Every retail industry has its time to shine during the year. Summer happens to be that time in the auto industry. With shopper traffic and next year’s incoming inventory increasing with the temperature, car-buying and car-selling is top of mind. Your dealership knows this, but unfortunately, so do your competitors. An easy way to keep ahead of online competition this summer is to employ a robust retargeting strategy to ensure your brand and inventory remain with your customers at every click. Here’s how:
1) Be where consumers spend their day online.
Facebook and Google are two of the world’s most popular websites, and boast a massive user database comprising people from varying backgrounds and interests – veritable goldmines of shopping behavior intel. On tap are two new digital advertising products that should be top of mind when looking at your current online advertising plan:
-Facebook Dynamic Ads
Facebook Dynamic Ads are essentially your dynamic ads reformatted to fit into users’ Facebook newsfeed. It has all the same features as a regular dynamic ad, including a direct link to the Vehicle Detail Page (VDP). But here is the kicker – we retarget customers across devices. Let’s say a shopper views the dealership’s website on his PC, but then checks Facebook on his mobile device – your Facebook Dynamic Ad will be seen on the mobile device.
-Google Remarketing Lists for Search Ads
Google Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) uses your website’s remarketing pool to bid on users searching for relative keywords on Google more competitively. This places your ad at a better position, increasing your chances of capturing a second, third or fourth visit to your website over the competition.
What does this process look like? Let’s say a potential customer just got a summer bonus, and that Audi parked outside the office looks really nice gleaming in the sunshine. She hops online and checks out an Audi on your website, gets pulled away into a meeting, and leaves the site. The meeting ends and she is back to her computer, typing a specific Audi model into the search bar. We bid higher to show your dealership’s make-model ad at the top of the search results, since this shopper has already been to your site.
2) Increase online “Be Backs”.
When the customer leaves your dealership site and moves on to another site, it’s essentially like a showroom customer telling you he’ll “be back”. How do we make sure he’ll actually come back? We immediately retarget that customer by placing your display ad above the game stats he’s scoping on ESPN.com, within his newsfeed as he scrolls through Facebook, and alongside the patio furniture he’s researching on Amazon.com.
3) Keep shoppers in the pool.
A successful remarketing campaign keeps shoppers coming back and engaging with your website. By continuing to build your remarketing pool, we can track them through a tracking window. Dealer.com’s is 30 days. This means that once shoppers click on your dealership site, they’re automatically added to the retargeting pool. No matter where they go online, they’ll see your display ads for 30 days with a frequency cap of 10 retargets per day. And if during those 30 days they go back to your site, it restarts that 30-day tracking window.
Let’s take that a step further and say a shopper is already in the remarketing pool, is served a display ad, and she doesn’t click on the ad. We keep track. If within four days that shopper goes back to your dealership site, we know because we tracked her through a four-day view through window. We know this shopper’s online path, and can benchmark the digital campaign’s performance to make the most out of your advertising spend.
Summer means heat, sunshine, activity, and new cars.
Capture your optimal shopper traffic online with a data-driven retargeting ad strategy that works your investment harder for those shoppers that have already shown interest in your inventory.
Learn More About our Summer Heat 2016 Digital Retargeting Promo! Dollar for dollar match through August. Click here for more information.
Check out our Keys to Summer Advertising Success eBook here