By Brian Pasch

Have you noticed the increase in photos in your Twitter newsfeed?  Twitter is making a change to their platform to increase the number of photos that automatically open in the reader's newsfeed.

In the example on the right, I loaded a "goodie bag" photo with my tweet about speaking in Holland, When I looked at the tweet on my mobile phone, the photo was expanded, increasing the visual impact of the tweet.

This is a big change for marketing professionals. As Twitter evolves, expect more creative ways to use Twitter to reach local car buyers and to accelerate B2B marketing.

Note: The Twitter IPO will be coming to market this month and it will be interesting to see if it succumbs to market hype bolting the shares to the moon in the first day of trading.

Twitter Ad Formats

At the top of this post, a graphic is shown, which is the opening page to Twitter Ads.  Twitter gives you two choices on where your ads will display.  

I have been testing Promoted Tweets for the past few months and the results have been very encouraging. The targeting options that Twitter gives marketing professionals works very well for B2B strategies as well as B2B conquest strategies.  

For example, if I wanted to promote a webinar on Automotive CRM Sales Process, I could target Twitter users (which includes dealers) who follow DealerSocket, iMagicLab, VinSolutions, Eleads1, and DealerPeak as an example.  

I can also target users who use a certain hashtag in their tweets. For example, the #automotive or #automarketing hashtag is often used by automotive professionals.  If you start to think out of the box, the possibilities get very exciting.  Again, since you are charged on a per click basis, the traffic and engagement can be easily tracked. 

Using Promoted Tweets for B2C campaigns (consumers) takes a more creative approach and targeting is not so cookie cutter.  The good news is that I see Twitter ads as even more effective now that the reader can see a photo.

Photos Will Help Car Dealers

The addition of photos in the Twitter newsfeed will help dealers connect with consumers on Twitter.  Cars are a very visual experience and I can predict that dealers using Twitter ads creatively will see a jump when photos are added to their campaigns.

Twitter provides and advertising dashboard which shows click data at the campaign level, and also a summary of all campaign engagement which is show above.  The cost per engagement (CPE) for the B2B campaigns shown above, are less than a $1.00.  

With photos in the Twitter newsfeed, the ad impressions become more important, because without clicking on the tweet (costing you money) the photo can convey a branding message. This will be one of the additional benefits to dealers who use promoted tweets on Twitter.

Strategies to Reach Consumers

Keep in mind that Promoted Tweets represent another slice of consumer online "eyeballs", it not the holy grail.  My initial ad campaigns show great promise. Twitter does not have the reach or granularity of Google Adwords but it has other advantages.  

Since so few dealers are testing Promoted Tweets, first to market dealers will have a competitive edge to increase new visitors to their website.  Twitter visitors can be engaged with great content (landing page) and also added to the dealer's retargeting campaigns.  This example show why social media advertising and digital marketing campaigns need to coordinated. 

If you have any additional questions about Promoted Tweets for your dealership, ask them here on DrivingSales or send me an email, if it regards your local strategy: brian@pcgmailer.com.

Brian

Brian Pasch, CEO
PCG Consulting
732.672.2356
Google

By Brian Pasch

Have you noticed the increase in photos in your Twitter newsfeed?  Twitter is making a change to their platform to increase the number of photos that automatically open in the reader's newsfeed.

In the example on the right, I loaded a "goodie bag" photo with my tweet about speaking in Holland, When I looked at the tweet on my mobile phone, the photo was expanded, increasing the visual impact of the tweet.

This is a big change for marketing professionals. As Twitter evolves, expect more creative ways to use Twitter to reach local car buyers and to accelerate B2B marketing.

Note: The Twitter IPO will be coming to market this month and it will be interesting to see if it succumbs to market hype bolting the shares to the moon in the first day of trading.

Twitter Ad Formats

At the top of this post, a graphic is shown, which is the opening page to Twitter Ads.  Twitter gives you two choices on where your ads will display.  

I have been testing Promoted Tweets for the past few months and the results have been very encouraging. The targeting options that Twitter gives marketing professionals works very well for B2B strategies as well as B2B conquest strategies.  

For example, if I wanted to promote a webinar on Automotive CRM Sales Process, I could target Twitter users (which includes dealers) who follow DealerSocket, iMagicLab, VinSolutions, Eleads1, and DealerPeak as an example.  

I can also target users who use a certain hashtag in their tweets. For example, the #automotive or #automarketing hashtag is often used by automotive professionals.  If you start to think out of the box, the possibilities get very exciting.  Again, since you are charged on a per click basis, the traffic and engagement can be easily tracked. 

Using Promoted Tweets for B2C campaigns (consumers) takes a more creative approach and targeting is not so cookie cutter.  The good news is that I see Twitter ads as even more effective now that the reader can see a photo.

Photos Will Help Car Dealers

The addition of photos in the Twitter newsfeed will help dealers connect with consumers on Twitter.  Cars are a very visual experience and I can predict that dealers using Twitter ads creatively will see a jump when photos are added to their campaigns.

Twitter provides and advertising dashboard which shows click data at the campaign level, and also a summary of all campaign engagement which is show above.  The cost per engagement (CPE) for the B2B campaigns shown above, are less than a $1.00.  

With photos in the Twitter newsfeed, the ad impressions become more important, because without clicking on the tweet (costing you money) the photo can convey a branding message. This will be one of the additional benefits to dealers who use promoted tweets on Twitter.

Strategies to Reach Consumers

Keep in mind that Promoted Tweets represent another slice of consumer online "eyeballs", it not the holy grail.  My initial ad campaigns show great promise. Twitter does not have the reach or granularity of Google Adwords but it has other advantages.  

Since so few dealers are testing Promoted Tweets, first to market dealers will have a competitive edge to increase new visitors to their website.  Twitter visitors can be engaged with great content (landing page) and also added to the dealer's retargeting campaigns.  This example show why social media advertising and digital marketing campaigns need to coordinated. 

If you have any additional questions about Promoted Tweets for your dealership, ask them here on DrivingSales or send me an email, if it regards your local strategy: brian@pcgmailer.com.

Brian

Brian Pasch, CEO
PCG Consulting
732.672.2356
Google

By Brian Pasch

I wrote this week about calculating the Cost Per Shopper (CPS) and related to this metric is the Cost per VDP View (CVV). A number of inquiries came in asking how to setup Google Analytics to count Vehicle Detail Page (VDP) views.  

You can setup a "Data Segment" in Google Analytics to filter data by VDP views.  This is something that is helpful for immediate answers but you lose some detailed analysis that GA can provide marketing profesionals by using a goal.

I recommend that readers setup a Google Analytics "goal" that triggers when a consumer visits a Vehicle Detail Page (VDP).  The goal is the preferred method because to see which traffic sources are generating the most VDP Views.

If you setup goals for VDP Views, then you can also use Multi Channel Sales Funnels (MCSF) to see a better picture of the attribution associated with consumers looking at your inventory.  However, MCSF will be a topic for another day.

The Goals Area of Analytics

You will need to have "Admin" permissions to setup new goals.  Click on the Admin menu in Google Analytics and you should see a series of choices, like I have shown above.  Click on Goals, shown in the red box, and then click on "Create a Goal".

Google Analytics is constantly evolving and you will be pleased to see that Google has added a number of templates to track goals for a variety of website applications.  Many of these apply to car dealers so read them carefully.  For this case, we will pick the "View More" option. 

Then you need to create a name for the goal, which I set as "VDP Views".  You also need to indicate what will trigger the goal counter.  In this case, it will be a "Destination" page on the dealership website: the VDP.

The only tricky part of this goal setup is to know how your website provider defines Vehicle Detail Pages (VDP).  In the case shown above for Dealer.com websites, they differentiate VDPs for new, used, and certified vehicles.  Each vendor has their own pattern, for example VinSolutions is simply /vd/. 

Using the "regular expression" option, you can tell Google Analytics to trigger the goal counter if any of these 3 types of VDPs are viewed.  The "pipe" symbol, located over the backslash key (\) separates the patterns for the VDP's with NO spaces.

If you did this correctly, when you "Verify this goal", which is the blue hyperlink shown on this GA page, you should see some data shown.  If the data is zero, you typed something wrong.

Save The Goal and Wait

Once you save the goal, data will be collected and VDP views will be calcuated from this day forward.  Once you get a full month of data collected, you can start to use Google Analytics to better measure the sources that are generated VDP views and the multi-touch influences shown in MCSF.  You can start to calculate CVV and in the next article I can show you how to calculate CPS. 

I hope this helps to get a few readers into Google Analytics and on their way to better focus on the metrics that can improve their website performance and marketing investments.

Brian

Brian Pasch, CEO
PCG Consulting
732.672.2356
Google

By Brian Pasch

I wrote this week about calculating the Cost Per Shopper (CPS) and related to this metric is the Cost per VDP View (CVV). A number of inquiries came in asking how to setup Google Analytics to count Vehicle Detail Page (VDP) views.  

You can setup a "Data Segment" in Google Analytics to filter data by VDP views.  This is something that is helpful for immediate answers but you lose some detailed analysis that GA can provide marketing profesionals by using a goal.

I recommend that readers setup a Google Analytics "goal" that triggers when a consumer visits a Vehicle Detail Page (VDP).  The goal is the preferred method because to see which traffic sources are generating the most VDP Views.

If you setup goals for VDP Views, then you can also use Multi Channel Sales Funnels (MCSF) to see a better picture of the attribution associated with consumers looking at your inventory.  However, MCSF will be a topic for another day.

The Goals Area of Analytics

You will need to have "Admin" permissions to setup new goals.  Click on the Admin menu in Google Analytics and you should see a series of choices, like I have shown above.  Click on Goals, shown in the red box, and then click on "Create a Goal".

Google Analytics is constantly evolving and you will be pleased to see that Google has added a number of templates to track goals for a variety of website applications.  Many of these apply to car dealers so read them carefully.  For this case, we will pick the "View More" option. 

Then you need to create a name for the goal, which I set as "VDP Views".  You also need to indicate what will trigger the goal counter.  In this case, it will be a "Destination" page on the dealership website: the VDP.

The only tricky part of this goal setup is to know how your website provider defines Vehicle Detail Pages (VDP).  In the case shown above for Dealer.com websites, they differentiate VDPs for new, used, and certified vehicles.  Each vendor has their own pattern, for example VinSolutions is simply /vd/. 

Using the "regular expression" option, you can tell Google Analytics to trigger the goal counter if any of these 3 types of VDPs are viewed.  The "pipe" symbol, located over the backslash key (\) separates the patterns for the VDP's with NO spaces.

If you did this correctly, when you "Verify this goal", which is the blue hyperlink shown on this GA page, you should see some data shown.  If the data is zero, you typed something wrong.

Save The Goal and Wait

Once you save the goal, data will be collected and VDP views will be calcuated from this day forward.  Once you get a full month of data collected, you can start to use Google Analytics to better measure the sources that are generated VDP views and the multi-touch influences shown in MCSF.  You can start to calculate CVV and in the next article I can show you how to calculate CPS. 

I hope this helps to get a few readers into Google Analytics and on their way to better focus on the metrics that can improve their website performance and marketing investments.

Brian

Brian Pasch, CEO
PCG Consulting
732.672.2356
Google

​​

By Brian Pasch

Recent research from Cobalt has shown that as vehicles get more VDP views, they will sell faster.  Vehicle Detail Page (VDP) views are a proxy for the stealth shoppers that do not submit a lead, call the dealership, or chat with your agents before they show up at the dealership.  Increasing VDP views should be a goal of every Marketing Manager. 

Since this is one metric that is aligned with increasing the velocity of sales at the dealership, are marketing managers keeping an eye on VDP view trends on their website?  Marketing professionals should make VDP data a part of their monthly marketing review and analysis of website traffic.

VDP Views By Source

One of the charts marketing managers should create is the VDP views by source so that they can see which marketing investments are generating the most VDP views.  By color coding the graph, marketing managers can also quickly see monthly increases in traffic by source.  

For example, in the last 30 days there was a 100%+ increase in referral traffic that generated VDP views on this dealer's website, shown in purple.  For this dealer, it would be a great time to see which referral sources generated that big increase (832 to 1,852). 

Another metric to look at is the number of people who looked at a Vehicle Detail Page (VDP) by source, which I will call a "shopper". This will show marketing managers the number of shoppers their marketing dollars are generating each month, by source.

Is Your Dealership Inspecting VDP Trends?

If VDP views are one metric that is related to the velocity at which cars at your dealership will be selling, shouldn't marketing managers make sure they are looking at VDP trends each month?  This data is readily available in Google Analytics and other software solutions.  

If your dealership is using Google Analytics, you will need to determine the "pattern" that your website provider uses for VDP URLs.  For example, Dealer.com uses three patterns: /new/, /used/, and /certified/. Vinsolutions uses one pattern: /vd/.  Once you know these patterns, Google Analytics can be configured to count visitors who visit a VDP and how many VDPs are viewed per month.

I hope you agree that this is another good metric to inspect as part of your monthly review of marketing investments.  I will be writing additional article on what metrics Marketing Managers should include in their monthly review of website performance. 

If you have any questions, ask them below.  Please also take a minute to share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and in your social network if you found this helpful. 

Brian

Brian Pasch, CEO
PCG Consulting
732.672.2356
Google

​​

By Brian Pasch

Recent research from Cobalt has shown that as vehicles get more VDP views, they will sell faster.  Vehicle Detail Page (VDP) views are a proxy for the stealth shoppers that do not submit a lead, call the dealership, or chat with your agents before they show up at the dealership.  Increasing VDP views should be a goal of every Marketing Manager. 

Since this is one metric that is aligned with increasing the velocity of sales at the dealership, are marketing managers keeping an eye on VDP view trends on their website?  Marketing professionals should make VDP data a part of their monthly marketing review and analysis of website traffic.

VDP Views By Source

One of the charts marketing managers should create is the VDP views by source so that they can see which marketing investments are generating the most VDP views.  By color coding the graph, marketing managers can also quickly see monthly increases in traffic by source.  

For example, in the last 30 days there was a 100%+ increase in referral traffic that generated VDP views on this dealer's website, shown in purple.  For this dealer, it would be a great time to see which referral sources generated that big increase (832 to 1,852). 

Another metric to look at is the number of people who looked at a Vehicle Detail Page (VDP) by source, which I will call a "shopper". This will show marketing managers the number of shoppers their marketing dollars are generating each month, by source.

Is Your Dealership Inspecting VDP Trends?

If VDP views are one metric that is related to the velocity at which cars at your dealership will be selling, shouldn't marketing managers make sure they are looking at VDP trends each month?  This data is readily available in Google Analytics and other software solutions.  

If your dealership is using Google Analytics, you will need to determine the "pattern" that your website provider uses for VDP URLs.  For example, Dealer.com uses three patterns: /new/, /used/, and /certified/. Vinsolutions uses one pattern: /vd/.  Once you know these patterns, Google Analytics can be configured to count visitors who visit a VDP and how many VDPs are viewed per month.

I hope you agree that this is another good metric to inspect as part of your monthly review of marketing investments.  I will be writing additional article on what metrics Marketing Managers should include in their monthly review of website performance. 

If you have any questions, ask them below.  Please also take a minute to share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and in your social network if you found this helpful. 

Brian

Brian Pasch, CEO
PCG Consulting
732.672.2356
Google

By Brian Pasch

There have been many articles written about the importance of Google author tags, but did you know that Google makes it easy to see how your authored content is performing.   In Webmaster Tools, there is a section called "Labs" and in that section you can see your author stats.

The dashboard shows you how many articles it found with your author tag and how many times the post was seen in organic search and clicked.  It does not count how many times the page was viewed.  According to GWT, there are 946 articles indexed that have my author tag.

The first article in the list that had 1,600 impressions in Google search was the "Six Horsemen of Automotive Innovation" and 70 people clicked on the article in organic search. You can use this tool to track your content and to see if anyone has copied the content with your author tag embedded.

So, if you haven't inspected your authored content, here is a quick way to see how well your articles are performing.   You might be surprised to find some articles that you did not think attracted much interest, get alot of action!

Brian

Brian Pasch, CEO
PCG Consulting
732.672.2356
Google

By Brian Pasch

There have been many articles written about the importance of Google author tags, but did you know that Google makes it easy to see how your authored content is performing.   In Webmaster Tools, there is a section called "Labs" and in that section you can see your author stats.

The dashboard shows you how many articles it found with your author tag and how many times the post was seen in organic search and clicked.  It does not count how many times the page was viewed.  According to GWT, there are 946 articles indexed that have my author tag.

The first article in the list that had 1,600 impressions in Google search was the "Six Horsemen of Automotive Innovation" and 70 people clicked on the article in organic search. You can use this tool to track your content and to see if anyone has copied the content with your author tag embedded.

So, if you haven't inspected your authored content, here is a quick way to see how well your articles are performing.   You might be surprised to find some articles that you did not think attracted much interest, get alot of action!

Brian

Brian Pasch, CEO
PCG Consulting
732.672.2356
Google

By Brian Pasch

The fall automotive conferences showcased a number of technology solutions that were mobile friendly, adaptive, responsive, or packaged as a mobile app.  The marketplace is getting flooded with new products.  The product ROI claims are getting hard to substantiate, so I'm turning to the dealer community to help me with some important research.

If you are using mobile apps or mobile friendly software for inventory management, sales, CRM, F&I, or Service would you please take a minute to send me your feedback on what is working in your dealership and what failed to deliver the results that were promised.

You can send your experiences confidentially to me via email at brian@pcgmailer.com.  I will not be publishing your quotes or mention the vendor feedeback you provide online.  I am working on a new research paper and upcoming book and I need dealer feedback from the field.

Automotive Software Solutions

For example, there are a number of companies offering desking tools and CRM software that format nicely on an iPhone or an iPad.  

Has your dealership implemented a mobile CRM app with your sales team and customers?  How did the rollout go? What did you learn?  What could be improved? Are you using iPads in the service drive or in the F&I office?  

Is there a missing iPad or iPhone app that your dealership needs? What should the next killer "mobile" solution for car dealers be?  Your feedback is important. Please send your experiences confidentially to me via email at brian@pcgmailer.com.

Brian

Brian Pasch, CEO

PCG Consulting

732.672.2356

Google

By Brian Pasch

The fall automotive conferences showcased a number of technology solutions that were mobile friendly, adaptive, responsive, or packaged as a mobile app.  The marketplace is getting flooded with new products.  The product ROI claims are getting hard to substantiate, so I'm turning to the dealer community to help me with some important research.

If you are using mobile apps or mobile friendly software for inventory management, sales, CRM, F&I, or Service would you please take a minute to send me your feedback on what is working in your dealership and what failed to deliver the results that were promised.

You can send your experiences confidentially to me via email at brian@pcgmailer.com.  I will not be publishing your quotes or mention the vendor feedeback you provide online.  I am working on a new research paper and upcoming book and I need dealer feedback from the field.

Automotive Software Solutions

For example, there are a number of companies offering desking tools and CRM software that format nicely on an iPhone or an iPad.  

Has your dealership implemented a mobile CRM app with your sales team and customers?  How did the rollout go? What did you learn?  What could be improved? Are you using iPads in the service drive or in the F&I office?  

Is there a missing iPad or iPhone app that your dealership needs? What should the next killer "mobile" solution for car dealers be?  Your feedback is important. Please send your experiences confidentially to me via email at brian@pcgmailer.com.

Brian

Brian Pasch, CEO

PCG Consulting

732.672.2356

Google