Why PPC Geo Marketing is a Must For Your Dealership

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Geo-targeting within the automotive industry is a must if you want to improve your leads and conversions significantly. Ensuring that your brand is represented in a positive and consistent manner is a time-consuming exercise, but is vital for a dealership to expand and achieve visibility online. Using targeted geo-marketing can easily improve your dealership’s digital marketing activities by automatically targeting potential customers who are within a certain range of your business, meaning that dealers can expand their market reach within the local area.

Setting up your Adwords Campaign

• In your account, navigate to settings and select the campaign that you wish to target. Go down to the locations section and click on the edit button.
• Click on the search tab and begin to type in the preferred location. The location will pop-up and will include country, city and post code. You can even see how many people each location reaches!
• For each location, you can ‘Add’, ‘Exclude’, and even select ‘Nearby’ for certain places.
• • Add: This will be added onto the list of targeted locations
  • Exclude: This will stop your ad from featuring in certain locations.
  • Nearby: This help you add a list of nearby locations.

Advanced Location Options

The advanced location options offer you three different choices for targeting your potential customers. There are:

• People in, searching for, or who show interest in my targeted location (recommended.)
• People in my targeted location.
• People searching for, or who show interest in my targeted location (default.)

Radius Targeting

Radius targeting is the most popular option to select in Adwords. Radius targeting pinpoints your dealership in the middle of the radius range, and gives you the option to customise how many miles you would like the radius to stretch out across the local area.

We would suggest that you go for the first recommended setting, to ensure that you are reaching the maximum of potential customers in your area. You are also able to exclude people at this point, which we would also recommend adjusting to make sure that you’re targeting the right people.

 Location Groups

The location groups option allows you to target specific places of interest which may attract a lot of people, such as cities or towns, and also specific tiers of income, so that you can eliminate certain demographics from your campaign.

Bulk Locations

Bulk locations lets you add or exclude up to 1000 locations in one click. With this feature, you are also able to add desired postcodes by typing or pasting in the locations that you wish to target. Just click on ‘done’, when you’ve finished with your alterations.

Optimising your Geo-targeted Campaign

Tracking your data regularly is an important part of the Adwords process, because you can see which areas are performing better than others. Go to the ‘Settings’ tab and navigate to ‘Locations.’ It is here that you can view your stats which include, clicks, average cost-per-click (CPC), impressions and average position which are linked to the locations which you have set up.

As well as monitoring how well your stats are performing, you can also find out in detail which keywords have activated your ads. Click on ‘Search Terms’ under the ‘Keyword Tab’ to visit this and discover your hottest search terms.

Ok… So now that we’ve established what everything does, how can you apply this to your dealership?

It is highly likely that you’ve already been spending a significant amount of your advertising budget on paid search advertising, and you have a solid idea of what keywords and ad copy attracts the most interest when driving traffic to your website. But when was the last time that you analysed your dealership’s geographical data?

For example, many dealers will create an account on Google, adjust the settings at the time of setup and leave it to do its job by focusing on potential customers within a 30 mile radius. But this may leave you targeting an area that has a dealership closer by than your business and doesn’t produce many leads, or ever so slightly missing out on a potential gold mine of customers who sit just outside of the radius. It is important to keep up with the activities in your local area and analyse your data to establish if your methods are working effectively and fully understand the capabilities which you have within paid search.

Let’s say that you run a dealership in West Bromwich, and three new dealerships have opened within your 30 mile radius – two of those are north west to your location, and the other one is north east. You may notice that your leads coming from the north in general are low since the opening of these three new sites. It could be worth trying to pump more money into the spaces between your dealership and theirs and focus more of your budget to the north; or alternatively, reel your radius in so that those three dealerships are not included within the radius barrier so that you are focusing only on the potential customers who are on ‘your side’.

Another example of adjusting your geo-targeting campaigns is that you may have noticed in your data that more leads are coming from the south east, and this could be because a local dealership 12 miles away from your business has recently closed. If this is the case, specifically target this area to encapsulate a new area of potential customers who do not have a local dealership on their doorstep anymore. As well as this, you are also able to exclude certain areas from your geo-targeting campaign if you’d rather spend your money elsewhere. Try to adjust your settings and budget slightly and see if any of these changes make an impact on your leads and conversions.

As well as using the general radius tool, you can accurately specify the areas which you want to target… right down to postcodes! For example, if you are hosting a bank holiday ‘up to half price off’ sale, you may wish to extend your audience demographic for the run up to the weekend, and include areas which wouldn’t usually fall within your general PPC campaign.

We would recommend trialling your new settings for 6-8 weeks. Doing a little bit of research about your competitors and adjusting your radius can go a long way and will no doubt generate more leads for your business!

For more information on Click Dealer’s PPC marketing packages, get in touch today for a free quote by emailing marketing@clickdealer.co.uk or calling us on 01782 904 715. Alternatively, you can message us via our contact page!