:Right. So the next category is new inventory. It's still fairly high funnel and that's kind of that's one that took me a long time to figure out that if someone was looking for a 2024 Honda CRV, for example, like that's someone that is feature shopping a car or they're ready to buy that car, you know. So inventory tends to be kind of more of a mid funnel strategy. It's definitely not top of funnel, but it's the cars that you sell, it's what you have on your lot right now or what's coming in from the OEM. So you have to go after it and it doesn't matter what OEM you have. You could have, you know, harley, you could have Honda, you could have BMW cars. There's always a ton of surge volume at the inventory level, which is why generic doesn't really make sense.
Speaker 2:If I can, if I can, get in front of people that are looking for 2024 honda accord, why would I go after buying new sedan or something like that? It's the intent is much higher. It says I'm curious about this type of car. I know the brand, um, I. I'm looking for a specific year, ideally, or I'm specifying new or even better. I'm saying products like Honda Accord Austin, honda Accord Dallas, the more specificity, they add, whereas the year, the brand and the location, that increases that level of intent and there's a tremendous amount of search volume at that new inventory level.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. You and I have ventured through a lot of new vehicle campaigns and keywords over the years and you're talking about some of those things that get into the specifics, which I think are really important. Are there also areas around like leasing type of keywords here, that kind of play in um? You know, definitely I think there are probably a lot of people that might be interested in that. I mean, it's affordability. I think it'll be interesting to see if leases continue to be a big play for people these days.
Speaker 2:I like lease in my new car in my new inventory campaign. Typically the way we split it will be by trim line. For instance, sedans, trucks, SUVs. The products under those different trim lines should have the keywords for them in those different areas. If the dealership offers lease which most still do absolutely have lease terms in there, add buy terms in there, add finance terms in there, very few people will actually look for stuff. A keyword that says finance, offer lease. Add Acura, mdx or something like that. Not a lot of people will do it, but the very few that will are very high intent. So it's good to have those keywords in the mix because for the very small amount of people that will go that far on their intent, signaling you want to be there for that- yeah, for sure, I love that.
Speaker 1:I love that tip. How about, like your specific keywords? That's been a topic for many, many years. People have a lot of different thoughts around. Hey, should we put in the 2020, 2024 or whatever year? Obviously, that is used oftentimes in current model years, but every once in a while there are vehicles that and we'll get into this we're not into this keyword category yet, but something that would be considered pre-owned or used. But while we're on the topic of new inventory keywords, share your thoughts on that, on the importance of using that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. You want to have you know if we're in 2024, you want to have 2024 and you want to have 2025, the second they start announcing and teasing those models out and the second that it is no longer 2024, you're on to eliminate those keywords. Because that's just. The person is indicating the year and model, which, for cars, are very specific and vary widely from year to year. So it's a super valuable intent signal. Most people will, the vast majority of people will say Honda CR-V and they will not indicate new Honda CR-V or 2024. But there will be some and you want to make sure that you have those keyword variants in play so you can capture those users and the value of that traffic. If someone's looking for a 2024 Honda CR-V versus a new Honda CR-V, I think 2024 is a more valuable keyword.
Speaker 1:I think 2024 is a more valuable keyword. Yeah, and for the audience, as you take all this in, especially for dealers, and this is both power sports and car dealers. I'll use Toyota as an example, because I've been a Toyota guy for several years now. If you haven't seen the 2025 Toyota 4Runner and it's uh, and if you like toyota's, it's a. It's a really nice, um looking vehicle. Yeah, it's super, super cool. They did a really good job with it, in my opinion. My point being is um and I haven't looked on toyota's site yet but I don't think that even at toyotacom, you can actually go see anything other than just very basics. They don't have it listed, as you can do a whole lot. Just yet They've been teasing that, and that is done by every single vehicle manufacturer, especially when they do something really big, a big model update or a brand new model.
Speaker 1:Think about how sad for Ford when they brought the Bronco back. Yeah, hey, by the way, this is going to be a pandemic and there's going to be a supply chain shutdown. And oh, by the way, most of the hard tops for these things are made in Wuhan, china. No joke, I mean, there were all these things that just made that difficult. But, the point being people who were searching specifically for that current model year, people who are searching for 2025 forerunner, because they are fans. Every brand has loyal fans. As a Tundra guy, when they came out with the new remodeled Tundra, I wasn't as excited. I still like the generation before it to look a little bit better, but still there were a lot of people that were excited. Those are obviously good reasons, right, because there are people like that that they may be a smaller segment of the search traffic that will type in the model year, but they are high intent, right. And so, even if this percentage is smaller of those people, you want to make sure that your keyword coverage considers that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and it's always hard to know when. How far in advance should you start running the 2025 Land Cruiser or 4Runner before it comes out? I would say probably a month or two on search, but similar to the generic kind of keyword thing using the New Year's model that you're not going to get for six months. That's a great one for you too, and you want to make sure that you're driving them to a place. Ford Bronco did this really well and the Tesla Cybertruck they did this very well. Where you know, I signed up for the Cybertruck. You know I still don't have it.
Speaker 2:I'm probably one or two years out on the list, but they teased it. They showed us a little bit of the car, drove us to the landing page. You sign up and you're wait. If you have some way to capture that intent, like all four dealers did with the Bronco, where you had to go and get on a list, you can recreate that for whatever vehicle you want. That is for coming. I mean, I think the models that we mentioned today for Toyota are a no brainer. Especially when you have, like an iconic rebrand. You want to make sure that you're getting out in front of it a little bit, but not too far, because you don't actually have that inventory yet. But when you're about a month out from receiving units or can start taking orders, that's when you want to start your Vivo campaigns for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll share one more for the automotive audience that's been at this for you know, at least a handful of years. They may remember this. But a perfect example of this also was when the first Transformers movie was coming out. It was the Chevrolet Camaro. It was them basically doing what Ford had previously done with the Mustang. It's like, hey, we just Chevrolet Camaro. It was them basically doing what Ford had previously done with the Mustang. It's like, hey, we just redesigned the Camaro. It's coming back. It was bumblebee, that yellow Camaro.
Speaker 1:We saw it in all of the you know tier one advertising. We saw it on all of the movie ads and everyone was like, even if you weren't a Chevy person or a Camaro person, you're like that car is badass, it was just awesome. A billion dollars of advertising oh, my goodness, yeah. But you know what? You couldn't get that. Those ads came out and the promotion of that movie months, maybe it was even a year before you could even order one of those cars.
Speaker 1:But Ralph Paglia, an old friend, rest in peace. Ralph and truly was a mentor to me when I worked with him in Reynolds in the Reynolds days, way way back. He was at Courtesy Chevrolet in Phoenix or in Arizona at the time when that was all going down and he brilliantly came up with a search and landing page strategy to harvest the interest of people, and I don't think there was a single Chevy dealership in the entire country that was harvesting a longer wait list and more interest around that because of exactly what we're talking about. So I just thought I would add that, as one of those kind of like feel good stories and like thinking of really great ideas that are outside of the box or perhaps more progressive than what your competitors are doing, the kind of information that we talk about here on the podcast that, mike, you're so good at helping people understand complex things, but you know, simplify.
Speaker 1:I think the practicality of using some of these actual stories that have happened will put the light on for some people to say, man, we should be doing this. We should be doing that Because, when you're not, your paid search providers, especially, are probably one of the places that get laziest, fastest and waste your money, and you need to know these things that we talk about on this, this podcast, because it'll help protect you against that. It'll help you make your money go even farther and actually perform better. So, anyway, I could go on about all this stuff. I love talking to you about it. It gets me really pumped up. Um, anyway, let's talk about the next keyword category.
Speaker 2:So similar level or I would say same level of intent, uh, as new, um, when I. The mistake I see a lot of people making here is they'll go too broad and they'll kind of use generic, use, use car dealer, use cars, use trucks um, that's an okay strategy for driving traffic, but depend, you need to structure your used campaigns almost more definitely a lot more carefully than you, because at least if you're a new Toyota dealer, you're reasonably certain that you're going to be selling the Tundra next year or the RAV4 next year, whereas a used car buyer can have some kind of rhyme or reason to the inventory. They go after that and you really they can be a Toyota dealer that goes after a lot of Chevy trucks and really wants to focus a lot on used trucks and building up that inventory. But, especially with your spend allocation, you want to make sure that you're just spending on the units you have on the lot as much as possible and spending a lesser amount on that generic used car category. And the reason why is, again, there's so many people looking for a 2015 Chevy Silverado. There's so many people. So if you have a 2015 chevy silverado, have an ad in an ad infrastructure in place to serve that versus acquiring the used truck search, which is what most dealers do. Um, which is a lot. It's just higher, just way higher.
Speaker 2:Funnel we don't know what kind of truck they actually want. A lot of times when people will use a generic term, they're kind of truck they actually want. A lot of times when people will use a generic term, they're kind of trying to remember what it was that they were looking for or they're trying to find what they're looking for. So that could be a Ram, that could be a Ford or whatever. And if you're a dealership that just has a bunch of Chevys and Rams and you don't have a Ford F-150, then that user looking for a Ford F-150 coming to your website through a used truck dealer is not going to be a valuable investment. So my tip here would be make sure that your keyword lists are updated very frequently on a monthly basis around the inventory that you have in stock, and try not to invest too much on kind of the broad used car category.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, invest too much on kind of the broad used car category. Gotcha, um, is it still? This is just because you know I'm not in the paid search realm uh, every single day, 24, 7, like you are. Is it still popular? For do you remember it reached local when, um, I think it was I won't say the dealer group name, but let's just say in the Southeast and no, not Southeast Toyota, so I'll just say Southeast.
Speaker 1:But we were at Reach Local and there was kind of a challenge thrown down because dealercom was pushing hardcore the connector inventory and piping in your used inventory would create these specific ads and that methodology was going to chase down far better conversion rates, better lead quality, more sold vehicles. And I remember this, like it was last month that you're like we'll take that challenge and, uh, you actually set up these campaigns in a test for this particular group. Um, that has a bit of a sassy person or two that were, well, one of them still there. And then we said, well, look, and we ended up proving that no, no, no, you can still meticulously put together a used car campaign that will by far outperform the set it and forget it. But now I mean, that's so many years ago, like almost not 20. Is there a better? Has that improved now to where they're okay, that's actually better.
Speaker 2:back then it worked like crap. Yeah, thanks to a lot of people spending and wasting a ton of money, dynamic campaigns have gotten a lot better. I think a lot of it has come from just shopping campaigns. Getting so much better. So dynamic is great. You could create a keyword where all of your used inventory is and they will dynamically create and bring up and take down ads for the inventory that you have on that page.
Speaker 2:There's still definitely a lot of things that you need to do to set it up correctly. I definitely think it's a good idea for dealers to do that as a layer, maybe for 30% of their used budget, but the rest of it I would suggest manually building out those list. Hopefully your dealership doesn't buy like a Jaguar one month and a Lotus the next and a Maidlock the next. Hopefully there's some consistency to the strategy of used car acquisition, and there usually is.
Speaker 2:Most of the time, if you're a Toyota dealership, you are going to be selling used Tundras. You're going to have more used Tundras than you will use Silverados a lot. Typically, you'll have more of the core brands used inventory. A lot of people will trade them in for new cars. But then there will be, like your secondary interserity kind of greatest hit models that people are always looking for that you know have a really good margin. So sharing that information with your agency is going to be super important for them so they can know that. Okay, yeah, it's great that you have two GeoMetros on the lot, but we're going to focus more of your budget on the 13 Ram F-150s that you have.
Speaker 1:I had not planned to ask this question but I know you'll have a good answer for it If you were a dealer, especially because as we got into the COVID era and then supply chain and there were a lot of things that dealers had heard about but started to get more involved with as we kind of went through some of these struggles together, one of which was acquiring inventory used inventory to sell and we started to see more of a rise of some of the services that help and enable, give a tool set to dealers to acquire vehicles from private sellers, and I started to notice a little bit, but not a lot.
Speaker 1:Acquire vehicles from private sellers and I started to notice a little bit, but not a lot. And still today I'm thinking I like that strategy a lot, but I don't ever really see a lot of dealers that think, you know what, we should actually incorporate this into our paid search campaigns to run campaigns that would. So I'm curious to know if you've ever seen that or if a dealer is doing more of their, Even if they're supplementing what they do from the auction with used car acquisition from private sellers, but they are doing it. Is that a good place to do a little bit of advertising?
Speaker 2:super good place. That, okay, honestly, is all we did when everyone gave all their inventory way out the show. That is, we pivoted 70% of budget to use vehicle acquisition and it's super effective. Um, surprisingly, you, you can get a very good margin on vehicle acquisitions directly, um, I think, and you can be a lot more strategic, whereas if you go to an auction, you're buying but they're selling then, and of course, you'll have the things that kind of conform to the criteria you're looking for. But if you want to buy a bunch of Silverados, you can do that Trade in your Silverado, create a specific landing page for that. We do this nationally for a couple of different brands, and the direct acquisition of inventory to your website is super valuable. I'm sorry, I've got someone at the door, no problem, go ahead, we'll. Someone at the door.
Speaker 1:No problem, go ahead, we'll, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll do a post edit. No problem, don't worry.
Speaker 2:Thank you well, well, in my save, this decided to show up all right, no, it's no problem.
Speaker 1:No problem, I put a clip marker on there so I'll know where to go and grab that, so awesome. And I'll do like a um little final thought on this. You just tell me when you're ready, right, yeah, just one last thought on that one. I love that you can verify that. That was a smart strategy and still can be a smart strategy.
Speaker 1:I know the ceo and founder at advanced vehicle acquisition network and I was talking with him recently actually, and now I'm thinking now I got to tell him like, hey, if you guys are not promoting that, um, that's a actually palm and van should be talking about strategically helping, because it makes a lot of sense to help your dealers that are adopting a strategy like that to have a paid search partner that knows what they're doing with campaigns like that, and I think, yeah, that just seems like a little bit of an opportunity.
Speaker 1:So, for dealers that are interested or you're already doing that, don't sleep on that now If that's still part of your strategy. That's one of those things to me. I think a lot of dealers are like, yeah, I know about private sale or vehicle acquisition or whatever, but most are not doing it, and then probably a lot of them that are kind of doing it are missing so many opportunities to really go in and make it significant to their business and bottom line we actually did a project that one dealer wanted to do is just a business they wanted to start for their own vehicle acquisitions.
Speaker 2:It's a business called get more cheddar and you know, made a little wordpress website. Uh, the guy that put it together uh, david gruen, brilliant guy and he put together just this kind of like bubble gum and tape process that was mostly automated, for the person submits their, they get a follow-up. You really need to have a tight process for doing it. We definitely know how to do that because we've seen other people do it the right way. But if you are just dropping people on a page that says, hey, come by our dealership, they're going to be like you have to make them submit their VIN uh, they. You've got to follow up with them via text, um, and you've got to have a reminder for whenever the inspection is.
Speaker 2:You've got to have a system set up for do we send inspectors in person or do we set appointments at the dealership with the knowledge that, like 60 of your dealership set appointments are going to be flanked on or laid. So that's why we actually found that going to the person and having a system and these guys even made a cheddar nobile. It was like wrapped with cheese logo and stuff and go and do these appraisals and their close rate was insane and uh, so that was a really cool project. And then later on we worked with a big motorcycle dealer group and we still work with them to nationally acquire motorcycles uh, typically above a certain price threshold. They're not looking to buy your ROM for $1,200. They're looking for a $15,000 modded street bar or much higher tier motorcycles that they'll be able to fix up and sell at higher margin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think any dealer that's doing that, especially, like I was saying, with vans technology. Uh, I was. I did an interview, I interviewed tom last week and he mentioned something about how their, their technology allows dealers to basically build criteria on what they're really looking for. It's kind of to what you were just talking about when, when you're like I don't want to be harvesting groms or I'm not looking for more, you know 2008 honda civics like you're looking for things in a particular year, I only want things that are up to six years old.
Speaker 1:I will go up to 120 000 miles on the vehicle like all this, and then it goes and collects all these potential opportunities from places where private sellers are putting their stuff. I'm part of it. It's just I geek on it because I'm a little bit fascinated by that. I think if I was in retail, I'd be like absolutely, we're going to double down on a strategy like this, um, and it just kind of puts more lights on for me thinking about there's a, there is a real smart play in this around um, your paid search strategy. But I digress. Uh, I don't, I'm not really digressing, we're just expanding. But let's move on to our next keyword, topic or category.
Speaker 2:I should say Okay, and this one's funny because you don't think of this as being low funnel, but it really is and this is the category that we refer to as dealer terms, which is Honda dealer, honda dealership, honda dealer near me it's. I know I'm looking for a place that sells this product. So it's saying what and it's saying typically where or near me or something. So because of that, it's super high intent, similar to inventory. But for whatever reason and I don't know why, honda dealership Austin will get more leads than 2024 Honda CR-V. For whatever reason, both are indicating that they're probably looking for a new product.
Speaker 2:Obviously, the inventory is far more clear in that and Honda dealer Austin, you can look at your service and you can do it for service. However, we get more leads for just phone calls, form submissions on the dealer terms category than we do off of any other category. So it's a super good net and it's definitely kind of mid to lower funnel tends to be extremely competitive. So you have to do it right, kind of be appropriately for it. You can't overspend on that on this category. But yeah, it's a great place to invest your money, probably the most important keyword category outside of finance and brand.
Speaker 1:Do you have an average percentage of a dealer's budget that you would typically recommend in this particular keyword category? I mean, is it 60 or 70 percent, or is it? Does it fluctuate a bit?
Speaker 2:percent probably. Yeah, much furry just on dealer keywords. Um new inventory, that'll be like another 20 to 30 percent used allocation. That depends completely on how much used inventory you sell on a monthly basis. Hang on, can you hear that in the background? All right?
Speaker 1:A lot of the little hold on. I'm going to make another marker A lot of the little things like even a dog barking and stuff. Most of the time they don't get picked up at all, but even things like that we can.
Speaker 2:I have a wee whacker right outside, okay, I can't even hear him. Yeah, okay, in terms of like best practices for the kind of dealer term keywords. Honda dealer near me is a good term. It signifies I'm looking for something nearby that I can go to, probably soon now, maybe when they geo-indicate it's higher value. So spend more of your money on the C and neighborhood terms concatenated with your dealer term Honda dealer Austin.
Speaker 2:Honda dealership near Westlake, texas, plano, so on and so forth. That is going to be your highest converting uh keyword category. Outside of um, outside of brand and from an seo standpoint, this is the category that you need to spend the most time focusing on, because brand traffic you're going to show up for pretty much you know, automatically if you have your website that's moderately well put together. But you won't necessarily show up for Honda dealership Dallas. There's a lot of other Honda dealerships to show up for and that is the highest amount of high volume traffic. So you're going to want to make sure that you're optimizing to that. You're going to want to make sure you're spending ad dollars against that as well, because it is a very keyword category.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's one of the areas where people think they know but they don't quite know exactly how to come up with the balance. That's why I was kind of asking if you guys have kind of an average of where it falls out around the percentage of budget used on that term and really all of them. I think a lot of people are always curious about what should my pie chart look like in terms of how we carve it up into these different categories. Thoughts on maybe a little bit more of explanation on the impact of generic terms like the honda dealer, one um on ad performance, maybe how dealers should balance these with those more localized keywords yeah, I, I would say, have have the non geoindicated dealer terms in your ad groups paused, but run the geoindicated versions first.
Speaker 2:So you're going to have ad groups for Honda dealer, honda dealership, honda dealership near me. Keep put those in there, write ads for them, pause them and spend all of your focus and try to spend as much money on the areas where people are geo-educating westlake honda dealer. Westlake honda dealer, austin because that is just a much higher signal. Um, honda dealer is like better than generic, but it's like a very generic brand term. You don't know what they're doing, you don't know if they're going for service, if they're looking for new or used, and you still don't know that if they geo-indicate. But at least you know that there's a little bit. They are certain of where they're trying to search, so at least they're telling you that, hey, at least I'm searching in the right area. I'm not accident, you know, I didn't uh, forget to change my browser history when I was trying, and now I'm talking to someone in New Brunswick when I'm in Austin, or something like that. So, um, geoeducation would definitely be the way to optimize that keyword category.
Speaker 1:Okay, again, just very, very good insights there. Uh, let's move to. Very good insights there. Let's move to, let's, let's move to that keyword category of finance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Finance is really tricky because everyone does finance. So many people focus on low credit finance. Second chance buy here, Pay here is insanely popular right now and they work really well. So finance is probably actually as low intent as you can get right, Because a lot of people are not brand shoppers, they're what can I afford shoppers, right. So if someone is looking for, you know, a Subaru dealership in Austin, that's great, Great dealer keyword. If they're looking for Subaru finance incentives like that's someone that clearly wants to make a deal, work with me, work with me. So that is a much higher quality user to go after when they're indicating finance and the other thing too. And I really do believe that for a lot of people, for most people they're searching for, they have their kind of preference list of what they want and then they have what they can afford and obviously, with interest rates being what they are today, a lot of people can't buy what they want, so they have to shop by what can they afford. So shopping by finance and also payments, the search volume around those keywords is going to be very low. It's going to be expensive, but if you win it, it converts at a very high rate and that's a person that's really steady, A really fun one to do is for brands that are not as popular.
Speaker 2:I'll give you an example Mitsubishi.
Speaker 2:Not a lot of people wake up inspired to drive a new Mitsubishi.
Speaker 2:Fast and Furious came out a long time ago and the reason why Mitsubishi new cars are sold is because their marketing is totally finance-driven and they have some pretty good finance incentives, better than a lot of other brands.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people stumble into that brand because they're a finance shopper and that is a huge category of buyers. Also, what finance indicates is readiness. If someone is already at the end of that search and they're looking for hey, this is my budget, this is what I can afford, this is the interest rate I'm looking for, or I'm looking for specific OEM finance deals, then that's a person that is very close to that transaction and they're waiting for the right moment to transact, which is very different than another quality and keyword category like the one we just discussed, dealer terms. We don't know what that person wants when they're typing in Honda dealership in Austin or hopefully they want a finance car. But if someone is saying Honda finance incentives, Honda sales special, finance special or something like that, that is someone that is ready to buy, and that is the person that you prioritize above the other types of intent.
Speaker 1:So, in this particular keyword category, you would say that that's an effective way to target potential customers who are looking for these types of options, like Honda finance or Mitsubishi finance or car finance, special or I think that's a much better way to flip buyers from one brand to another.
Speaker 2:Like I remember back when we worked together, we'd always have people doing like cheeky stuff, like hey, we really want to sell more Chevy Volts, so we're going to shit on the Fiesta. You know Like we're going to bid on Ford Fiesta for the people that are looking for Ford Fiestas and we're going to try to change their mind on the first result of Google. You know like, you know what I mean. It's just like that's. That's a stretch.
Speaker 2:But if someone is looking for a finance incentive and they were looking for the F fiesta, that you can convert them into a whole driver. Uh, I feel bad for them. But hey, you know, and that's, it's an effect strategy. It's way more effective than trying to tell someone that their preference is a bad idea. You're just giving them something that is more financially tangible to them. So that is by far the most effective way to flip here on the, you know, ford to toyota is to leverage financial. Most effective way to flip Kia Hyundai, you know.
Speaker 1:Ford to Toyota is to leverage financial incentives to get out there. Are there any strategies that you know kind of highlight those incentives in a way that makes them perhaps perform better in search results? I don't know if you can do anything beyond just trying to. It's almost, like always, the process of iteration, of slight changes, but it's I just. My guess is there's probably nothing you know distinctively. Oh yeah, do this Like it's kind of one of those categories where it's straight down the middle. Whatever your brand is finance incentives, whatever your brand is finance incentives, whatever your brand is you know special finance or you know that type of you know thing. But I was just curious if you've ever seen anything that kind of rises up as, ah, this is a little bit of a insider tip that could help. I don't know that there are any.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've had a couple of buy here, pay here dealers across the country with kind of a guarantee of a rate cap which is kind of a crazy thing to say for you know cause some used car dealers sell cars or 15% or 12% interest rates. So as shitty as a 10% interest rate sounds, you know, for a lot of people that's the best deal that they can get. So the interest rate cap, kind of on a non-branded side, is a good one. Ultimately, if you have a really good apr, you should just lead with that like and whatever that apr is. That is, that's going to get people's attention right from the search results.
Speaker 2:And a lot of brands are doing really great finance stuff.
Speaker 2:Subaru did some incredibly low financing. I've seen some really good stuff from each and four and so, if you don't, you should have, honestly, in your dealer terms, new inventory. You should have finance in your ad copy, because that is just another great way to kind of really make that product stand out to them. But yeah, the closer you can get to just saying, hey, here's the finance rate that we offer for people who apply, you know, insert the disclaimer, that's definitely the way to go. Or if you have some kind of a finance guarantee or maybe it can be something really vague, like we work with second chance or you know low credit buyers to find the car. You know because everyone needs a car in this country for sure, and you know if you can kind of speak to that user, whether, regardless, you've got to speak to them at their level. So for someone that's looking for a great finance deal on a new car, that's going to be a little bit different messaging than you're going to have for someone who's kind of in the buyer-bayer acquisition situation.
Speaker 1:So the inclusion of finance-related keywords, what kind of impact does it have relative to budget and then performance of campaign? And I guess the other thing I would ask in this is maybe some examples of you know, if not all dealers are going to need at every given moment to have finance-related keywords in their campaigns. Some are, like you know, they're performing in other categories, but when it's something that needs to be either in the mix or perhaps even maybe one of the more prominent ways that they are actually trying to accumulate traffic and generate sales opportunities, can you speak a little bit to that, maybe some of those scenarios where, when it's going to make sense and what's maybe some of the expectations from your experiences that dealers should think about around budget and how these things perform?
Speaker 2:Yeah, typically, like I mean. Again, it depends on the dealership model. If you're a buy-pay-hear dealership, then 100% of your spend is probably going to be on finance. If you have good finance rates, that should be present in all of your ad copy as much as possible. And it's kind of easier to answer your question by saying when you don't have finance in your ad copy keywords is when you have nothing to offer, and that is true for many oems. Some of them don't have very compelling offers right now where offers that are substantially less appealing, and then what another oem is doing. In that situation you may not lead with finance rates being an incentive because it's not a real value proposition that you can offer relative to what your competitors have.
Speaker 2:But for the most part there are financial products and packages that dealers offer or they have in their network. So, whatever, the best that you can do is you want to make sure that you have that ad copy when possible that you can do is you want to make sure that you have that ad copy when possible. And you know, from a spend allocation standpoint, for your standard new OEM store, probably 10 to 15% of your budget would be well spent on finance. It's a very expensive category and everybody goes after it. So whatever has a limited volume and a lot of competition is always going to be very expensive. So you can expect higher CPCs. But if you target your users correctly and retarget them correctly, you can expect a very good conversion rate there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you mentioned this and I think it's really for dealers really important to realize that it's competitive and so if you have good offers, it literally could be the thing that puts you in consideration over whoever it is you're competing with, whether it's a different brand. Like you said, when you're trying to conquest, some people end up with a conquesting accomplishment and they weren't even really trying. It was a finance deal that moved somebody over, or a finance opportunity we've saved. I don't know that it's the best, but it's certainly one I think most people are pretty familiar with.
Speaker 2:For the last keyword category, and yeah, From a conversion standpoint, brand is definitely the best. From a cost standpoint it is definitely the best, but you can absolutely cannibalize SEO traffic. So our rule of thumb here is never spend more than 10% of your budget on your brand. But our rule is definitely spend something on brand. And the reason why? Uh, it's funny because, like right as you're preparing for this conversation, a search engine, uh journal article popped up. It says, uh, that google ads is selecting broad match keywords by default. Now, in all new campaign implementations, you better go out of your way to use match types like exact phrase. So a lot of times, uh, people think and there's a really funny example it was huffines, chevy, lewisville and stonebriar shudderway, and I remember we were on the huffine side. I still work with those guys, uh, all these many years later, but they were like man, every time I type in chevrolet lewisville, uh, you know, boom, briar is showing up. And we thought it was deliberate for years. And then I went over to work for dealer dealer. We met and worked with the rep who was managing so briar is a really nice guy and I was just like I need to look at your keyword list, see. And sure enough, it was just an electric brand, broad matching. Basically they were bidding on Chevrolet Louisville and broad matching to Huffine's Chevrolet Louisville.
Speaker 2:So most conquesting would not actually deliver it. It's accidental. It's lazy. Digital marketers and most dealerships wouldn't want to spend that much coaching brand traffic from their competitors and other OEMs. Forbid it, harley, mercedes-benz will literally cut your allocation after two warnings. Bmw, lexus you cannot do it. But through broad match keywords it's really easy to make that mistake. So that's why you have to be very, very, very cautious in how you defend your brand terms, because it's so easy for someone to poach traffic from you, even accidentally. And here's the cool trick with. You know, let's say you just you think your SEO is awesome and you don't need an ad. You don't need to. You know you don't need ads to drive that kind of traffic.
Speaker 2:I would say spend 3% of your budget for one reason alone, and the reason is this If your CPC for your brand term is, say, $0.30, sure, maybe you would have gotten that click without having to pay $0.30. But if your competitor is bidding on your brand term and you are not, then they might get it for $0.30. But when you bid it and you're defending your brand at 30 cents, they might have to pay three bucks. So the cpcs for your competitors will go way higher when you're defending your brand. And a lot of brands have learned this amazon does it, walmart does it, there's they all show up organically on google when someone searches for amazon or walmart. But they do that brand defense because there are so many brand challengers out there that are trying to coach people at the bottom of the funnel.
Speaker 2:And again, whether it's deliberate or accidental, it's happening a lot to your dealership, regardless of where you are. So you want to be cautious and thoughtful and have some brand strategy in there without spending too much. Something we see a lot in all of our audits is that our competitors will allocate too much, sometimes as much as like 30, 40% of the budget to brand and they'll trot out the reports congratulations, we got you a $3 CPA or something insanely low. But that is super misleading because you are catabolizing a lot of your organic traffic and obviously you want some brand defense. But from my point of view, you want to spend more money getting new people to the website and spending overspending on people that you've kind of already got, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:So there's a balance overspending on people that you've kind of already got, if that makes sense. So there's a balance. Yeah, no, it makes all the sense that you would want to be making smart. I mean, it all comes down to how smart you're spending money to develop opportunities for your business. And everything you shared around brand terms I think is really important because I think a lot of people are. If you were to ask them, like what keyword categories do you know about paid search? What they everyone would be like brand terms and everyone usually has an opinion about. Well, you shouldn't buy your own name. You and I have been through this back when it actually was a topic worth having some serious conversation or argument about, because there were so, so many there probably still are so many vendors that just are literally just garbage campaigns and they burn through budget because they know that the dealer doesn't even know where to look to find that they're literally just lighting their money on fire and giving them some bullshit report.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you that that's what penix does. If you don't set a brand exclusion, phoenix will look like it's performing really well, but it's doing a ton of brand hitting.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah, that's I. It's one of those um keyword categories that I think, if I'm a dealer, I really do kind of want to know more of the nuance and intricacies here because several different reasons why it's important. But, like all of these keyword categories, there is a certain amount of knowledge that's necessary to make sure that it's being managed properly, whether you do it yourself or you've got an agency or whomever you're using. Your amount of knowledge and being able to be detail-oriented, even within the big old category of brand terms, is so important or you won't catch things, you won't see things, the anomalies in search results that you, even at the dealership level you're a Harley dealer, you're a Ford dealer, you're whatever brand you are when you are sitting in your dealership and, hey, we've got a little bit of idle time we're not selling anything and you're sitting around looking at Facebook or LinkedIn or doing some search results, looking at what your competitors are doing.
Speaker 1:The reason why podcast episodes like this are so important is because we've just been sitting here for several minutes listening to you share things that should make the person sitting there in the dealership smarter. So when they're doing some of these casual searches that they would see some of these things that are, hmm, that's not quite right. Yes, for your own business, for your own brand, but also to see what's going on with your competitors. I will. Just yesterday, a friend of mine posted something that he found within the Ford brand, where tier one, two and three are all competing for the same keywords and his part of his post was well, I guess the auto industry is actually returning to normal because here's a brand.
Speaker 1:This is not smart at all, like just blowing through millions and millions and millions of dollars, and I, you know, I talk to people quite a bit nowadays, with the things I'm doing around content creation, that are like they have a disconnect between. Well, car dealers are not the same as within big franchises, where they waste a lot of money in advertising because they have $5 million to spend this quarter. We need to spend it all and where are we going to go shovel it? We're going to shovel it in these places and it gets spread out.
Speaker 1:In the case of automotive, you've got three different tiers to waste millions of dollars in, and I would just I guess I'll get off my soapbox just to say, for the audience that tunes into this podcast just be aware of that so that you can one defend yourself, fight back a little bit, be smart enough to realize that you shouldn't settle for your hard-earned advertising dollars basically being lit on fire, and imagine what you could do if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in advertising wasn't being wasted but it was being architected into really thoughtful campaigns across all of these keyword categories that we've been talking about, with more strategy, with more insight, with more specificity, more planning. That's how you get good results. That's how you become a competitor that makes your competitors wish you weren't in the market, because you're doing things they're not doing. So I would just say be really be very careful with what's going on, even at the top brand level, because it's very likely that you may need to be having some conversation with people that think they know better than you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. If I could wave a magic wand and get OEMs to stop spending on inventory or tier two or three terms I would make. It doesn't matter what search shows or what we pull up or auction insights, but the number one competitor by spend is the OEM always. And you know, I think about if I'm a poor dealer in you know Colorado or something like that, and the user is in Colorado or something like that and the user is in Colorado as well. They're looking for a 150 light ink. Where is that conversion experience going to be better? Is it going to be better at the dealership where they're going to actually buy the car, or is it going to be better when they go to the OEM website, fill out a form and then they farm that lead out to sometimes one or, in most cases, many different dealers and then you're getting all these different inquiries. That's just a really shitty user journey and it's a huge inflation and inflating impact on individual dealers, the ability to drive traffic for people that are locally in market. So that's OEMs are always a bit tricky.
Speaker 2:I've seen them try to do things where they'll say, hey, don't bid on any inventory terms, just go after generic terms or whatever, because we don't want you to compete with us, but it really should be the other way around.
Speaker 2:The OEM should be going all generic new car, best new truck, best new SUV. They should be creating awareness at the tier one level, for if someone thinks about a truck, they think about a Cybertruck or they think about an F-150. That's their job is converting that general generic intent into I want to be an F-150 driver because I saw these really great ads. I think that their investment would be so much better spent on YouTube versus search. They should leave as much of that as they can to the dealers and they sort of like collect enough data from the dealers to know who is getting kind of that share of voice and uh, yeah, it's, it's. It's lame when you have, uh, when you have a dealer with a budget that's $10,000 to $20,000, but you're going out and asking for a million-dollar state or regional budget, that's just a very hard thing to compete with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got to tell you that it's, and I know you will agree. It's astonishing that here we are, more than halfway through 2024. And I don't know, maybe there is I don't think so employed that has, I mean deep level, at least 10 years of experience in digital marketing, specifically paid search, specifically knowing the very beginning of Google AdWords. Yes, I know it's Google Ads now, but lived through the changes in that platform, which was one of the last properties that they did real big overhauls on when they started several years ago. They did real big overhauls on when they started several years ago. It's astonishing to me that I won't call any of them out by name, because it's really all of them. They've basically moved that responsibility to a third party and even the third party doesn't have that institutional knowledge of doing these things. They make these huge decisions that have so much to do with, certainly, results, but so much money. And when you go all the way back and track it to well, who is it? It's the great and powerful Oz, behind the big green curtain. And they don't know anything about how google's ad platform works. They don't know anything about the depth of these different keyword categories. They don't know anything about how I wouldn't.
Speaker 1:Would you be surprised if one day you and I got invited to whatever? A big oem invited us to their corporate headquarters and like, will you please help us understand? We got to sign non-disclosure so you don't embarrass us all. Will you help us understand what we should be doing better across all three tiers From our level? Where should we be?
Speaker 1:What kind of keyword category should we be more focused on? So we're not cannibalizing at the dealer level at tier three, because we give them the ability to run campaigns that are going to maybe focus on different things. And what should we tell tier two, so that we don't have the you know north texas, fill in the blank dealers cannibalizing either those areas like would it not just blow your mind if we got invited to a hypothetical meeting like that and you find out that they clearly and have no clue what they're doing? Would it surprise you if they had actually disclosed? We don't really know what we're doing and we we need, like, tell us what we're doing there are typically other ways that those characters disclose that they don't know what they're talking about.
Speaker 2:It's usually just by virtue of them talking. It's funny that you say that because I know you're referencing something from our past when we worked together when you got invited to one of the big Detroit shops I don't know who it was, but I will tell you that I did have a meeting with the regional uh, I guess like tier two group of infinity dealers in ohio and I did meet the vp and man, like we were kind of presenting our strategy and it was just it totally went over his head. But you know, we were talking, we were, we were there to kind of support these, this dealer that was primarily owned by one guy, to like, hey, let us do this different thing, because they were trying to restrict co-op and trying to basically force all of the inventory search to be at the oem level versus at the dealership and they were trying to penalize the dealership for spending against the inventory that they had on their lots and that they were supposed to sell and they're going to be penalized for not selling it by the OEM. The OEM is not letting them market it. Yeah, no, they don't know, I don't know, whenever you get to that EP of marketing title, it's honestly guaranteed you know absolutely nothing about arbiting.
Speaker 2:I think if I were an OEM or a big automotive company, I would really want to have people that have a deep understanding of Google, organic and the history of keywords and match types. You'd want to have kind of like that custodian of knowledge for your brand, but unfortunately, because there's so much turnover in the industry, we just never accrue that much knowledge and the only places if it's accrued is third parties. So the third parties are going to give very self-serving recommendations for them and for their affiliates. They give them kickbacks. So the entire like oem and co-op system is it's. You know. It's been farmed out to third parties that pretend to know what they're doing and maybe they do, but they're they're not steering the industry in the right direction. They're just steering more money for own pockets. So definitely a point of frustration, and it's always funny too.
Speaker 2:I I was at um, a google marketing live event I think it was like in 2018 or something and they brought the CEO of digital for Chrysler, duke Dodge, and he was researching or rehearsing just a Google spiel that he had worked on with them for a while and it was like I was like you don't know what you're saying. You're like a puppet rehearsing other someone else's lyrics. You're literally just saying what Google wants you to say, but you have thousands of dealers that would expect that you should be the Jedi Knight of digital marketing for this brand. Your level once, once you ascend to that level uh, from what I've seen, the the personalities that get up there kind of want to get away from the leads and they want to work with the consultants and let them make all the decisions and go to the steak dinners. That's, that's what I've experienced.
Speaker 1:Um, I'm sure it's not the way it is across the board, but just in in my small sample size yeah, well, in the beginning, for for google, uh, you know, you and I have lived, lived through this but in the beginning I think google had a real healthy appreciation for, uh, the barbarians and the vanguard that took the access to google adwords and learned the platform. And then people who built things and, um, you know people, people who built even bid engines and like, they're obviously even our days, going back to the reach local days. But I don't, I don't sense that today, when I listen to what google puts out, when I see any of their people uh, show up at a small or a large event in automotive and I listen to their keynotes, I'm just like it's a nothing burger, it's just propaganda, more propaganda, it's, it's, it's so, and there is no healthy appreciation for people then that ask questions that even have a mid-level of depth, it's like, ah well, I don't know that, but I could get with the team. Yeah, it's always been that kind of shit from them for a long time, and this is like, okay, I still say like it's the most amazing ad platform that's ever been created in our lifetime. Okay, great.
Speaker 1:But now that there are these people like yourself, you're a perfect example of somebody that could be so instrumental in not only cost-effectiveness but outcomes for a brand, and yet the people that are in those conversations conversations they don't know half of what you know, they don't have half of the experience that you have, and yet, for some reason, I won't say it. I it feels like somebody could say well, it feels corrupt, right, it feels polluted, and that's really sad because then, in the case of this episode, and really all these episodes, we're doing these things and having these conversations to hopefully make sure that the business owners learn and they get value and it makes them better and it's for them, so that they have this understanding.
Speaker 1:It sad that it's sad when, when there's a projection that the customer is most important and in all reality they're literally not just the afterthought, they're like the after afterthought, once everyone else has been considered first, and I think it's batteries in the matrix.
Speaker 2:That's. That's what they are and like I was planning on talking about this because I don't have my talk track fully rehearsed, but like I think about my career, right, it's gonna be the next episode. I've been doing google ads for 16 years. That's a very long time, kind of a very young, dynamic industry.
Speaker 2:And I remember our Google reps would come and talk to us. They would wine and dine us, they would give us credits for hitting targets, they would send us Google swag. We always had one point of contact for our agency. They were super flexible on billing terms so we could get more people on. Because, guess what? There were still very few people that had adopted digital marketing and that has just flexible on billing terms so we can get more people on because, guess what? There was still very few people that had adopted digital marketing and that has just exponentially grown and now that they're at this point of critical mass, they are 100 percent. Uh, they are. They are monopoly like google and they're they're acting like one two. That the the interesting thing. And I remember you gave me a book, uh, about google and I remember reading it and I was like, wow, I love this, don't be evil concept and that's gone years is almost whatever they say. Almost in every case, whatever they say, the opposite is true.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you pay much attention to the Google leak. I did a post on LinkedIn focusing on this, but it was this, this the Google leak. For any good SEOs was not amused because we're like Google's full of shit and they've been lying to us directly for a long time. Google said that the amount of traffic you get doesn't play into your rankings. They said that links weren't important. They said that time on site or Pogo sticking and all these things are not signals we look at Bullshit. They are definitely signals that they have been looking at as soon as this year in March when that week happens, and they have been lying about this for a long time. Ran Fishkin from Moz was really demonized and a lot of bad things were said about him. You know, but like these guys, these talking heads, I can't remember their names. I I present them so much I I can't even remember the main guy, that, the main seo guy that he's.
Speaker 2:They're lying mouthpieces and what I don't understand as an agency. It's my job, if you know if I'm working for google or with google. Their goal should be we're going to give you as much information as we can so you can convince your clients to peel ledges away from TV, from newspaper, from being. But they're not doing that and it's super myopic because what they're recommending everyone just do PMAS, broad match keywords are the way to go, 25 mile radius, no exclusions, like all of this bullshit which will 1000 waste your money. They're saying that it's fine, but I'm like you know that these people are going to know that it's not fine whether business starts to decline when your sales reps are spending all of your time qualifying crappy leads because you didn't have the robust exclusion category.
Speaker 2:Or like these 60-hour keyword campaigns. For any car dealer that would be about 10 different campaigns, but for some of Google's, google will tell me, yeah, just throw it all in one campaign, a couple different ad groups and throw in an RSA and yeah, you're good, you're doing great, you're doing great. Look at your optimization score. It's 85. Good for you. That optimization score is such bullshit because sometimes what the optimization score will be recommending is increasing your minutes by 100 with the customer directly and is starting to try to push agencies to the side, just all like and it's not even. It has been playing favorites for the last five years and I know that because we were a favorite and then we weren't. And, yeah, the amount of support we got dramatically changed, even though our revenue that we were driving through google dollars, so we spent more money with them, but because we pushed back on some of their stuff that they were trying to push down down at us. We lost support reps. Now this is a real kicker, because this is a big deal and it just hit a couple weeks ago.
Speaker 2:Google is starting to not allow businesses to run their ads off of credit cards. They're forcing everyone to VCH, which is mind-blowing. You and I have been in auto for a long time. We know that now that we've got VCH, everything is on a float. You're floating your inventory, you're floating your ad spend where your agency is, so we will do a lot of that too. Sometimes we'll float ad dollars because our credit card gives us that float. And now Google is going directly to the client saying you can't do this anymore. They're going around us.
Speaker 2:Wow, you are clients, and man, some of my clients have just been completely livid. They're furious and I kind of this whole idea basket that I just ranted about. I did kind of thinking about an article about like, basically like Google partnership kind of needs nothing. Google is not your partner. You know it doesn't matter. You can try to play by their rules, but if it's a decision between fostering the business that got them to where they are today, which is a massive network of partners and publishers.
Speaker 2:We made Google what it is. I have personally spent about a hundred100 million in my lifetime. I should be getting baskets of steak from these guys every month. I am their best sales rep by far and I have been for a long time and I've been telling people not to use other platforms. That's over man we are. Now we're converting everyone to Bing, to TikTok, wherever else they are not, because, at the end of the day, google can do things now that they couldn't do before. Well, actually, honestly, they're losing impression share at Bing. Bing is growing because they are innovating more on their platform. Do I think they'll ever be bigger than Google? Not anytime soon.
Speaker 2:But in any given market for cars, they have 20% of the search volume. It used to be seven. That's a big drop in revenue. And Bing with Microsoft ads. Their support is awesome. They offer incentives for signing up new ad accounts. They make it super easy to import from Google and I think that for dealers, you absolutely need to diversifyify because Google changes the rules of the game all the time.
Speaker 2:It used to be you pay one penny more than your competitor. That's no longer the case. It's had. It used to be that the bid in an auction is set based on whatever people are willing to spend. People are willing to spend. So if you had an auction where your starting price was a dollar because someone was bidding a dollar and therefore you had to bill or bill, it did a dollar and let's set. You know that was the price. Now google's just like nope, starting price is five bucks, starting price is seven dollars. Uh, and in some categories we work in like law or yeah, like law it's. It can be like as high as 70 bucks and it's not. I'm like, are you sure it's 70 bucks? Like you don't have any seven dollar clicks here. You know it's. They know where the rabbit, where the monetization is for their traffic and they're just wheezing everything out of it.
Speaker 2:And for any dealer that is 100% leveraged on Google just for paid media and SEO, you're missing out on 20% of the market and you're also putting yourself in a really bad situation where you have a kind of ascending platform with Microsoft and all these other platforms that are going to erode Google's dominance over time and you're not going to know those and a platform that you know and that you're trusting is going to make it harder for you to manage your business. Well, they're going to take away your levers of control. They're going to push down stupid things like broad match or destroy your ability to use a credit card for your ad spend. I actually think that's illegal, to be honest. But like it's this, this kind of escalation I'm seeing with Google is really frustrating, and I have so many great relationships and great friends over at Google, but they're not in charge. And there are our Google reps are amazing and they do their best to help us, help, protect us and navigate around whatever Google's policy changes are, but it's becoming a full-time job just to keep up with them, and if our SEO team were listening to Google, we would spend thousands of hours doing work that was completely useless instead of doing the things that we ended up doing, which are increasing organic traffic and visibility for clients. So it's it's a really weird situation.
Speaker 2:I think that, um, I think that Google is really out of touch. Uh, I think that they think that they are thought of as a good company. I think if you were to go anywhere in the country and pull a hundred people and say do you think google is a good company or a bad company, or do you think they have a good influence or a bad influence or a monopoly? I think most people would say they're a monopoly there. They control what we see, what is is shown, who is successful. It's a lot. It could be such a great platform if they were a little closer to their end users, but they're not really interested in that and they're definitely not interested in bolstering partnerships with agencies like us. I mean again, it doesn't seem that way and what it does seem is that they're trying to give dealers the idea that they can just put in a credit card and launch a theme apps campaign and hey, you don't need to spend that managing a few years, remember? That's totally not true. What I thought is are you willing to allow that dealer to set up an express campaign and blow $20,000 and then write off Google forever? Is that worth it? Or are you okay with them working with a partner on your extremely complicated platform that changes all the time and they get a little bit of a margin? That's not hurting them? It's really interesting to see what they're doing.
Speaker 2:The rationale for kicking people off credit card is the transaction fees are high. I'm like you made 50 million dollars in the us. I think you got it like I don't care if your transaction fees are. They're not more than two percent or three percent. That's nuts. You're gonna literally piss off your customers and force them to change the way they do business just because of transaction fees. It seems like they're lying and it's like for me.
Speaker 2:I have made a great living working in this space. I know this platform super well. I've done trainings on this platform. I've trained so many young digital marketers and what I see is this platform is constantly eroding our means of control and also kind of not fostering a positive relationship with the people that have to use the platform. Like seos are the bad guy. I'm like no. They manage websites that drive traffic, which drives revenue, so you should tell them what works and what gets things to rank and what moves the needle and what you actually care about, instead of making this plethora of lies of oh, this useful content thing or this over here. Don't view links that doesn't work when we know that it does Like. Just tell us what works and what you actually want us to do. Keep more still-let-it-work-on-your-ads. No one will ever be able to game the system so much so that it diminishes Google's ad revenue.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's other stuff too, with the AI overviews that drive something insane. A lot of it is wrong. First of all, I was changing the fluid in my Porsche and they changed where the coolant was, and the article that they have listed in the SGD was from Porsche Littleton in Colorado. I'm in Austin, I don't know why I would pull up, and it was an article from like 2017. It was the only one I could find, because they had changed the search results because they're like oh, yeah, it's an AI overview, because this is kind of a how you do it question. So we're trying to steal that traffic from all of the different content websites, from headboards, from all of the for Porsche. They're trying to steal that traffic from Porsche. I had to. It took me a while to get to the Porsche site and make sure that I wasn't pouring it in the wrong tank. You know like, yeah, it's just, it's remarkable. I tried to call Mexico recently on a project. Ai overview was long there too, and it's just, it's really messy. Project AI overview was long there too, and it's just it's really messy and they don't understand that for your average user if you have 10 bad experiences and then you go over to edge and you're like, oh, this was a little smoother, you lost that person. That person is interviewed. The same way, we all think about pay.
Speaker 2:Well, and those C's and hotmail and all all these platforms that nobody uses anymore, that are kind of dying platforms. Google can get there really quick. You know the war. They spend time trying to bolster gemini and, you know, have issues with gemini where it's like making uh, you know, you know, uh, native american popes and nazi soldiers who are black or stuff like that. That was their new unveiling of the Gemini platform and they haven't stopped pushing that out, even though it's just a cataclysmic failure.
Speaker 2:And it's just really weird because I know that Google had to do something innovative within AI. They had to Like you absolutely have to, it's where things are going. But just to have such a colossal fail and then try to like jam Gemini into their golden goose which is Google search. They could have done it somewhere else. They could have created another platform and be like hey guys, try a Gemini search, but now I've got to let it deselect it. If you look at my Google Trends, the number of people that are looking for how to turn off Gemini is just like. People don't like it and it's in their own data and they're changing it and they're even limiting it more because it's not working.
Speaker 2:So again, long rant on Google. I think there's a lot of things that they've done right, that have allowed them to do a lot of things that are just horrifically wrong, and there's an end of a road there. And is it going to be five years? Is it going to be three years? Who knows? But things change very fast in tech and, as it relates to customers, you have to be in more places than just Google. You need to be thinking about SEO on Bing. You need to be thinking about it on Yahoo. You need to be thinking about ads on those platforms. If TikTok stays around, you need to be thinking about TikTok because that's where everyone under age 34 is right now. You can't just be like our choice of social platforms is meta and we don't care about tiktok as people are dancing over there. Whatever, that's the wrong thing. You need to be very diverse in your channels, because there are some really great competitive other options uh, other than google.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always enjoy having some of these deeper conversations about Google because I don't think that car dealers and motorcycle dealers and I don't I mean talk about you know apartments, multifamily, talk about lawyers, talk about health care Most of these people at the business ownership level have really no clue, and that's not putting them down, it's not what they're supposed to know.
Speaker 1:But even the people that they put their trust in have these limitations and boundaries and guardrails and things get changed all of a sudden, like what happened, all dictated by Google, and I think it's important for those business owners to actually have at least a decent level of knowledge and to really have that. You kind of have to know from the beginning. Somebody could summarize like this is when Google unveiled their ad platform and this was the approach in the beginning their ad platform, and this was the approach in the beginning and this is how they told people that were providing these services on behalf of uh businesses to charge for their you know fees, like there's just so many things. This is what the premier and the uh you know a little premier partner status. This is what that really means. If somebody has this logo over that logo, it just gets conflated and confusing, and then it gets used, unfortunately.
Speaker 2:It changed the meaning. It used to mean something, to be a premier partner, and it was a really big deal for us that we were. Now it's being meaningless. We do not have centralized support. We don't get the kind of sales support that Google should be giving people that are selling their product. So, yeah, I don't understand what they're doing. I know that there's always some kind of rationale for what they do, so I can only assume that it's not good. Uh, and you know, just based, you know, I, I, I, they're either completely out of touch with what the industry thinks about them or they don't care. I kind of think they don't care. That's my assessment.
Speaker 1:I don't know what percentage of both. I think it's both. For me, I think it's completely out of touch and we don't care. I think the evidence of that is everywhere.
Speaker 1:You guys, your agency is not the only one that's kind of gone from hey, this was great, the support was amazing, and when you get to that consideration of, well, maybe they don't care you and I have talked about this before, I've shared this with other people that are in this same space they don't care, because if they leave an agency that's actually better in every category, right, the way they set up campaigns, the way they manage campaigns, all the details that we talk about on these episodes, it's painfully obvious that you and your agency know exactly what you're doing and you've got a lot, many 16 years of experience doing this. But Google is playing this in a way now where, um, the I don't care part from at least my opinion is, if somebody decides to stop working with you, google is betting on them going to one of these other providers that they don't care if the results they get from the other provider are worse, because the profitability to Google is probably higher, right.
Speaker 2:But the problem is, as more of these platforms grow in popularity, people will be like why? You know what? I tried Google, I thought. Just the other day someone tried Google in-house and they were like we don't want to talk about Google Ads because it doesn't work. And I had to explain how complicated it is and how to do things correctly and they're like okay, we're open to trying this with you. But if I didn't bring that person back around, they were like fuck that platform. I wasted thousands of dollars, I had no support. I was talking to somebody and that's just not what businesses in the West expect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I agree this may be a future topic that we plan out and talk about some of these things. It has to be, I think, carefully discussed and planned just to make sure that the audience really gets a point of view and perspective, that they realize that they one should be educating themselves. I've said this for years Stop eating baby food, that your vendors keep popping the jars of Gerber because you love the taste of baby food. You got to learn how to eat steak and that's why we do episodes like this. So maybe there's a Google, maybe there's a further down the road episode that digs a little bit more into just what to know, like from beginning to current, like here's what to know about google, because you I mean you just in your last few comments here um, it was very revealing to a lot of people when that google leak happened and joy hawkins did a really good job with michael king and ran fishkin. They did a kind of a episode where they talked through a lot of those things. Rand was absolutely he's been, you know, kind of vilified a couple of times when he shouldn't be, and so I, yeah, I think there's a lot to learn in in all of it. I also think this brings us to a great place to park the episode.
Speaker 1:Man. Always appreciate your time, mike, you're just home run hitter with this um information that, I think, is, you know, just so helpful for for your audience, to the audience. Hey, we always appreciate your time. We never want to waste it. We, uh, we, very much appreciate comments and questions. Feel free to share. Uh, if you're watching this on youtube, it's easy to drop a comment in there. Your feedback helps us deliver very relevant episodes and we've stayed on track with these first three of the podcast, based on the things that you are responding to and what you like. So if there are other things that you hear as we talk about, things on these episodes that you'd like us to go deeper in, we'd love to hear that feedback. Until then, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you real soon right back here on the podcast. Thanks John, thanks Mike. Let me hit the stop.