What Is PPC and How Can It Help Your Dealership Get More Website Leads?

PPC is a term that is often bandied about when dealers are talking about how to drive more traffic to their websites and ultimately securing more leads and in turn sales for their business. But when all is said and done, what exactly is PPC and how can it help dealers to improve online?

Click Dealer has put together a handy beginners guide to PPC marketing, for those dealers who are thinking about getting into the increasingly popular method of ‘paying for clicks.’

What Is PPC?

PPC (Pay-per-click) is a model which enables dealerships to effectively buy visits to their site, charging a fee each time that their advert is clicked. One of the most popular forms of PPC is search engine advertising, which involves bidding for ad placement in search engine’s sponsored links, in the same way you would at a used car auction!

The benefit of PPC advertising is that visits to the site, and the resulting sales, should in theory be worth more than the cost of the advert. PPS (Pay-per-sale) marketing is incredibly valuable because search engines, like Google, receive large amounts of traffic which can deliver the majority of clicks to your ads, leading to the generation of more profit.

How Does It Work?

When a query is entered into a search engine, PPS advertising systems, such as Google AdWords and Bing Ads, will search through their pool of advertisers to select which ones will appear on the results page. Dealers can choose keywords that they want to bid on and identify an amount that they are willing to bid, which is known as the cost-per-click bid (CPC).

If several advertisers are bidding on a keyword relevant to the query, there will be an auction. In this case, the search engine will enter the most relevant of the keywords identified by the advertisers into the query auction, along with the maximum bid specified by them.

Following this, ad rank will be determined. Ad rank is dependent on the advertisers’ maximum keyword bid and quality score, which is calculated by assessment of the relevance of keywords and landing pages.  Advertisers then pay the minimum amount for their position on the results page when their ad is clicked on.

PPC Keyword Research

The way in which PPC advertising systems operate may mean that an advertiser with a higher quality score could place higher in the search engine results than an advertiser with a larger maximum bid. For this reason, researching and selecting the appropriate keywords for a PPC campaign is crucial. There are a few things to consider when creating a PPC campaign:

• Targeted keywords – Keywords need to be tailored to the product being sold. This will result in a higher click-through-rate and ensure that you are not paying for web traffic that is unlikely to lead to sales and profit.
• Competition – Your research should include both popular keywords and long-tail keywords, which refers to those which are less common and specific. Long-tail keywords are less competitive and therefore, less expensive.
• Expansion – Your PPC campaign should be constantly expanding and adapting, and so you should be continually aware of new keyword opportunities and be able to act upon on your research.

Once you act upon your research, it is important to keep your PPC campaigns managed, reviewing the quality of your keywords. In order to do this, you may want to look into online PPC suggestion tools, which can gather and display information to show you how effective your campaign is.

For more information on Click Dealer’s comprehensive Search Engine Marketing packages, or for a free no obligations audit contact us today on marketing@clickdealer.co.uk or by calling 01782 904 715.