Click the image above or click here to watch 8/24 Automotive News webiner: How Search Has Radically Changed The Way Consumers Shop For Cars.

August 24th Automotive News Webinar

On August 24th, leaders from Google, Yahoo and Moore & Scarry Advertising presented an Automotive News webinar on how search engines have changed the auto industry and the way consumers shop for cars.

With some research indicating nearly 90% of consumers utilize a search engine as a key part of the buying process, fundamentally understanding how shoppers use search engines is mission critical to a dealership’s success. Industry leaders Google, Yahoo and Moore & Scarry Advertising show you how search engines are radically changing the car buying process and how you can maximize your search results.

• Get a sneak peak under the hood of the world’s leading search engines
• See tools that will help you measure your search performance
• Learn how search engines are changing the way people shop for cars
• Get breaking industry news about the merging of Microsoft and Yahoo search
• Learn how to most effectively combine advertising and technology to maximize results

If you missed the webinar or would simply like to see it again, click here to view a recorded version of the session.

Haystack Used Car Search Marketing App

During the presentation, Duncan Scarry presented Moore & Scarry Advertising’s Haystack used car search marketing application. There was tremendous interest in the product after the webinar. If you’d like to learn more about the product or schedule a private demo of what the tool can do for you, please click here.

Webinar Question & Answer Section

There were a lot of questions that were submitted during the webinar that went unanswered. We thought it was unfair that everyone didn’t have their opportunity to ask a question.

During the webinar, all the questions that were asked were recorded. Duncan Scarry has downloaded the questions and answered them here. Please note, the questions have only had mild editing for grammar and spelling. Additionally, if you weren’t on the webinar, some of the questions and answers won’t make sense as they don’t have the context of the presentation attached. (Questions in bold and italic)

What should be an average price one should pay for a click through?

As we mentioned on the call, the cost per click varies per market, per brand and per keyword from $.50 to $15.00. Also, the cost of the keyword is largely set by the market – not the bidder, so you don’t have complete control over click costs. Generally expect to spend between $1.50 to $6.00 per click.

Question to Melissa Grusche – please clarify your “Smartphone users are 50 times more likely to search” comment… more likely to search compared to who? sorry I missed it…

Melissa’s comment was that 50% of smart phone users start their session at a search engine, showing that search is vital to the mobile user.

Is there any information available on searches for used vs. new vehicles?

Google Insights provides data for whatever information you enter. You can enter new car keywords and compare them to used car keywords. You can find Google Insights for search HERE.

Who owns the data in Google Analytics? My company or Google?

Please see the terms and conditions of Google Analytics. While Google retains the information on their servers, it is your data to export.

What is website for Google Analytics?

Google.com/analytics

No input from Google on organic search?

Google doesn’t typically comment deeply on organic search optimization. Since they are the people that know the algorithm, they feel that it could be construed that they give better advice on search optimization to one company than another. Thus, they refrain from giving detailed advice on search optimization; kind of church/state separation.

What are your thoughts regarding Reach Local Corporation?

Reach Local is an Adwords Reseller, which means they have a good number of staff certified by Google and spend quite a bit of money on search. My opinion is that they are over-automated, typically charge markups, don’t integrate with other systems and don’t fully disclose click data. There are a number of better options on the market.

This question is for Melissa. We participating with Dealer Rater and 2 of our 3 stores are populating positive reviews on Google. We have been a Dealer Rater customer since March and our positive reviews are not populating. We cannot get any assistance from Google. Is there someone you can suggest to help us? Thank you

A lot of Google products are supported in an offline manner. Google has recently announced that they are now allowing verified business listings to respond to reviews that have been placed on Google. My [Duncan Scarry] opinion is that they may be showing fewer reviews from other review sites in effort to make their review system gain market share. If I were you, I’d be sending people to Google reviews instead of Dealer Rater anyway. Read my article on that HERE.

Your numbers are off…16 million? MORE LIKE 10 MILLION

Your reference is to my math that if there are 300 million people in the US and 16 million of them are going to buy a new or USED vehicle from a dealership, which means in any given month 0.44% of the population is going to buy a vehicle from a dealership. You’re right the actual number of units sold in the US this year will likely by about 10 million, but that figure is new cars only. We’re assuming an additional 6 million units of used automobiles.

Should big brands go after non-branded search terms? At SES conference last week – recommendation was for big brands to stick to branded terms and for unknown sites to focus on non-branded terms to build up their brand.

We likely agree. If you focus on broad terms like ‘USED CARS’ your click through ratio and general overall performance on that keyword would be weak. Until you maximize your base keywords and spending, I’d stay to terms that are very close to the specific products and services you represent.

What is that paid amount per car sold? We are a small rural dealer and can’t imagine spending that amount.

We don’t calculate search in that manner, but in general our clients spend between $250 and $500 per car net of advertising credits. The smaller the dealership, the higher that number is likely to be.

How important is it for car dealers to tailor their websites for smartphone compatibility?

Right now, we see very low mobile traffic volume to dealership web sites. However, it is a rapidly growing sector. You should be prepared to take advantage of it and it’s relatively painless and inexpensive. Ask your web provider about their mobile platform options.

Why would an Acura (Honda) dealer be advertising a 2008 Nissan Altima?

It’s a great point and one of the reasons that Haystack works so well. If I was an Acura dealer and I actually had a 2008 Nissan Altima in stock, of course I’d want to advertise it. When I didn’t have it in stock, I wouldn’t. That’s the beauty of the Haystack product. It creates search ads that match your inventory on a daily basis so you advertise what you have in stock – no matter what type of inventory it is.

What is the cost for Haystack? Ids it for used cars only?

Haystack starts at $395 per month. You can find more information about it HERE.

Is Haystack an off the shelf product?

Haystack is a product developed and serviced by Moore & Scarry Advertising, so no, it is not an off the shelf product. However you don’t have to be a full service client of the agency to use it. Get the contact information for a sales rep from our Haystack product page.

If 35% of consumers do their searching out of hours, how important is it for dealers to offer an out of hours service? I.e. call center or Live Chat function?

This was addressed on the call. That function would be important to have ONLY if it was staffed properly. We find too many chat services that don’t provide enough information to the consumer and only frustrate them more. The best option would be to have a staff member manage the chat.

Question for Duncan Scarry, what are you seeing as your conversion rate (based on phone calls and lead generation) with automated paid search campaigns? Currently, my group is using a non-automated solution and I am curious about the difference in conversion rates between the two.

Generally, conversion rates for search in general aren’t mind-blowing. We talked about this in the presentation. People don’t want to ‘convert,’ we provide them plenty of information and they’re going to walk in anyway. That being said, the conversion rate isn’t that much different. What you will find is that people view about 60% fewer pages and stay about 60% fewer minutes. At face value, this isn’t a good statistic, but if you dig deep, you’ll see that we’re simply getting your consumer to the exact information they’re looking for quickly. Haystack isn’t a substitution to a non-automated search marketing campaign – but a good addition. You can use Haystack in addition to your current campaigns.

We know that there is so much information available to analyze your Internet, Website and Search processes thus there can be a paralysis of analysis…..if you could only do 10 things on an average day to evaluate you search and internet effectiveness, what would those top ten things be ?

That’s a long answer. How about 5?

1. Good website with good content updated daily.
2. A good analytic program to measure your performance.
3. A good search engine optimization strategy.
4. A good search marketing strategy.
5. Constant tinkering with the above 4

What recourse does a dealer/ad agency have where the ip addresses assigned inside a local marketing area by a cable company are registered to a major city 90 miles away? In other words, all sponsored ads and search results reflect the situs of the ip address.

No recourse at all. Search is not an exact science. However, you can prevent your ad from being displayed to particular IP address ranges. If you can figure out the IP address range that isn’t geotargeted properly, you can eliminate it from search.

How does one get access to haystack?

Haystack is a service of Moore & Scarry Advertising. You can find out how to utilize it at our product page HERE.

What is the source of data on the slide citing internet usage/leads

The source is the JD Power Automotive Internet Roundtable in July of 2009.

What is a good bounce rate? Time spent on site? Etc.

These statistics vary by industry and site, but a bounce rate should be between 20-30% for a site OVERALL. Time spent on site should be approximately 4-6 minutes. Google has a benchmarking feature in Google Analytics that shows you what other competitive sites deliver as typical numbers.

Is there any data that supports search outside of NA or is based on Global data?

Search should be focused on where you’re customers are. If you have customers outside North America, by all means advertise to them. Adwords and Yahoo are both global systems.

What is the cost to running Haystack? Is it effective in a Canadian market? We are a very small independent store in a small town, will something like this drive more “city” clients to us?

Haystack is $395 per month for the service plus click costs, which you could likely estimate will run you another $400 per month if you inventory about 80 cars. It will be effective anywhere you’d like to target used car shoppers looking for specific vehicles you have in stock. As I said before, Google and Yahoo are global systems, so it’s a click of a button to make it work in Canada. We are currently scheduled to test it with dealers in the UK too.

Since yahoo paid search is going away – how does this affect your statements about Yahoo being the place to advertise?

Yahoo paid search isn’t going away. They’re merging with Microsoft. You’ll access Yahoo search through the Microsoft adCenter. Instead of having 25% of the market, they’ll now about close to 33%. Their comment also talked to the typical quality of Yahoo and Bing traffic, which seems to drive a slightly more qualified customer.

I think car shoppers go to OEM sites.

Not quite a question, but I know where you’re going. Car shoppers definitely go to OEM sites. As a matter of fact the number one site for a new car shopper is the OEM site. However, the number two is the dealership site. For used car shoppers the number one site visited is the dealership site. Those stats courtesy of AutoTrader.

How much does dealer generated video add to visibility and what could be done to improve the video and meta data?

Video is good for search. But that’s like saying celery is good for your diet – it is, but not if you put it on top of a cheeseburger. There are a lot of other factors that are more important. If you get those right, video is a helpful addition.

What do you recommend to optimize mobile search?

It’s done within the same tools you optimize non-mobile search.

How many searches does Google do a month?

LOTS. I don’t have an exact figure at this moment, but if I said 80 billion, I’d only be off by a couple billion, which is a good error rate in this case!

I’m looking at slide 14 and 34… the percentage of people who use search. Why are the percentages so skewed?

Those slides were showing different numbers. The general consensus of what is being shown is that A LOT of people use search engines.

What’s the expected results of larger form factor mobile devices such as tablets and needed foreseen preparations to accommodate them, as these devices are not .mobi nor .com optimized?

Too early to tell. Those devices, while appear to search engines as mobile devices have full search capability. I assume those types of devices will be considered differently in the future.

Is it true that video increases position in an organic search? And does it increase the click through by the customer?

Answered above, video is a positive factor, but there are much more important search strategies. Celery on a hamburger, celery on a salad analogy again. Video is a good addition, but can’t replace an entire search strategy.

DUNCAN YOU ROCK!!

Again, not a question but THANKS – AND SO DO YOU!

As SEO seems to be a moving target, how often should we expect to change our strategy, keywords/meta data, content, etc.?

We check / optimize sites daily. Melissa gave you a statistic that they made 550 improvements to the algorithm last year. While they aren’t evenly spread over the course of the year, if they were that’d be more than one a day. Optimize often.

Everycarlisted.com claims to be able to get preferential ranking through Youtube videos of cars.

Again, celery theory here. How EveryCarListed.com gets great rankings is by having 125,000 pages of content. Google will rank their site higher for the exact same search, leading to the exact same car than a typical dealer because of page content. A typical dealer has about 500 indexed pages, EveryCarListed has 125,000. Google ends up thinking they’re a bigger authority on the vehicle than you are. Avoid EveryCarListed like the plague. They’re basically a parasite on the automotive industry. Too many negatives to list here!

Do you feel your seo and sem campaigns should be handled by the same vendor? Is there a substantial benefit to that?

It definitely makes sense, but just putting two eggs in one basket isn’t the answer. The company that does your television, print, direct mail, in-store marketing should be doing your SEO and SEM. You wouldn’t hire one agency to handle your TV, another to handle your newspaper and a third to handle your direct mail, would you? Digital marketing is just part of an overall marketing package – not a separate effort. If you have to hire a SEO/SEM specialist, you don’t have the right agency in the first place.

Does Yahoo/MS have an analytics dashboard similar to Google?

Yahoo does have an analytics tool. Find it here.

What is a good CTR for auto related Google ads?

Again, we talked about this on the phone call. This is like asking how much is a car? Car prices range from $9000 to over $1 million dollars. Typically expect 2.5% to 4.5%.

How important is unique content on your website?

Unique content is important from a search point of view, but most important from a business point of view. If you’re not driving someone to your web site to provide them solid information about what you sell and why people should but it from you – you shouldn’t be advertising in the first place. Search doesn’t create sales, it just connects interested consumers to the content on your site that will make them do business with you.

Also how does social networking help optimize your site?

Varying social networks have varying degrees of search optimization. Generally, social networking as a form of search is limited, but pennies make dollars. It doesn’t hurt.