Can you imagine a world in which your dealership’s digital advertising efforts are not only effective but also drive significant ROI? Operating in this digital era, it's crucial to understand and evaluate the various aspects and metrics involved in digital advertising. Join us, as we take a deep dive into the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing. Premier Dealer Alchemist, Shean Kirin will guide you on how to effectively allocate your ad budget, the role engagement time plays in your analytics, and why transparency and accountability are integral components of your dealership's advertising success.
We recognize the challenge of grasping complex topics like cost per click, traffic attribution, and advertising budget allocation. So, we're here to break it all down for you, giving you digestible, actionable insights that are key to driving incremental business. We'll tackle the issue of frequent ad account changes and share personal experiences and insights from top-performing dealerships. Did you know that everyone's favorite model-specific paid search campaigns and social media ads can significantly increase engagement? Yes, you heard it right! We'll also explore these and many more strategies that will transform your digital advertising approach.
But it's not just about effective tactics; open communication and trust form the bedrock of any successful partnership. And in this digital age, it's no different between vendors and dealers in the automotive industry. We firmly believe in the power of education - dealers who comprehend marketing strategies and data are better equipped to achieve desired results. As we wrap up, we invite you to engage with us, leave comments, or ask questions on our YouTube channel or website, dealeralchemist.com. Let's embark on this transformative journey together, one episode at a time. #AutomotiveAlchemy #DealerAlchemist #digitalmarketing #automotive
Can you imagine a world in which your dealership’s digital advertising efforts are not only effective but also drive significant ROI? Operating in this digital era, it's crucial to understand and evaluate the various aspects and metrics involved in digital advertising. Join us, as we take a deep dive into the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing. Premier Dealer Alchemist, Shean Kirin will guide you on how to effectively allocate your ad budget, the role engagement time plays in your analytics, and why transparency and accountability are integral components of your dealership's advertising success.
We recognize the challenge of grasping complex topics like cost per click, traffic attribution, and advertising budget allocation. So, we're here to break it all down for you, giving you digestible, actionable insights that are key to driving incremental business. We'll tackle the issue of frequent ad account changes and share personal experiences and insights from top-performing dealerships. Did you know that everyone's favorite model-specific paid search campaigns and social media ads can significantly increase engagement? Yes, you heard it right! We'll also explore these and many more strategies that will transform your digital advertising approach.
But it's not just about effective tactics; open communication and trust form the bedrock of any successful partnership. And in this digital age, it's no different between vendors and dealers in the automotive industry. We firmly believe in the power of education - dealers who comprehend marketing strategies and data are better equipped to achieve desired results. As we wrap up, we invite you to engage with us, leave comments, or ask questions on our YouTube channel or website, dealeralchemist.com. Let's embark on this transformative journey together, one episode at a time. #AutomotiveAlchemy #DealerAlchemist #digitalmarketing #automotive
Welcome to Automotive Alchemy, a podcast that dwells in the cavernous depths of data, unearthing precious gems of wisdom to illuminate your path to digital marketing success. As alchemists, we understand that each nugget of information is a vital ingredient in our elixir of knowledge. So ready yourselves as we embark on an enlightening journey through the arcane world of data-driven automotive marketing.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to Automotive Alchemy. I'm your host, sean Reigns, once again here with the premier dealer, alchemist, sean Kiran. How's it going, kiran? How are you today?
Speaker 3:Excellent Thanks. How about you Sean?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great Looking forward to talking about this episode, one of the things that you evangelize really well in the marketplace for dealers and really kind of simplify the thought process for dealers around how they should spend and if they're really getting maximum return on the investment of dollars digitally very much, including how they spend within Google. But you break some things down in a presentation that some people I think a lot of people need to see, that have it and it really goes into I think you call it five, but it's technically, I think, really six areas of focus and today's episode for the listening, watching, viewing all of it audience. This is one of those ones where you want to pay attention and probably take a couple of notes, because some of the things that I'm going to ask Mr Kiran today will get into some real actionable things that you should do and that they're not particularly difficult. They really, I would say, center around caring about this part of where your dealership invests, and anytime you care about something, you're going to have to spend time.
Speaker 2:You can't fake caring, and so I want to set the stage on why dealers should pay closer attention to the return on investment in digital advertising. That may not sound like a new topic to a lot of people, but it is worthy of breaking down because, if we're all honest, whether we've worked in dealerships, worked on behalf of dealers there aren't a lot of dealers that want to raise their hand and have to try to explain the differences of all these nuances and specifics about digital advertising, and so let's do a setting the stage Understanding the spend. First thing that I want to ask how much do you think really a total advertising should be allocated on the digital side? It's an old question but I think, a worthy one of as we get closing out 2023, what should we be looking at? What should a dealer look about in terms of allocating digital spend?
Speaker 3:Well so last time I checked, you wanted to spend money where people work, correct. So I think the latest statistic was 99% of people look online before they purchase a car. So where do you think you should spend 99% of your budget?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean it's you know. I know we've got friends at the newspaper and the television station and the radio station, but there's a reason that every one of those companies is now a digital advertiser and so really there's no reason not to put money into digital instead of.
Speaker 3:you know, you may have a pocket mail campaign that goes out every once in a while, but for most dealers, the smart spend is to put it all digitally, because you're going to have, when all the dust settles, a lower cost per vehicle retail, and that's what it's all about. So you're going to be able to get the maximum in our life.
Speaker 2:Yep, I totally agree. And I mean think about, you know, ott as it relates to TV, right, I mean, even the television has become digital, even the television is digital Everything is digital. Yeah, yeah. So, regarding evaluating performance, are there metrics that you would recommend or that dealers should be using to assess whether or not their digital advertising is effective? So the favorite metrics.
Speaker 3:So what I want to talk about today, so what I want to do today is I want to talk about exactly what do you look at in order to know if it's working or not working. But I'll tell you, you know, I'll give you a quick tip. You know, when you spend money digitally, it's going to come through three different places. The first thing that's going to happen is your phone's going to ring. Second thing is going to happen is you're going to get an internet lead. And the third thing is going to happen is someone's going to walk onto your line.
Speaker 3:And so if you're not tracking the number of phone calls, well, you've got a hole right there, and you know. I mean it's a shameless plug, but I'm going to do it anyways, even though I've got friends at other companies, right. But you know, really the least expensive solution to do that in today's world is total CX, right? So it's an inexpensive solution that allows you to track every single phone call. There's just no excuse not to, because you can now track every single phone call, have a summarized and what you really care about is the number. So if you're spending money in digital, how do you know if it's working or not working. Look at the number of phone calls, look at the number of leads and look at the number of cars you're selling and if your CRM doesn't attribute it correctly because they're a bunch of drive buys, that's a sales manager problem, that's not an advertising problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that, and you're right, I've got some stuff that I'm going to set you up with to kind of dig in on some of these areas, and so I'm going to just share a few things. I think that'll help with the rest of setting of the stage for the audience. If you think about everything that you're trying to do with Digad, the additional points are you're going to think about managing your costs, right. That seems like a no-brainer, but you also have to know how to identify and solve problems, and we have left the dealer out of that for a long time, because most vendors will come in and we'll do it all for you. And then you get into the broken trust factor of like, yeah, you were supposed to do it all for us and you kind of didn't. And then there's the tracking and management and a lot of confusion and some people happy, some people not so happy with the big change into GA4.
Speaker 2:That's important, right, that can be, so it is right now very disruptive for dealers, but strategic improvement is also a huge portion of concern for dealers around. Can you do some things differently, right? Can you actually take some of the things that you have maybe thought didn't work before. Can you apply strategies from one channel to another? There's not enough time given to that, in my opinion, in the dealership world, and so the first bigger, broader area is really on. I want to start with on the engagement within analytics, because I know that you guys are really big on making sure that components are connected within what's happening in the advertising world digitally and what's happening in the measurement and capture area. So first point is the engagement time. That's really important. So how would you make sure to express to dealers that they should be regularly monitoring the average engagement time in analytics, and why is that important?
Speaker 3:So I think a good way to sum it up is the reason we care about engagement time is that Google went away from just an automatic tracking the time on site and they're looking at the amount of time that you're engaged. So is the mouse moving, are you scrolling, are you actively participating in the website? And so obviously engagement time is a smaller metric than time on site. But what it does is it eliminates the person that clicks on something and never moves their screen again. And so what you find for engagement time is, if there was a simple rule, if you've got engagement time in less than five seconds and I would tell you in reality probably less than 10, you're wasting money on that ad source. And so pretty strong statement. I get that. But let me give you a couple of examples.
Speaker 3:We go look at a display campaign. We go look at the engagement time in GA4. It's got two seconds or five seconds average engagement time. Let me ask you a question If you pull your cell phone up 1,000, 2,000, and then you put it down, are you really engaged in something 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000. I'm pretty sure that's junk. I mean, you know now I could be wrong, wouldn't be the first time, but less than five seconds. You're wasting money. Period Doesn't matter who the provider is, you're wasting money. So display is the first culprit of that. The second culprit is going to be that quote unquote email blast using data. They're going to buy this data from whatever data provider and they're going to have all this incredible engagement. Well then you go to look at that engagement time on the website and guess what? Your average is Six to seven seconds. If your average engagement is six to seven seconds and those 5,000 users that went onto your website didn't make a single phone call, didn't submit a single lead, do you think that was real? I'm going to say probably not right, and so?
Speaker 3:And then the third one, of course, being social traffic. All social traffic has not created equal. You know, I can go. I can go align myself with the data provider right now, and without any education, you can hit about four buttons and you can run social ads for a dealer. The problem is that the people you're serving to are the wrong people that are not in market. When you look at social ads that are working, they're very rarely less than 15 seconds. Frequently they're 20 to 40 seconds. As a matter of fact, we just had a dealer yesterday. I was looking for 54 seconds average engagement time on a social ad. That's what excellent looks like, by the way.
Speaker 3:Like that's the top shelf, that's as good as it gets. But, mysteriously, guess what we also found with that engaged traffic on social. We changed our conversions over and we look to see it and these people were picking the phone up and making phone calls. Because it turns out when real people are looking for real automobiles, they actually have real questions, right. So maybe they contact the dealership and they're more likely in today's world to pick up the phone and make a phone call than they are to submit an internet lead. So, yeah, so under five seconds engagement time. That's the whole key. As a matter of fact, if I was to sum up engagement time in one sentence, it would be look for traffic sources that are less than five seconds and ultimately, let's say even less than 10, and investigate, dive deep, start asking questions, because someone's going to start back peddling when you start asking questions.
Speaker 3:And then if you've got that traffic and you don't have any call conversions and you don't have any lead conversions, I'm going to tell you you can reallocate that spend and you can get better ROI, because that spend is not even working.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's all I mean, just exploring just that metric alone around engagement you just unpacked a whole bunch of stuff is really valuable and I don't. I think dealers need to always, always consider that sometimes, just because somebody came up with not that the word engagement was new, that it being applied to a, this is a metric. Engagement is a metric you need to pay attention to. You also have to make sure that, to your point, that you actually think a little bit below the surface, right, because the big providers are going to want to use a metric like engagement as a tool to coerce, manipulate, you know, somehow make you believe or think a particular way, setting up value. And, to your point, if I saw your thing for a second or two seconds or even five seconds, the likelihood that I was really engaged with it is not very strong.
Speaker 3:Well, we're talking about a vehicle purchase, right, Sean? So if we're talking about a vehicle purchase, right, we all know it's a second biggest purchase people are really going to make and it costs more to make that purchase today than it did 12 months ago. There's that If that vehicle that I'm looking at today is is a 40% or 50% higher payment than it was a year ago, I'm going to vet that vehicle a lot closer. Well, by the time you click on the ad or look at the picture and scroll through two pictures, you're already at five seconds and a person that's scrolling right, Like everybody, can think tender for this, right. You know how to scroll and swipe left or swipe right, right. So to that, to that, to that person it's. They see that vehicle in half a second. They like it or they don't like it.
Speaker 3:Well, on your social ad, when they click on it, they either swiping on that vehicle or they're swiping away from it. They're either engaged in looking for more or they're not. And how many times does somebody click on a vehicle or click on something in their social feed by accident? And when they click on it by accident, what's the first thing you do? You try to close it real quick because you don't want to be retargeted, you don't want to see a bunch of ads from that whatever junk you just accidentally clicked on because they mis-targeted you. Well, that's what happens in the automotive world too. Real consumers sit there and they think of the questions they think about, they plan the questions before they call the dealer.
Speaker 3:So just always look at engagement time. It's a one thing in Google Analytics that you can pay attention to that will save you money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and all that you're sharing speaks to the ability for the dealership to be able to do some. That's right. That's all we're trying to do right.
Speaker 3:We're trying to look at quality traffic. If you see, I mean, and there's things where you look at engagement time Like, if you see engagement time a three to four minutes average your search ads are built wrong Because you're landing everybody on the homepage and it takes them three or four minutes to get to the right vehicle. Now, what do we think is the optimal engagement time? Optimal is going to be around one minute, because, if you think about it, one minute looking at anything is a lifetime. Number one. And if you don't believe me, I'll show you something. It's a hilarious thing I used to do when I was training. It goes like this Imagine that you pick the phone up and you're looking and just count this down with well, just sit there for one second One 1,000, two 1,000, three 1,000, four 1,000, five 1,000, six 1,000, seven 1,000, eight 1,000, nine 1,000, 10 1,000. That was 10 seconds. Can you imagine what a minute feels like A lifetime, a lifetime. So really, a minute is the right metric.
Speaker 3:I was looking at analytics for a dealer yesterday and they were really excited about the engagement time on their paid search. So I asked him. I said well, sir, I'm confused. Why do you think it's good that they're on your website for three minutes when they click on a paid search ad, he said, because they're really getting to know us and find the vehicle that they're looking for. So I said you do know that technology exists that will land them on that vehicle in the first click, because it shows him the right vehicle based upon his data profile and then it links him to the search results page for exactly what he's looking for.
Speaker 3:You know that Google tells us if you're not landing on the right page on the first click, you're doing the job wrong. There's a hundred studies from Google to say the exact same thing. So one minute time on site is optimal. You've got outliers that spend more. You've got outliers that spend less. But if you're a minute time on site on a paid search program, that means it's wonderful. If I'm two, three minutes, I'm landing too many people on the homepage. My ads aren't built to properly link people deep enough to where they're supposed to go.
Speaker 2:Interesting. So in a case like that, or maybe a different one with a dealer, do you have strategies that you would recommend to the dealer where they want to be able to kind of maybe move from one traffic source that's low engagement to higher areas like vehicle ads or something like that, maybe social as you mentioned a few minutes ago? Are there strategies that you try to help dealers understand or would recommend to them?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. The first thing is there's the standard way that an ad account is built. The standard way is I've got my brand term. Brand means the dealership name. I've got my regional terms brand dealership near me.
Speaker 3:So if I'm a Toyota dealer, toyota dealership near me, toyota dealership, toyota dealership in and Lone Tree, colorado, because that's where I'm located at, and so if most of my budget is going there, well, I'm building search terms around a generic ad. Why do you think someone's looking in a generic ad for their, the dealership? Do you think they're looking for a vehicle because I want to buy a Toyota Camry? Is it more likely that I'm looking for the Toyota dealership near me because I need an oil change, transmission flush service interval for my new vehicle? Right, 80%, 70% of those clicks are on the service side and guess what? They were coming to you anyways.
Speaker 3:So if you reallocated that budget and you were to move where you spent it in paid search, you would see a different result. And so when we go to reallocate that spend, I would say there's a few areas. Area number one is brand and regional terms. Just kidding, vehicle paid search, it is model paid search. And so if I'm looking at model paid search. It's not just what's called a broad match keyword, it is a deep linked year, make, model, trim, color with all dynamic advertising attached so that it matches the customer search query.
Speaker 3:So when they're looking for that black Toyota Camry XLE, it's going to show them the black Toyota Camry XLE. That's what you want. Second place is going to be social, because properly put together social ads are very powerful. Third is going to be a vehicle listing ads and performance max, because they're grouped together now and then from those you could layer on a small amount of display. I'll tell you upfront we're not a big fan of it. But for retargeting purposes only a small amount of money there done at cost makes sense and then after that could be a little bit of OTT. But the first three big areas are paid search, paid social, performance max, vehicle listing ads those are number one, number two and number three every single time. And paid search meaning not brand and regional but instead most of my budget going towards pieces of inventory, because people aren't looking for a dealership to buy, they're looking for a car to buy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great, that's great advice. Would you go so far as to give dealers an idea of, maybe, how much of their budget should be allocated to these sources that have low engagement time, or maybe the under the 10 second threshold?
Speaker 3:Well, so the percentage of budget that I put towards low engagement threshold, that'd be zero, because if it's not engaging, all you're doing is spending money that's not working. Right. So it's gone. Are the days where I can spend $100,000 on television and feel good about myself? Those days are gone, right? So somebody's telling you hey, it's the brand awareness, it's like no way.
Speaker 2:They just want to burn that through on brand related terms because they know that it's basically it's going to make them look good in reporting. So really, if I was to build an ad, budget, it would look a lot like this.
Speaker 3:First I'd probably put let's say I had a $20,000 ad spend. I'm going to put a good $10,000 of that towards the paid search platform. Now there are going to be companies that tell you should spend a lot more than that. Fantastic, go for it. However, most of that company is going to spend on brand and regional terms. Well, here's the tricky part. 85% of that budget should probably go to model terms Exact pieces of inventory that I put in the past. I put in the last year. So if I had a $10,000 search budget, $1,500 would go towards my brand and regional terms. I've got a dealer in the market where their dealer name is the city name and so in that situation you're forced to spend more money on it. It still doesn't surpass 30% and most of the time it's 25%, because what you find is the point of diminishing returns After you put enough of it to cover your basis. Everything you spend on top of that doesn't sell you any more cars. It just makes your reporting look good for a low cost per click.
Speaker 3:When you take that money and you spend it on vehicles, you're driving incremental business into the dealership, and so, really, that brings us to that second topic what is the percentage of your budget you're spending on brand and regional terms? Because if you're spending 50% of your search budget or 70%, well, if you're spending more than 30%, you're doing it wrong. Say that again To reallocate that spend and you can sell more cars, right?
Speaker 3:So if you're spending more than 30% of your budget on brand and regional terms, you're doing it wrong.
Speaker 3:You can take that budget, you can take that other, whatever that remaining percentage is, which is funny because in most dealers it's more like 80%. So let's say that I've got $10,000 and I take 85% of that budget and I go spend it on properly built model campaigns Properly built, meaning I'm a Toyota store. I've got 28 different models, according to Toyota. By the way, if I'm a Toyota store, that's all no big deal, because every hybrid and every electric is its own model line as far as the search results are concerned. So what you truly need is for that budget to be split amongst all of your model lines and then, once it's split amongst all of your model lines, we want to make sure that I've properly set that up, so the percentages go accordingly. So very little of my search budget should go towards brand and regional terms, because all I'm doing is competing for service and what you find is the customer's going to go to the nearest dealership first almost all the time, unless they've had a bad experience with you already.
Speaker 2:Is there a component to this where a dealer is kind of looking at the competition in their market to kind of justify where they might be on some of that? Is that much of a factor if they've got a lot of especially similar or same brand competition in market?
Speaker 3:So I'm going to use this California Toyota dealer and I've got a Honda dealer in the LA market as well. Well, two Toyota dealers and one Honda dealer in that market specifically, and I think they're an excellent example because LA highly, highly, highly competent, highly competitive market. In that highly competitive market, these three dealerships have a city name inside of their dealership name. So, because of that, what do you think every other Toyota and Honda dealer's doing? They're buying that dealership, that city name. Well, what we found, the data shows us that when you get a car, what we found shows us that when you get more than 30% of that spend on your brand and on your regional terms and that setup, you start to see diminishing returns in sales. Interestingly enough, now I can give you some theories behind why, right, but I'll do my best to give you my theories as to behind why. Because Google's not going to tell you.
Speaker 3:Google knows if you're a sales customer, you're a service customer, because they have all of your click history, unless you're sitting on an iPhone with your ads blocked, which is a whole separate scenario, or unless you're browsing in Chrome with everything turned off, because you can do that now, but the lion's share of people aren't doing things that way right. They're still trackable. Well, google knows if you've been looking at vehicles when you're searching. They know if you've not looked for any vehicles and you just popped in and you're looking for the Toyota dealer near me, right? Or the Chevy dealer near me or the Ford dealer near me. So let's say that I'm driving a Subaru. I've been driving it for a year and I haven't looked for any Subaru things and all of a sudden I pop up a Subaru search and I'm looking for the Subaru dealer.
Speaker 3:What do you think Google thinks? Do you think they think you're looking for a car? Do you think they're highly, highly, highly, highly? Of course I'm tongue tied. Confident, that's the word. We're looking for that. You're looking for a service, because they know the difference.
Speaker 3:Well, if your user profile in the back of Google shows that you've been looking for vehicles, you're more likely to see the dealership that's closest to you if they're only spending a small amount of money in their budget on brand and regional terms. If you're spending a fortune, they're going to spend a fortune of your money. I promise you, google will let you spend however much you want to spend. They're not going to say no. Right, like Google is not kicking you out of bed in the morning. They're going to take every bit they can get Right, and so along those lines, that's a horrible analogy. I probably shouldn't say that out loud Like that was. That was borderline terrible, but no, seriously, I think what we believe the reasoning is is that because Google uses a whole data profile attached to every person that is in there, and if you're on Chrome, they have more data on you, right?
Speaker 3:And so the more data they have, the more they know whether you're in market or not in market, and that tells them whether they're going to show you an ad or not. Show you an ad.
Speaker 2:Totally makes sense and I think sometimes people take for granted how much Google knows with all of that consumer data profiling your point with Chrome. If you're a Chrome user and use a lot of extensions, bookmarks, I mean if you're a heavy user, they're going to know a lot about you and they're going to be able to. The whole idea of Google as a search and is is to serve you. The thing that's most relevant to your search right To get to where they want you to go, whether somebody paid to get you there or it happened organically. Yeah, so are there alternative advertising sources that that you think when people are going to start to do some of this budget reallocation? You and I have talked before on VLAs, now vehicle ads.
Speaker 2:I totally agree with your point. I think dealers really need to take to heart what you do with the model specific campaign setups. But are there some of those that you feel are more effective when you're going to move around some budget? Because I guarantee you dealers that are going to listen to this are going to realize, hmm, I don't want to be flushing 30% or more down the drain, right, I'm not, I'm not here just to make Google and other people you know, have a financially wonderful quarter. I need to have a financially wonderful quarter, so I think I might have enough money.
Speaker 2:Maybe, maybe.
Speaker 3:I think that's how much I checked that we're doing pretty OK. Yeah, right, yeah. I love this question and I'll tell you there's a great way to answer this. We have been running into Clara Voight a lot in dealerships lately. And as an advertiser. A lot of advertisers are scared to death of them. Why are the advertisers scared to death of Clara Voight? All Clara Voight wants to do is justify where your traffic came from and give you attribution. Why is that so scary?
Speaker 3:Maybe it's scary because your strategy is not efficient. Well, it's interesting. It's opened my eyes, you know, and we've been working closely with the team over there because ultimately, we just want to get better. Right, we understand that we don't know everything and we understand that the more data that we can take in, the better of a job we can do making decisions, and so when I looked at them in my first account, I'm going to tell you I, like every other vendor, was pretty much worried, especially paid search vendors, because the paid side of digital doesn't pencil real well on that platform compared to, like, your third parties. But here's what you start to notice. You start to notice that an effective dealership has a few things in common. They've got a couple third party listing services in common. So let's say that I cut some of that budget out and I've only got one third party involved. No problem, out of second Easy place, to put it, you should probably be running too.
Speaker 3:And it's funny what that looks like. It will frequently look like car gurus and auto trader, or car gurus and carscom, or auto trader and carscom. And what's interesting is that no matter where you go in the country, you'll see different, different sets of that being effective. You'll go into one part of the country and one dealership tells you carscom is killing it. And 10 minutes next door, 10 minutes to the south of that dealership, guess what? Carscom is the worst things in the world and auto traders killing it.
Speaker 3:And so how do you do it? You just measure. You measure the phone calls, you measure the leads and you take a look at it so as a paid platform, right, because our technology runs paid ads for dealership. That's what it does. It really to me feels like how do you get everything to work together so that, holistically, we're doing a better job? And really I'm looking at everything on a cost per leak, cost per sale basis. And if we're not looking at a cost per leak, cost per sale basis, what are we really doing, right? Is it truly a merit based world where we're making decisions based upon the efficacy of the program, or do I have my favorites and do I put on my rose colored glasses and look the other way when I look at reporting, because I really like that rep right.
Speaker 3:Which you know. Not a car dealer has ever said that before right. Right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's a Pandora's box. We could do a whole episode on that through the years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I get hate mail and bombs sent to my house. If I did something like that, your question about like, what are we doing?
Speaker 2:So that kind of sets up. The next thing I'd want to ask you on this particular topic how frequently would you recommend for a dealer that they should be reviewing whether they make adjustments or not? But how frequently do you think dealers should be reviewing and potentially adjusting around budget allocation, Just to make sure that you know.
Speaker 3:This is a great question, yeah, so I'll tell you what I what. Here's the real answer, but I'll tell you the best way to get there. You should really only make changes once a month. Big changes like budget changes, things like that. Small changes in the back end of AdWords. You can make those all the time. Right, like we are constantly adjusting. Technically, our software is making adjustments every day. But when it comes to big items like I'm really wanting to make a decision about this paid search program or this whatever, and I want to move so much from search to social If you're doing that more than once a month, what you're actually doing is you're ruining the AI's ability to properly manage campaigns.
Speaker 3:And so if I look in the back end of Meta and I look in the back end of Google because whether we all like it or not, those are the two that work the best and have the actual, real ROI Both of those systems have an AI platform that lives in the back end. That thing is constantly dissecting data and it's working to get you a better result. So when you make a gigantic wholesale change to your Ad account, either by adding a lot of budget or by doing anything to it more than once a month, you're making it much more difficult. And so, for example, let's say it's two weeks before, it's a week and a half before the end of the month and a new sale comes out and I want to throw $10,000 towards it, two things are going to happen. Number one Google is going to spend your money. And number two your cost per click is going to go up substantially because Google is going to spend your money, and so you have to have a really good reason to make a change more often than that.
Speaker 3:And so we had a dealer in Texas, and every five to six days they wanted to change it, and we finally told them no. We said hey, we don't want to do this anymore. You are breaking the entire process. You will never be successful if you do this, and I'll tell you the truth. We got fired over it because I told them. The thing that didn't want to hear, which was doing this, is killing your business, and I would rather tell you the truth and tell you that this is a terrible decision.
Speaker 3:So how should you go about it? In my opinion, you should look at it a couple times a month. I feel like that for most dealerships. That's the best version of checking it out. You may look at a weekly inspection, but even if your vendor offers a weekly inspection, don't make them change it every week. You're making their job more difficult. You're actually making it harder for them to succeed when you're trying to move all this money back and forth all of the time and you're making a weekly change.
Speaker 3:Once a month is the best case scenario and in reality, if you can let something run for a couple of months, you know still make minor adjustments, right, you're going to make some bid level adjustments based upon time of day, other things like that. You may move a little bit of money from one ad group to another, but wholesale, gigantic changes like $5,000 plus $5,000 minus two, or from any one of those things starting a new audience, something like that 30, 60 days, because the longer that it runs, the better the data gets. What's interesting is, if I look at my highest performing stores and these are stores that sell 500, 1,000, 1,500 cars a month and you know there's not a lot of stores that sell 1,500 cars a month anymore, right Well, when you look at that dealership, what's interesting is they've got something in common, guess how often they change their ads account Not very often, not very often at all. You're inspecting it all the time, you're looking for holes and you change it when you find something goes wrong. So one of those examples I might have a dealer that we.
Speaker 3:We noticed that all of a sudden, three more dealers are trying to buy their dealer name because what they've determined is they want to try to buy it out of their business. Now I've got to allocate 5% more budget to offset what these other dealers are buying. Well, the second that they start spending that money, they start realizing they get no ROI from it. So what do they do? 30 days later, 15, 20 days later, they turn that spend off because they're tired of losing money again. Right, so if you're the top performer it usually looks like most of the time you're number one. Then all of a sudden, number two or number three gets this wild hair up their ass and decides that they want to catch you. So they spend $100,000 on a bunch of bullshit advertising. They do get closer by losing $1,000 a copy, and then they realize they get their statement at the end of the month, the owner says, hey, I'm not taking a black eye like that yet again, you better fix that.
Speaker 3:And all of a sudden the ad budget gets back in, back in shape. So what do you do? Is the dealer that's guarding against that? You make a change. 30 days later you turn it back off because they're no longer trying to take it, they're no trying, no longer trying to commit. So I think long drawn out explanation, I guess, is what that was, but it's something I get excited about. So try not to change it more than once a month. And if you are, measure it for the entire month. And if you are measure it for the entire month, measure, cut with a scalpel, not with a machete.
Speaker 3:Right, move it around carefully, not arbitrarily use data to make that decision and then measure it for another 30 to 60 days. Track it week after week after week, just in case a dealer in your area does something stupid, right, like I was at a store called Tynan's in Colorado, in Aurora, and you know we were generally number one, 10 out of 12 months of every year. We used to joke that we would give them April and we would give them September, because March and August were so good that our people were tired. And what would happen is sometime every summer between May and June, someone would try hard to take us out of first place, and we could see it, because they'd start spending all this money digitally. We'd have to make some adjustments and then 30 days later you could tell they were tired of losing money. Maybe two months later we could go back to normal. So I'd say that's kind of what that really looks like and that's a good. That's a scientific method of how and why to do it and it's gonna work for anybody.
Speaker 2:So a great explanation and for me it just feels like if I don't mention this or ask you this, then I'm missing a great opportunity. So you know, you guys dealer alchemists, you guys run a business and all businesses just like yours. You're constantly like trying to find the most interested target customer, a car dealer and hey, take a demo, talk to our people. We'd really love to just tell you how we do it and why we do it the way we do it, and we think we'll be convincing and all those things. But what you just shared, I have to ask because I think I already know the answer to the question, but there could be a dealer that listens to what you just explained and they say I wish I knew all of those intricacies.
Speaker 2:I just don't know this in that level of detail and I have questions. I need to learn a little bit more. Do you guys welcome that phone call from a dealer that's like I don't want to demo first, I just you guys are smart and how do I get more educated and start with me there and then, yeah, maybe I end up doing business with you. But is that a phone call that your team would like to get from dealers, because I'm thinking that your explanations are one where, if I'm a dealer and I don't know that I'm gonna be like, well, where can I go and learn that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, first I would say, please, we would welcome the phone call every single time, right like? Our opinion is that you grow business by doing the right thing repeatedly, over and over again. So we may have that conversation today, and it's not gonna amount to anything, because they're gonna try to work with their current vendor to make some adjustments. Maybe they've known that vendor for a decade. It's totally fine, make that phone call, we're happy to go through and look at it with you. We'll give you a set of questions and then, at the end of those questions, you can either hold your current vendor accountable or, if you think that it merits making a change, we would love for you to make that change in our direction. So I think, if those questions exist, there's a set of things to do, and I'll tell you that the days of being an ostrich in digital advertising are over, because the honeymoon is over.
Speaker 3:Covid spending well, that ship has sailed and we have to sell cars again, which means we have to spend money again, which means we have to know where we're spending money again, which means we have to track all of these things that got us to where we are today, right, yeah.
Speaker 3:So, out of respect for any other vendor, I would say ask your current vendor, because they should welcome the conversation and most vendors should want to go through all of those pieces with you. And then, if they're backpedaling, well, that's probably not a good sign. If they don't want to show you inside of your own Google Analytics and Google AdWords account, that's also a problem, right? Like we're not going to give you access to your AdWords account because our technology, our proprietary way of building it, different than everybody else's, lives in the back. But you want to look at it. We'll log right in right now and show you in. Any vendor will, because there's nothing to hide, unless you're trying to hide something, right?
Speaker 3:So ask them, look at those questions and then, if they don't answer the questions, let us know, because we'll be more than happy to answer, to look at it, to dive deeply, because, quite frankly, there are some vendors that do a really good job out there and I can tell you that I've had plenty of conversations where I've looked at something with the dealer and what I've done is I've said, hey, I know you want to throw stones at the dealer, at the vendor, but I'm looking inside of all of this reporting and it looks pretty good. If I was going to throw stones at someone, I would probably be throwing stones at my desk and it's probably not going to make me popular for saying that. But you know, right is right, yeah.
Speaker 3:That's all there is to it.
Speaker 2:I just think that's a really important distinction.
Speaker 2:When you guys are saying call us and just talk to us If there's some amount of distrust that's boiling up. If your vendors are either not answering questions or they're not willing to be that transparent and they kind of give you the wizard of Vaz vibe, like they're behind the curtain but you can't see what I'm doing. You know that's a big pig problem and it's not a new one. It's existed for a long time and I just I think it's worthy of you guys kind of stepping up to the maybe it's not a bullhorn, but it's certainly more of a microphone or amplifying the message of sometimes you just need to talk to people that you know, know more than you and they have more experience with something, but they're also willing to answer questions for you without expecting that. Okay, well, you got to sign up for a year's worth of services or whatever, and that's sometimes the best place to start the relationship. I've said this for so many years it's always like a relationship has to exist before the transaction exists or takes place.
Speaker 3:That's exactly it 100%.
Speaker 2:You guys seem to be kind of an open book with that and I think you know, if I'm a dealer and I'm listening to you as you explain and unpack some of these things, and, yeah, there's a lot that you're sharing If I'm taking notes and I go and summarize all of this that I can start to take action on, there's also a lot of things that you'll that you share, that there would be dealers who would say I just don't know, that, I don't understand it quite at that level and that kind of depth.
Speaker 2:And the fact that you guys would say, well, give us a call and tell us what's going on, and maybe that, maybe that turns into an opportunity for us to say, well, if you want us to audit something for you as a compliment, we'll be more than happy to do that, just so that you know the truth. And that's one of the things that I really like about you guys is you want the dealers level of knowledge and their capability intellectually and understanding all this stuff. You want it to be elevated so that they understand value, right? Not the cost, like seeing the cost of everything and the value of nothing. You guys want to flip that and I think that's really really smart.
Speaker 3:I think that a vendor has an opinion and that opinion is the more I can have a dealer get educated on the things that we believe, the more they're going to be able to see the train coming before we get into a train wreck.
Speaker 3:And so the goal is to educate the dealer on what to look for because, even though right, we deploy an AI in the background that helps us inspect campaigns, and the reason we deploy this inspection process is because there are humans, and humans can make a mistake. But, unlike content, creative art, which is creative AI actually does make mistakes, in case you didn't know, but makes hilarious mistakes actually. But inspection AI doesn't make mistakes. It says, hey, this went down by 8%, this went down by 11%, and it gives you an exact list of what happened and why.
Speaker 3:Well when a dealer can tell you a little bit more about what's happening, it stops you from making poor decisions, right, like? I'll give you an example. I've got a friend of mine that came over to work with us and we're sitting in there 30 days in and he, all he tells me is how much that we suck. And so I'm just like, finally, I tell him, I say so, I'm really confused. You're number one in the market, right? He said oh yeah, absolutely every single time. And you told me that you're now higher ranked in the market than you were before. And you picked up in the region. Is that correct? He goes, yep, I said. But you're telling me how much I suck and that nothing is working. He goes, I sure am. And I said great, well, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna react on your changes and I'm gonna go change everything, because you're telling me that it's not working, and so I'm gonna make a bunch of changes. But I'll do you a favor. I'm gonna document all of these changes and I'm only gonna ask you for one thing in return when your business goes down after I make these changes, would you please be truthful with me next time? And so, of course, we went through and did everything we said we were gonna do. We changed everything based upon their feedback, because we thought that our system for how we do things individualized for that deal that wasn't performing. Well, what do you think happened? They sold 20% less cars Boom, like a light switch. So we turned it all back on.
Speaker 3:Next thing, you know, he goes. Hey, I just want you to know I'm not doing that anymore. I said what's that? He said. My MO has always been to tell every vendor how much they suck so that I can constantly get better pricing, because if you let them feel too good about themselves, they get lazy. Well, and we all know that, because I was taught that as a dealer. Right, I wasn't correct, but we were all taught that. The bottom line, though, is that that doesn't work with a good marketing partner, because the good marketing partner is gonna make changes. So, I just think, be truthful, and in our world, we wanna educate the dealer as much as we can, and I think good vendors do, because the more you know, the more you can tell us what's actually going on.
Speaker 3:Like I'm like hey, you know, your Camry business seems off. What's really happening over there? And then what we find out is that, even though there's 15 Camrys on the lot, 12 of them are pre-ordered and paid for and under contract, but they don't take delivery till next week and so his Camry business temporarily looks like it's lower, and it's only because they can't sell any more cars, right? So there's so much more than the data when the partnership exists, I guess, is the point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that example that you gave is also a really good example.
Speaker 2:It's kind of classic of dealers that they don't have any trust network to go and ask questions to so that they could avoid kind of the embarrassment of saying, of using a tool like you suck, you, suck, you suck in their mind, of keeping you in check, being able to always drive a lower price, always almost keeping you in negotiation phase as if you never did anything significant or achieved anything for them.
Speaker 2:And I understand that happens in every kind of business vertical out there, but in automotive certainly that's one. But when the dealer is doing that, or dealers if you're doing that, you're also disclosing to somebody that you don't know what they know. And then if that vendor really is trying to work on your behalf, it could be a little egg on the face or a little eating crow or a little bit embarrassing when in all reality, the education, the edification, the building up of yourself would make it so that not only would you know the difference and not have to say things like that, but you would also have so much better relationships with your vendor partners Like you would be like, oh man, it's great, because then you'd come in for that visit and the guy would be like, oh, my goodness, man don't change anything, like it's just humming like a bird.
Speaker 2:We just love this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3:So well, let me know. Or like Honda right Honda in California. We were looking at it. The overall search quantity in the market was down 21%. Our dealer was even, and so we looked at it. We're talking to the dealer and it's like I think you're killing it right now actually.
Speaker 3:And we were looking for month over month improvement. We were not happy because we're looking over month over month improvement. He said you realize that I'm up in the market, right. And then we thought about in a second, so we go pull the search quantity for Honda, we find out that it's down 21%. The next thing we're thinking to ourselves is oh, we've been beating ourselves up over nothing.
Speaker 3:Right so there are just so many other factors, and that's why the real back and forth, the real dialogue is really actually. It's really important, is what it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, a lot of great stuff on that area of just kind of what percentage of budget needs to be spent on brand and regional terms and unpacked a whole bunch of stuff in that area. Next area I wanna look at is looking at vehicle like model specific campaigns, which we've talked a little bit about that. But I wanna get in a little bit on analysis of a CPC or, for those that don't know the jargon, that's the cost per click, so the cost for every click you get. We don't have to necessarily go through what the current is, but I think there's an ideal range and then when we get outside of that, things start to change quite a bit. So what, from your guys' point of view right now, what's kind of the ideal range on a CPC for most model campaigns?
Speaker 3:So I think this is probably one of the most important questions about an entire paid search campaign. Right, so we get taught to look at cost per click as a whole. The problem is that you've got things that are more expensive and less expensive. So what if vendors done over time in order to make it look better than it really is? Well, you do things like you put a display campaign in there, because that display campaign costs 10 cents, and so now I took that $6 cost per click and I made it look like $2 cost per click and you're high five and you're oh, but that number's not real. So really, I think the most important thing to remember is that model cost per click should be between $1 and $3 almost across the board. There are small instances where it may be a little bit higher, but if it's built out incorrectly, it's gonna be $6 to $10. So we have this ebook that we're building. That kind of outlines everything from today, and in the visual example that we have in there we have a Volvo store that had a $6 click on one model and $11 click on the other, and these were pretty enormous spends that were happening outside of these two campaigns, because this is a deal that really does a great job, and so, as we're looking at it, what we realized is that that budget should be reallocated because there's no more than a $3.
Speaker 3:In a highly competitive market you rarely see a gober $3.50. It's just really rare. So what do you do? You've got to have the vendor break out every model campaign and they've got to show you what it looks like. And they've got to show you every single model campaign individually. Right, my favorite two were Shubby Silverado and Ford F-150, gmc Sierra matched in there because they're gonna be 10 to $12 and a lot of vendor setups. Well, I think nationwide last month I was less than $4 on all of them, including some extremely competitive markets Like Houston, miami I call those pretty competitive markets, yeah, la kind of a competitive market, and so really in the smaller areas it still falls into $1 to $3. So you've got to have a real good reason of why it's outside of the range of $1 to $3. And sure, that's only $3, but $3 times a thousand is how much money? That's $3,000. And I don't know about you, but if you want to throw three grand away, come my way, I'll be sure to take it off your hands.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no great great points. I think we talk about all the jargon in industries. There's jargon to the car business in and of itself, but there's also a lot of jargon within digital advertising and cost per click being one of those. Cpcs been one of those acronyms where people don't realize that, well, there should be some standards, some ranges, but what type of campaign? So, in this case, like model specific campaigns and that example that you're talking about with the Volvo models, like how dealers don't often think as much as they should about the differences and why they exist, and then how would they evaluate how effective a campaign would be? They're just again leaning on the trust factor that somebody's doing it the right way for them, and so if you're a dealer, how do you?
Speaker 2:yeah, they're oftentimes underhanded with the knowledge or the ability to understand how they would assess effectiveness on a campaign just based on that one metric on CPC.
Speaker 3:So I think there's other things that you would look at right, like how, why does it cost more? So you can look in the back end of analytics or, I'm sorry, the back end of AdWords, and it'll tell you why it costs more. It'll tell you if more people are bidding on it. But what's interesting right is, when we look at the insights reporting in the back of AdWords, what we find is that usually the reason that the cost per click is too high is because it was built out wrong. The definition of built route wrong is I built a broad match keyword. I've got Chevy Silverado, new Chevy Silverado 2023, chevy Silverado, stuff like that in that keyword search and that's it. And then I've got about 1,000 negative keywords behind it. Well, that's the way that ad accounts used to get built, by the way, and if I still look at a lot of providers today, that's what the backend of their account looks like. It's like not very many keywords and a whole lot of negative. Because I only want to buy these specific keywords right here.
Speaker 3:Well, when you do that, you don't give Google very good visibility into what you have. Your landing page probably doesn't closely match and because of that, you get greeted with a higher, with a lower quality score and a higher cost per click. The number one culprit of high cost per click is a poorly built ad, and so instead, the proper way of doing that is we're building out a keyword list on every single vehicle, the second that it hits. So for that Chevy Silverado, I've got a keyword stack on every single Silverado that they have in stock, so that Silverado might have 1,000 keywords attached to it. Guess what my keyword list is? A third half, probably. No, it's probably more like 10 to 20% of everybody else's, because we don't need it to be so restrictive, because Google knows what we're selling. It can see it from the keywords.
Speaker 3:Your keywords are your Bible. It's like your magnifying glass that looks inside of what you're selling to Google so that it can understand what you're selling, and then the landing page and the content of that ad generate the cost. Well, you hard code. I'm going to sell my Silverado for $6.99 a month. Congratulations, you just paid more for that ad. As dealers, we love to see you save $9,642 on the Silverado today.
Speaker 3:Well, guess what? That ad doesn't work as much as you think it does. We believe it does, because we grew up in the car business in the days of offer headline deadline, because that's how you build ads for the entire career of the car business. In today's world, that methodology doesn't actually work. In today's world, it's more important for Google to modify the search content so that it matches what the customer typed into paid search. And when you do that, you get a higher quality score and you almost always end up in the first position. Well, you can run that $10,000 off ad in the second position. You can run the ad according to the way Google wants it in the first position. That second position ad costs $12, $13 for the click. That first position ad costs $2 and it garners 70% of the clicks.
Speaker 3:And by the time they get on that page. If they can't see that exact discount on that exact vehicle immediately, with the selection of vehicles that match that content, then they think you're a liar, because they think we're liars anyways, don't they?
Speaker 2:Yeah, usually.
Speaker 3:So yeah, so let's be smart about it. Is the point what we think works is different than what actually works once you start really looking at data is, I guess, the point. So those are causes of higher cost per clicks. I guess I yet again another tangent. I feel like the tangent came today because I feel like I want to expand on whatever it is that you ask.
Speaker 2:Well, it's all good. And when you're kind of going by, segment by segment again for those that just tuned in right now, you jumped into the middle of the episode or towards the end. Maybe middle-ish, middle-end Model campaigns are a big deal. They always have been. I mean, from hey we just put every single new vehicle into the same ginormous new vehicle campaign, which is like. I don't think so. You might want to get more specific on. Camry gets to be its own campaign and variations of but this is just another intricate layer, but really important. So kind of unpacking the CPC analysis all the way through. How effective can these campaigns be and the right questions to be asking dealers.
Speaker 2:Last couple of things in this particular area that I wanted to ask you about is around performance and tracking. Like we talked about this a little bit around that second segment. But is there a frequency here on monitoring the CPC? Is it similar to you know what? Take a look at it once or twice a month, or is it? I think with you guys probably it's. If that thing gets wildly out of whack, you know it almost instantaneously. But on the dealer side, is that something that they should spend a whole lot of time with, or is it like we need to make sure that we pick the right people and then know that? Well, that's being monitored on our behalf.
Speaker 3:So there's two ways that can work. Someone needs to monitor it all the time, and so let's say that I've got a marketing director in my group and my marketing director is responsible for 20, 30 stores. You want them to monitor that on a regular basis. Without technology, I'm going to tell you, no matter how they can walk on water for a living and they still can't do that, because it's impossible. Yeah, like, the only way we're able to do it is we employ an AI in the background, right, like we don't. We deploy a software that learns and understands what it's looking at, and so when that cost per click goes up or goes down, it flags, it immediately starts to research and look at why, and then, if the whys are acceptable reasons, it knows not to push it any further.
Speaker 3:So the true answer is you have to. You really, the vendor should be inspecting it every day and should be flagged if something is wrong. Now, when something comes wrong, it's like somebody comes and spends a bunch of money in your area or somebody removes all your ads from your area, which also happens or it could be Nissan good old tier two advertising, drops in a bunch of advertising on that model campaign, and now you've got to beat out your tier two to be in the first position. Right Like? These are things that happen and they're real. Right. Why does Nissan buy that tier two campaign? Because they have to. So many dealers don't advertise this way. If every dealer advertised this way, tier two wouldn't need to buy that campaign.
Speaker 3:They buy it because they don't have a choice, right? So someone needs to monitor it every day. The only way you can really do that is with technology. So the real question is to your vendor how do you monitor my cost per click in order to make sure that I don't, that I don't overspend it? And then, with that, how often do you look at it? How do you look at it? Right, because there are companies that do it by hand and once a week they look at everything, and I'll tell you that company that's looking at it once a week is better than 50 to 70 percent of everybody else. Is it ideal? No, but it's better than a lot of the alternatives.
Speaker 3:So, the right answer is monitor it every day, and if you've got someone internally know that it is not a fair ask for them to be able to look at it and inspect it every day. It requires technology is what it requires.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's a great piece of insight for sure. Well, I want to pull you into the next area, and this would be more of the question if dealers should be asking are they advertising all of their models? Because this has become a thing that's been a thing for many, many years where people are like well, I'm not going to advertise all my models, I'm just going to advertise F-150s and Mustangs because that's what flies off the lot. But is that a smart strategy? Like I guess my first thing would be like in terms of advertising coverage, is it smart to have ads running on every single model?
Speaker 2:if so why?
Speaker 3:I thought it was like Field of Dreams if you build it, they will come. Isn't that how that works?
Speaker 4:No, I don't think that's how it works. We all wish, we all wish.
Speaker 3:So it's interesting you say this because the right answer is this is a digital world. In a digital world, you know that the data profile exists for every consumer that's in your market right now for what they're looking for. So every household, right, my household here in Lone Tree, colorado, has five people in it normally six right now, because my daughter's home from college and so what happens is there are six different profiles actively running right now. Well, as it is right now. Right, I just bought some new pants and I'm about to buy a new pair of shoes, and because of that, my profile is very clear and everything I look at everywhere I go online, I see ads for Pants manufacturers, different types of shoes. I mean, like that's what I'm actually looking for.
Speaker 3:Well, the same thing applies to whether you're looking for sporting goods, whether you're watching sports, whether you're looking for a car, a truck, electronics, a TV, no matter what that is, every single individual has a data profile. With that data profile, you know the year, make, model, trim and color that they're looking for and price range, and so with that, a properly built model will put the right vehicle in front of them. So, if data will allow us to do that and I need to sell that car that I need to sell four of, and I'm only going to have four of it, but I need to sell the four of them. Do I need to hope that it sells itself or do I still need to put that in front of the people that want to buy it? I probably want to put that in front of the people that want to buy it. You would think right, and so along those lines.
Speaker 3:why do we, as dealers, only advertise four or six models? It's because, a long time ago, we built newspaper ads and television ads. And what did you do on television? You put an ad out there with your top payment or your top discount and your top three or four models, because that's how you ran the TV ad or the newspaper ad or the radio ad, and we were conditioned to do this a long time ago. Well, as dealers, you do know that you teach your vendors how to do their job, right? I mean, we all like to think that they teach us, but you teach them. And so what dealers taught vendors a long time ago is I only want you to advertise my top four models. Right, the core four is what I usually hear. What are your core four models you're advertising this month?
Speaker 3:Well, let's say that I'm back to that Toyota example. And, by the way, it doesn't matter which brand. Every brand has a whole lot of models. I just know this one because I just had this conversation and it's stuck in my head ever since Nissan's got like 20. Right, like, did you know? Nissan has like 20 models. It's ridiculous. Honda's got like 15. It's crazy.
Speaker 3:So let's say that I'm the Honda store and I'm selling four and I'm advertising four models. Well, do you think we still need to sell the HRV? I think we do. Do you think we still need to sell the Civic, or does it just automatically sell itself? I'm never going to have any in stock because they all sell themselves. It doesn't work like that Right, like I've got Honda stores that have zero cars in stock, they still advertise them all because they sell them all based upon what's in transit and everything that's on their website is in transit inventory. Well, the bottom line is technology allows you to advertise every single model. Your budget should be spent according to how many you sell. So if I'm a Chevy store and I sell a ton of Silverado and a ton of tracks and every Tahoe I can get my hands on, what do you think I'm spending money on Right Spending?
Speaker 3:money on those right there. But when I get to my Traverse which might not have as many eyeballs on it, but I've got 18 in stock do I need to sell that vehicle? Absolutely I do. I couldn't go spend five times as much money because I'm not going to sell them. There's only so many buyers in the market. But Chevy knows, and it gives you enough inventory as a general of thumb for the number of people that are in your market. Most of your manufacturers do. We're not selling those cars. It's our fault.
Speaker 3:Right like, I've got a favorite example. My favorite example right now is electric vehicles. Guess what you find. If you're not running an ad on a vehicle, what is the first thing you find in paid search? Are you, are you aware of what the first thing you find is? By any chance, when you look for a, you're making model of a vehicle. So let's say, I'm looking for a Hyundai Ionic 6 and no Hyundai dealer wants to run ads on it right now, because they're trying to fight the electric behemoth, because they don't like Whatever political reason and whatever I don't know, it doesn't really matter, but they're, they're, they're like actively trying not to sell it, right? Well, what you find is the manufacturer website and you find the car and driver website. Were those websites built to create leads for the dealership or were they built To give the customers much information and a car, a driver, to give you an opinion, and not always a good one?
Speaker 2:bingo.
Speaker 3:The problem with that is have you driven an Ionic 6? Because I'll tell you, the second you drive one, you're, you're very. First thing you're gonna think is Holy shit, this is, this is fun. Actually, it's shockingly good. Right, like I'm not, I don't drive a Hyundai personally, I drive a different vehicle, right. But the second you drive that car, no matter whether you're a fan or not, you get in it and it is great to drive. It's not like kind of okay, it's amazing to drive.
Speaker 3:Well, the problem is, if I'm putting people on a hunt on a manufacturer page or a car and driver page, because I'm not running any ads on those models that I don't feel like selling or that are starting to build up an inventory, what really is happening is buyers are becoming shoppers by going to the manufacturer page. That's what's really happening. So do you want that person that was interested, was looking for the year, make, model and trim near them so that they could look at the vehicle? Do you want them to show up at your dealership, on your website, where they can submit a lead or make a phone call in order to ask questions about a car that they're interested in, or do you want them to go to car and driver or motor trend or the manufacturer website and get a lot more information and understand that there's oh yeah, you've got to pay to charge that thing. Let's talk about that after you've already fallen in love with the vehicle.
Speaker 3:By the way, I I thought this selling cars was about the ether. I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 2:It is such a great point and it reminds me I'm so old in this game you are too, but Gosh it reminds me that's the difference. You just have to balance your bourbon and tobacco intake over the years and then no way to stop all of that. Maybe, but I haven't found that date yet.
Speaker 2:I used to tell people all the time when they would do something like what you're describing is. You're literally pushing somebody back up the funnel Right, so where they could actually be based on their intent and interest is all the way down the funnel to you and your dealership website is like last year, is like last stop cafe. Come in for a cup of coffee and a quick sandwich. Drive out with my new rig right.
Speaker 2:That's exactly that point and so if you're not there, you're not even there to receive that person that says, boom. I'm going to welcome to Sean Kieran Supercarlandcom. I'm gonna go to the Manufacturer's site, which essentially is what you just said. It takes somebody who is so close to buying decision Back up into shopper research mode. Pushing them back up makes no sense at all. But I love also that you share that Core, for that makes sense. Like, even if you're a manufacturer or your dealership is, and we don't have a core for, we've like a core 2 or core 5 or whatever.
Speaker 2:Whatever your number is the point that you made around. You need to spend time strategically having a conversation that advertises your in all of your models, but some of them. Oh, by the way, if you're not catching on to this, you, you dealers out there, you get to choose. Just make sure you're working with a good Provider. But you get to choose how much you're gonna allocate. Right, but at least have something, because even if you're the dealer that has just a small little amount of budget on that Hyundai I is it called the iconic?
Speaker 3:I on it.
Speaker 2:I on it. Okay, yep, so the Hyundai I Ionic dealer who's actually running some, some Spend against that at least they're gonna show up. And then what would it be? The worst thing? I think you have an expression that I love. Would you like, wouldn't she? Wouldn't you love to know that you find out that you're the dealer who gets a very low cost, not just a lead, but somebody who converts into a sale and you paid less for it than anybody else because nobody else wanted to do it it. You know it there. There are opportunities like that all over the place. I'm glad you shared that story because there's probably a Hyundai dealer or two or ten or a hundred that might need to know. Like, that's kind of important. And really, if you're not a Hyundai dealer, I'm sure you can adapt that story to a model of of yours.
Speaker 3:It's all EVs too. I mean most, most stores, right, like we're in the car business, right? Nobody outside of the car business is really gonna see this or listen to it, and so we all know that EVs are a struggle, right. But whether we like the struggle or dislike the struggle. The struggle is real.
Speaker 3:Yes and so in that world, if I've got a Mercedes eqs and eqe and I've got 25 of them on my lot, I better figure out how to get rid of those cars, because if not, the floor plan is gonna get expensive.
Speaker 3:Yeah then the same thing applies to almost every brand. Almost every brand has an EV out there, and a lot of times you run into a situation where the salespeople aren't as excited about it. They don't want to sell it and so they steal that. They're like an excitement leech for the customer, and then, on top of that, by the time the customer has to fight to get to the store. They've got to fight through all of these different ways of advertising because the only things that are really being spent on a lot of those vehicles Are the car and drivers of the world and the, the research websites where they do comparisons, and so the challenge is that if they're looking to comparison places and then they're looking at the manufacturer website, that's. That's not a converting customer.
Speaker 3:Whereas if they land on the dealer website, they're going to convert. And if I, if I, it's my, if it's my, you know my most expensive electric BMW or most expensive electric Mercedes.
Speaker 3:I've got to work harder to sell that car because the Tesla does cost less and of course you know, and, and, if, and if they're buying a Tesla, I'm sorry, but they hate you in the car business because Tesla is an anti-car business company, you know. So None of us should like that. None of us should like that company. It's great that they had some innovation, but they want to spell the end of the dealer world is what they want to do, right? So, unfortunately, their product cost less, and and so we got to do a better job of selling ours, right? That's how it goes.
Speaker 2:I, I hope I live only long enough to not have to be forced into buying A type of vehicle that I don't want to own. That's, I don't like that at all. People wanted, I mean, electric cars are cool, they're cool, but yeah, I could go with a whole nother episode. So I want to, I want to keep on track. There's a component to this around kind of the when you have to analyze Distribution, the business distribution, it's probably not just the analyzing the business distribution, but it's analyzing really the, the amount of Business or what's happening around that core for it. I'm wondering if you could share some things on, maybe just encouragement or questions. Dealers should be asking around kind of well, how do we then, how would we kind of decide on what amount of distribution, what percentage In comparison to those core models that you are always very focused on and then the others that do deserve attention?
Speaker 3:Here's a great way to look at that in just an easier way, right? So on our side it gets managed using technology, so you don't need to because it does it for you. But let's say that I love my agency, I love the people that I'm working with, and I'm gonna go fight that battle to get them to build out math ads on all of my models. Well, you would take your, your search budget and you would split it According to the percentage of each of those that you need to sell by the end of the month, and so what that might look like is I've got my kind of core, most important models and a lot of dealerships. Those core models are going to take 50 to 60 70 percent of their total sales, and so I might split that, that that budget, so that my top models took 50 to 60 or 70 percent of that budget, and that that 30% leftover might get split amongst those remaining 8, 10, 12, 15, 20 model lines that exist.
Speaker 3:And it isn't have to be a lot of money, right? Like some of these model campaigns, you're gonna spend $300 in and you're gonna sell a car more because you put money there. You're gonna spend $500 here, $500 there, but you're gonna sell one or two more of each one of these vehicles and by the time you turn around, you sold 20 more cars that month. Right, we live in a game of inches in the car business and we're trying to find that one extra sale. Well, if you want to find that one extra sale, sure you can go do it internally. Right, there was always the argument for tightening up your internal process. It's a lot easier to get a lead on the car that you happen to have in stock that somebody wants to buy right now, because then you can just literally take the phone call, set the appointment, pull it up and have it ready for a big old VIP experience. I don't think that car deals very difficult. Right so.
Speaker 3:So that's an easy way to go. Do that and that method. Any dealer that does that is gonna sell a few more cars, plain and simple. Why does it matter to me? Right, I just told all my competition how to fight against me, but I know for a fact that when we do that, we don't have to fight tier two, I Don't have to fight tier one. And when we get to a day in the car business where dealers control this part of the Advertising because everybody's following that kind of best practice, what you end up with is a lower overall cost per click because we're not fighting tier one and tier two, and that's worth it.
Speaker 2:That is worth it. That's actually a very astute point. I hope the audience Realizes you know kind of what's what you're unpacking there. That's a very, very big and I could say something about your competitors I'm not going to, but whether you should be that concerned of telling them what you do or how you do it anyway, because most of them it's a big problem. It always has been with all things digital, it, it, everything technically has gone so fast and it's gone faster than people's ability to understand it and keep up with it, and so that's become a big thing for dealers.
Speaker 2:I've always had a heart for dealers. I feel bad, like it's like you're just trying to operate your business and you're really good at it. Right, I'll never be as good at operating in a dealership is a dealer who's been doing it for 10 years or 20 or 50 or more years. But on the digital side, I know that very, very well, as do you, and you also know the retail side. But some of these things when they come up, I just immediately think about you know. Oh, if the dealer understood that Dynamic as it relates to what's happening at tier one and what's happening at tier two and all these things that we're unpacking. It's really good, but I wanted I I want to delve in a little bit to one last area and that is Kind of looking at your best conversions, your top conversions in analytics, and GA4 has been a huge topic.
Speaker 2:We will probably revisit on the podcast GA4 again, because it just continues to. You know, unravel ripple. There's just so much going on there. But when you consider this, all of these areas that dealers should be looking at on a regular basis, where they can see great improvement and come up with true Evaluation of their return on this investment in digital, analyzing these conversions and analytics is important. So how would you say there, or what are some of the things that dealers should be looking at to check for in analytics?
Speaker 3:So I like this one report that came out in GA4. So and as a matter of fact, I'll backtrack a bit we used to in Universal Analytics, we used to go into this top conversion paths report, and the top conversion paths report was pretty cool Because what it showed you is when they came in as social. How many times did they come back after that? So you got it was the best version that you had in Google Analytics of knowing what the actual visitor profile is, right? Well, the second GA4 happened. That went away.
Speaker 3:But there's another item called top conversions and it's really cool because what top conversions does is it looks at the users on your website as an individual user and what is the early touch point, what were the middle touch point and what were the late touch points before they left, and so what it tells you is like if I've got a junk piece of advertising, then I've got the person that touches on it once and never comes back. So let's say that I go look at an advertising source and I'm gonna go back to my initial three that I pointed out in the very beginning Display campaigns, because when they're proper, when they're improperly built, their total junk. The second is that quote-on-quote email blast that gave you all this wonderful two-minute time-on-site traffic but magically never sent you a lead. Hmm right.
Speaker 3:And then my third one is a terribly built social campaign where we just dropped them the back of a platform. It hits, send and expected the audience is to build themselves. Because they don't do that. Just in case you were curious. Well, what happens is that that user hits on it one time. They don't have any engagement time, so that engagement time in the very beginning is low. And there's a second piece. They don't come back a second or a third or a fourth time.
Speaker 3:But what do they do if they are engaged? What an engaged user does? They click on it on their cell phone. As they click on it on their cell phone, they, they, they are at work, so they're on it for 15, 20, 30 seconds. Oh, then work calls. They set their cell phone down and what happens at the end of the day? They click on the website again. They go when they refresh that website. When they go refresh that website, what does it become? It becomes a direct visit and Google analytics. Or they go to reset the website and they close the browser out. But they remembered your dealership name, so then they go search for the dealer name. You can tell I've got a Google in my house. Anybody that thinks those things aren't listening. Just look at what just happened, right, she's still talking to me, so.
Speaker 3:So what happens, though, is that is that that person comes back at the end of the day, and they become either a direct visit or an organic visit, and so quality traffic may start out as a cost per click visit, or a Social visit, or a display visit, or an email blast visit, or any one of those things, and in that top conversions report, you get to see that they came back how many times afterwards, and then you get to see what percentage of your late conversions Were responsible because of something that happened earlier, and so we have this report that we pop on the screen, and I'm not going to pop it on right now, but anybody that wants it on the I'll send it to them. What it shows you is how social traffic that looked like junk traffic in the beginning, because it was 15 second time on site and didn't have a lot of conversion you looked at the middle touch points. In the late touch point, it was the single largest source of late touch point traffic in the dealership. Well, why do I think this is so powerful? Because dealers nowadays look at social traffic Oftentimes and they cut it off because they don't see enough time on site. And then they wonder all of a sudden, how come I'm selling less cars?
Speaker 3:Well, a chunk of your organic and direct business actually came from that ad profile. So, top conversions in the back of Google Analytics and it's on the left hand side to go all the way to the bottom it's called advertising. You click on top conversions. From top conversions you change it to source medium and then it's going to show you Everything about all of your users on the website and which people control the most beginning, middle and late touch points. And If you've got somebody that's all early and has no late touch points, congratulations, you can fire them today. So you know that's an easy way to reallocate some money, save some money, whichever one you want to do, because that's what you're going to accomplish. And, by the way, you're not going to sell any less cars either.
Speaker 2:That's a double whopper with extra cheese and bacon right there. But that that is we've talked about. Maybe not you and I that, but we could because you just explained, latent Conversion is a thing and it has been forever, like since the dawn of paid search and all this. You know digital and so dealers or people that are Getting smarter because of this podcast. Mr Kiran just shared something that's extremely important and happened every single day, like the interaction with things that are happening and the fact that there's a Report like that in GA4. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:I didn't know that. I'm not as familiar. I tell everybody I get calls from people like you've been in this forever rains, why you're not like more up on GA4. I'm like Just because I, you know I need to have some kind of life and so I just you know, I know I know enough, but at most of it I'm learning from folks like you, kiran. It's like an Andrew, you guys. I'm glad you're staying on top of that, because dealers need to know things like that. Latent conversion is a really big, significant factor. So I want to move in this particular topic. I want to move to maybe some of the Changes that dealers might have to consider strategically on traffic sources, because you're certainly gonna identify traffic sources that don't show up in this top conversion type category. Are their Steps, things that dealers could do or things you would recommend to improve Traffic quality, and as also, is there a point of like, hey, once you've done that much, then maybe there's a dead end as well?
Speaker 3:Well, let me give you an example. Let's say you pay a particular vendor and that vendor charges. You want to pay per click basis. So that particular vendor you know not Google, not Facebook or Metta, whatever their name is today. They, they are X vendor and what they do is is you pay them for a number of of impressions on your vehicle. This is and and let's say that you've been with that vendor because they've been around the space for a long time and you've always wondered is that traffic real or is it not real? Well, this is how you know, because real traffic comes back period. Humans don't look at one thing and make a decision, not when they're gonna spend 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 65 thousand dollars. What was that average car vehicle purchase nowadays? I mean, it's like some god-awful $50,000 number.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a lot.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's so high I couldn't even believe it when I saw it. Well, based on that being the average new transaction price, you know what's not happening is an arbitrary. I'm gonna go click on it and buy it in the first. In the first time I clicked and phone called and went to the dealership. That's a lot less likely. You got to be doing a better job to make that happen. What really happened was months of research and budgeting and Determining every option and determining the price point before they call the dealer. That was that's what actually happens. So if you've got an advertiser and that advertiser Spends money on a cost-per-click basis and you look in this report and they're not generating Additional visits from that user, that means that user clicked on it one time for eight seconds. It never came back Sounds fake to me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you can be allocate to something else and sell more cars. Right, like, do I love third parties? No, I'm a car dealer, right? Like I grew up in the car business, I view them as a necessary evil. I have friends that work there and I love them now and I love them then, like that's never gonna change. But Our goal in the car business is to not have to use them. But really we're probably not ever gonna get there. And so if I'm gonna spend money, let's. Let's get my cost per vehicle retail in line. Or let's go put that money if my search, my social, my VLA and OTT, if they're saturated, let's go put it on a listing site. Let's give ourselves more opportunities to sell cars, because that's what it all about. Or I got a better idea for you. What if you were to take that money and you were to pay for training? I Mean, that's crazy right there, I don't know, insane.
Speaker 2:I.
Speaker 3:I probably shouldn't teach them. Actually, you should not do that. That's bad advice.
Speaker 2:Oh, I am going to take you to kind of the bottom of this category now and I've got before. I'm going to give you some free space to talk about my bonus area, but before we get there, on this particular area, we asked this. I asked you about this in one of the previous areas, so to this one. Is there a recommended frequency right around just making some of these decisions? So we're going to try to get our campaigns improved. We're looking at what's happening on the analytics side of things. So is there a frequency that you might recommend when the dealer needs to make adjustments on traffic sources, because you're going to be looking at conversion data and you want to optimize for best results in campaigns?
Speaker 2:A lot of dealers are going to say how often should I do that? I don't want to do it too early, I don't want to do it too soon because we have things that are just anomalies and we're going into. We're in that season now where costs go crazy because of all of the heavy spins happening within the other tiers as well. But my question here would be is there a frequency or just general recommendations around? Well, when should we make these adjustments?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so there definitely is right. So I talked earlier about once a month is the most frequent. You would really want to adjust that and really, as a dealer, we've got a monthly budget anyways, so you really that's how your budget works. Now the thing is is when you do those changes is pretty important. So what an ideal scenario would be is somewhere between like the 23rd and the 27th of the month.
Speaker 3:You would look at your analytics account, you'd meet with your vendor and at that time you would set up your changes that are going to occur on the first, and the reason you would want to do that is you want to make sure that on the first of the month, any changes get executed, because any time you make these big changes, google had and Meta both have to relearn, and so what dealers do is they make these changes on the fifth, the sixth, the seventh of the eighth, which means really, for that first week, you're spending more money and you're not as effective because the learning algorithms haven't kicked in yet.
Speaker 3:So do I want to let that happen, so that my ads can really hit effectiveness by the 15th of the month, or do I want them to be effective by, like, the fifth of the month. Which one is it right? So I'd say, be consciously aware of making changes in that last meeting of the month before the month closes and have them executed on the first of the month, because that way everything is working. You give your vendor the best chance to succeed, you give yourself the best chance to succeed. Right.
Speaker 3:Like let's give you the company that you choose to work with. Let's give everybody the best chance of success, and that's how we do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's another really smart thing that I don't think is a point of encouragement to dealers nearly as often as it needs to be, which is there are a lot of things within digital advertising that are cyclical, right, and if you decide, for whatever reason, screw this, we're going to make this big change. I want you to do this right now. If you are not aware of how those cycles work, the havoc, the disruption, really the downtrend and positive improvement for your campaigns is absolutely in jeopardy when you don't know that. So it's not that you shouldn't, it's like, but you should know when, and so those are really great things.
Speaker 2:Last thing this has been a long episode, but it's got so much great stuff in it. I want to give you just kind of. I'm going to give you this kind of last area that I think is one that you have a lot to offer and you can go as long as you want, but this bonus area is around the connection of a Google ads account to analytics and the importance of that, and there are a bunch of areas. So, for all of you dealers listening in, I'm just going to give Karen the kind of open canvas to make us a huge, awesome, valuable word salad here. But Google ads connecting to analytics can break down in a lot of areas, from the verification of getting a connected understanding how important it is for that to be connected, if it's not things that you might need to to know what it does.
Speaker 2:Around accountability and transparency that you need at your dealership, access and control. Are you asking for access and control of the right things? You mentioned it earlier when people I want access to the ad words account, where I wouldn't even know what I'm doing, but I want access to this we almost made it through without one F bomb is of course I'm going to bring it to it but, access and control, and then we're working on that.
Speaker 2:Then, yes, and then the optimization of strategy based on this. What this whole episode's about, which is basically understanding how to get complete every juice, every drop of juice, out of that return on investment for digital advertising. So, google ads connecting to analytics Take us home.
Speaker 3:So I would say that your highest quality vendors are generally not going to give you access to the ad words account, and the reason they're not going to give you access to it is they have a proprietary way that they build out the back of that ad words account. Their technology is connected in the back of it, their build is in the back of it and these legacy providers out there want that knowledge and they're guarded and protected with it because it's their livelihood. So I'll use us as an example. So our story is I was 22 years of retail automotive, my wife just quit her job as an architectural engineer, we just had baby number four, we just bought a second home in the mountains and I decided to quit my job.
Speaker 3:So, needless to say, I had some fuel on the fire to succeed and, of course, when I told my wife, I said hey, honey, by the way, I decided to leave my job. What she said was I know you'll make it, you know which you know. So which makes her a saint, by the way. But I and most people that do something like this, they leveraged everything they had to make it happen, whether way that they went the investor out or, like us, cash flowed, the thing themselves, which really meant I was broke for a very long time, but but that's a whole nother episode.
Speaker 3:Actually, they're protecting their proprietary information because it is their livelihood, and so, in the spirit of transparency, you need to be able to verify what's happening. I believe in the old attorney phrase trust but verify, you know. Or like my old friend used to say it's not that I don't trust you, I just don't want to have to you know, which is a whole, nother terrible way of saying that. But no, in all seriousness, you have to connect AdWords to analytics, because it's the only way to transparently see every penny that's being spent and validate that the markup that you perceive is there is actually there.
Speaker 3:I can't tell you how many times I have caught a display campaign in the back with a 200, 300 or 400 percent markup and the dealer had no idea. Or a performance max ad with a 200 or 400 percent markup, or a display ad on a multiple hundreds percent markup right A dealership paying a $2, $3, $4 cost per click for a display ad that costs 15 cents. Like these things happen, and if you signed up for that, it's okay. You just want to be able to validate it. Trust, but verify, and so we have to connect the AdWords account to the analytics account, because the very first thing that it does is it lets you verify your invoice to verify that it's correct.
Speaker 3:The reason this company exists is because, when I was dissecting invoices, I found three different companies trying to steal our money. The definition of steal our money is they built us $5,000 in the front of the month, they spent $4,500 and they never reconciled the invoice. And you do that for six months and what do you have? $3,000 and money sitting in the sitting in their account. Oh no, that's your money. We were just waiting to give it back to you. No, you weren't.
Speaker 3:I got these for you. That's not what you were doing.
Speaker 2:You were just waiting to catch us with it.
Speaker 3:That's right, so you know. So for us, for example, we do bill up front because, in reality, you kind of have to. In our world, we actually used to bill differently, but what happened is dealerships don't pay their bills on time as much as we wish they did, and we're constantly collecting you a payment. Well, from day number one that your ad starts. On day number 30, google sends us a bill, and you know what happens if we don't pay Google on time your ads get shut off period, like there is no wiggle room. You don't have one day, and so instead, vendors like us are forced to bill up front, because it allows us 30 extra days of chasing the dealers that are not paying, which is the real thing. That happens, right? Not every dealer does it. And to those dealers that pay on time, my God, I love you, right, and I promise your vendors, we all love you and we appreciate so much that you manage your business that way. Well, the problem is, it means you've got a reconciliation that happens at the end of the month and you're probably plus minus $100 to $200. That's what it really is going to amount to. In our world, we won't overspend because we just believe that the dealer is going to, you know, be very upset if you overspend. So I was just looking at an account today where one was $55, the other was $62, because you can't get to every penny you've spent. That's just. That's what it looks like when you're trying to manage it the right way.
Speaker 3:Well, when you connect AdWords to analytics, you can verify that. Number one, so you prevent any theft. Number two, your analytics account tied to your AdWords account means your AdWords account can perform better because you can let AdWords learn off of the conversions and analytics and when they're properly accounted for, with the right values on every conversion, the Ad account performs better. And there is nothing that the dealer can break from that account. They can't break it, they can't modify it, they can't screw it up. There's nothing they can do to cause that thing to go wrong. So what I think I've said out loud so far is I can't find a single reason, logically, why you would not want to have access to that and the dealer or the vendor wouldn't want to give you, as the dealer, access to that. I'm pretty sure that's what I just said.
Speaker 2:Isn't that what you think it hurts on? I think absolutely.
Speaker 3:I think they want to steal something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think extremely important for dealers to understand is some I don't you know, there's like burying the lead. A lot of dealers get really nervous logging into Google anything right, I don't want to log into Google ads. Like it's always kind of funny when people are like hey, we give me access to my AdWords account. Well now, of course, google ads. I still have that faux pa all the time. I'm an old school guy. But yeah, can I get access to my Google ads account? For what reason? And it's not immediately to be like oh see, you're even asking me that, but it's mine. It's like, did you set it up? Actually, it's not.
Speaker 3:Let's just be quite clear Did you set it up?
Speaker 3:It's not it's actually the vendor's account and if the vendor doesn't want to assign access. Now let's be technically true about something. Basically, the longer your AdWords account has been in existence, the better it is for your dealership. So in a perfect world you would have one ads account that transitioned from vendor to vendor to vendor to vendor. However, in the real world, you can go find every vendor's prior settings from that and any vendor that's worth their salt is not going to show it to anybody because they know that they're protecting that. It's their livelihood Right For our company, it's the single thing we have more value in our setups and AdWords than I do in any other single setup in the entire company. It literally shows how our technology interfaces with the back end of it. Of course, we're not going to give it away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's great points. I got to say so once again. Once again, karen, you've mixed up a batch of knowledge to help dealers navigate this Even arcane world of automotive digital marketing. To the audience Say this podcast loves feedback from you. Fellow Alchemist data enthusiasts you name it so give us a comment. If you are consuming this at YouTube, that's a great place to throw a comment. You can ask questions. You can also go to dealeralchemistcom and connect with us there and send questions and feedback and consume all the information about what's going on with dealer Alchemist. If you want to learn more about what was covered today, you can go there. Go to the YouTube channel, get connected and, before you know it, we'll be back soon with another episode of automotive.