You know what’s cool? Having a website that shows how awesome you are. Even cooler than that? Having a website that gets clicks & conversions. Ice Cube may have been All About the Benjamins, but if you’re hoping to do some business on your website, then you need to be All About the Conversions.

What is it?

So what is website conversion, exactly? Simply put, it’s the practice of making systematic updates to a website over time to increase the likelihood of site visitors converting. It’s a very general, broad term and doesn’t refer to any one particular metric. In fact, it’s a bit of a relative term, since every site converts a bit differently – especially across multiple industries. Are you a pizza delivery site? Then having a big, red “Order Now!” button is 100% essential. Are you a financial consulting firm? Form submissions are probably the way that your customers get ahold of you.

How do you do it?

Take into consideration a wide range of website metrics and factors – bounce rates, average time on page, CTRs for pages and individual buttons, scroll depth, and, of course, heat-mapping. Since these are all ways to measure how your visitors are interacting with your website, let’s start here. You can gauge how well a particular asset on your page is performing by looking at how your website audience is interacting with it. From there, you can judge how important it is compared to other elements of that same webpage. Let’s try it out.

Take a look at the webpage above, and notice the “Community” Quick-Link in the bottom right corner. Since buttons are clicked on by users, we could look at the total number of clicks on the above webpage and see how many are going to the “Community” button. If, for example, we found that it was receiving less than .1% of the clicks from site visitors over the last 30 days, that might tell us that we ought to test against another button. Since this webpage is a “quick-search” for new & used cars, we might try a button for “Vehicles Under $15K” to see if that helps drive user flow and boost conversion levels.

Ok, but how do you test it?

Fair question. Essentially, A/B testing is the cornerstone upon which all effective optimization changes are made. We can investigate the strength of a website asset in many ways (see previous section), but its impact can be far reaching. That is, you have to look at the big picture, and not just the metrics for that particular page. That’s where A/B testing comes in. In the example above, we swapped out one link for another. So then, in order to successfully find out which version of the site is better, we randomly show each visitor a variation of the site (with or without the change) in order to ascertain the effectiveness. Once enough data has accumulated, we have two datasets over the same period of time (to avoid seasonal shifts in data) with a singular change between them that can easily be compared for higher or lower conversion rates. If the new change has a higher conversion rate, the change should be made permanent.

What now?

In the coming weeks, I’ll talk about some specific elements of your website that can be optimized for conversion. Next month, I’ll focus on your homepage, and the most common elements therein – like headers, contact info, search bars, banners, and more. In the meantime, you’ll want to have access to your Google Analytics account so that you can, well, analyze metrics like CTR, bounce rates, time spent on site, unique visits, etc. Other tools, like the Chrome extension Page Analytics or the Crazy Egg script, can help you look at your site’s heatmap. Happy optimizing!

This post originally appeared on the DealerOn website, written by Mike Somerville.

The internet is a big place, and there are lots of digital advertising options. So how do you decide when it's best to direct your ad budget to PPC, or pay-per-click advertising? That's a good question, and I'm glad you asked. In this short blog post, I'm going to share a few things that will help you decide when you should invest in PPC and the various benefits of it. If you're considering venturing into PPC, but want to get the biggest bang for your buck, this post is for you. Hey, everyone likes to kick the tires, so don't feel bad. Let's talk about when PPC is the right move, based on your website needs.

You Need Quality Website Traffic

All website traffic is not created equal. What makes your website traffic high quality or low quality? To put it simply, intent. Someone casually browsing your site is quite a bit different from someone searching for a specific product, or filling out a form to request a service. We call those kind of site visitors quality traffic, and it doesn’t matter what kind of business you run, your website could always use more quality traffic. Driving people to your site via PPC ads is a great way to get quality traffic, because those potential customers are there for a very specific reason. They went online and searched for an answer, saw an ad that promised an answer, clicked it, and they’re now ready to be contacted. This is the very definition of quality website traffic, and having amazing PPC ads is one of the quickest paths there. You Need More Leads Again, website traffic ought to be categorized by intent. When you serve clickable, helpful PPC ads, your website visitors are much more likely to submit a form, click a “Contact Me” call-to-action, or otherwise become a qualified lead. Like I said earlier, PPC ads help drive more qualified traffic to your site, and when site visitors convert (i.e., click a button or submit a form), they are considered a lead or an opportunity.

You Need More Phone Calls

The “click-to-call” PPC ads are just what the doctor ordered if your business is trying to get the phone ringing. That’s right, PPC ads aren’t relegated to just landing pages or signup forms, you can also include a “click-to-call” functionality that lets your leads immediately call your business. And they don’t even have to click through to your site, they can call directly from the Google search page where the PPC ad was served. This works particularly well for mobile users, because it’s only natural to use your phone to contact a business.

You Need to Defend Your Digital Turf from Competition Hey, it’s tough out there. If your competition has any sense at all, they’re going to be bidding on the same search terms & keywords that you are – as well as your business name in order to capitalize on your website traffic. Since we’re in the automotive industry, we see car dealerships bidding on their competition’s name all the time, so that when someone searches your dealership name, they’re served an ad for your competitor(s). Bidding on your own dealership name can help combat some of that and keep qualified website traffic headed your way (and not to the dealership across town). Businesses that bid on their own name usually have better page position and even a lower cost-per-click, which I'll talk about below.   Now you've got a pretty good idea of what makes PPC a good move, so let's talk about some of the benefits. Not only will a successful PPC campaign help you achieve the goals above, but it can help the long-term health of your digital advertising game. Check out some of these sweet benefits.

Speed

Much like Keanu Reeves on that speeding bus, your website is on the clock. PPC ads are the fastest way to get directly in front of the potential online customers looking for you. Google has a bit of a reputation for getting people accurate search results, and it’s vital that your PPC ads are showing up for the customers looking for your business. Other forms of digital advertising and SEO take time to see results, but PPC ads offer near instant results when created properly.

Transparency

If you’re doing your own PPC, then you’ve got access to your analytics so that you can see what’s working and what’s not. Optimizing your ads for conversion is impossible without clear and transparent reporting, so if you’re using an agency for PPC, make sure they’re sharing everything with you so that you can make the most intelligent decisions with your ad dollars. If you can see how every single penny is being spent, you can easily calculate ROI.

Data, Data, Data

Again, the reporting data from your PPC ad campaigns will help you make adjustments to your keyword bids and even the specific time you are serving ads to customers. Bidding on keywords at 3:00 a.m. or on the weekends when your business is closed? Bad idea. Nobody will see those ads, and worse, they can’t take action even if they wanted to. That’s wasted money. Volume PPC is still a top performing digital advertising option when it comes to lead volume. Click-to-call and form submissions are two of the fastest ways to generate leads from your website.

Lower Cost Per Lead

When you are running well-built and well-managed PPC ad campaigns, your cost per lead (CPL) can go way down. Too many times, people take a “shotgun” approach and try lots of different bids and schedules to see what sticks. Not only is that an inefficient way of running an ad campaign, it’s going to drive your CPLs way up, since it’s incredibly difficult to tell what’s working.  

And that's it, folks. This post has been focused on PPC, obviously, but there are a host of other digital advertising options that are available to nearly any business with a website. 

This post originally appeared on the DealerOn website, written by Shaun Raines.

Last month Google announced an entirely new, ground-breaking Adwords functionality – Customer Match.  I haven’t seen too many people in the automotive industry discussing this new Google offering, so I wanted to raise awareness about it.

For years Google has been providing ads to anonymous consumers, based on their needs and intentions (whatever keyword information they enter into their Google Search bar).  Google has also provided dealers the ability to remarket/retarget consumers who’ve been on their site via their cookies.  What Google has never done, until now, is let a dealer target ads and offers to their actual customers – this is the power of “Customer Match”.

Customer match lets dealers take their customer email lists from their DMS and CRM, encrypt the lists (to ensure appropriate security for handling your customer data), and then upload them to Google.  Facebook and Twitter have provided a similar service for months now, but for Google, this a completely new advertising channel, and a very exciting one for car dealers.

At DealerOn we are currently working with some of our clients on testing out this new platform.  There are obvious security concerns, based on using actual customer email addresses and sharing them with a 3rd Party (Google).  Fortunately, Google has put in some very strict encryption requirements to ensure that your dealership’s customer data won’t be compromised.  This means that setting up your initial Customer Match campaigns is a bit more involved than just logging into Adwords and creating some new ads, but that security for your data is worth it.  

An additional benefit of the Customer Match advertising platform is the “Similar Audience” functionality.  Google not only lets you serve ads to your actual customer base as they browse the internet or surf YouTube, but Google also lets you target people similar to your customer base that you’ve never interacted with before.  How does Google do this?  

Google uses a series of algorithms, based on the demographic, psychographic, and geographic information of the people in your database to construct customer profiles of similar people in your market, with whom you may have NO relationship at all.  You can then market to these people who are most similar to all of your customers, without ever having to spend additional resources to figure out exactly who they are.  

If you are interested in testing out Google’s new Customer Match offering, please contact me at chris@dealeron.com and we can discuss whether your dealership would be a good fit for our beta test of this service.

Last month Google announced an entirely new, ground-breaking Adwords functionality – Customer Match.  I haven’t seen too many people in the automotive industry discussing this new Google offering, so I wanted to raise awareness about it.

For years Google has been providing ads to anonymous consumers, based on their needs and intentions (whatever keyword information they enter into their Google Search bar).  Google has also provided dealers the ability to remarket/retarget consumers who’ve been on their site via their cookies.  What Google has never done, until now, is let a dealer target ads and offers to their actual customers – this is the power of “Customer Match”.

Customer match lets dealers take their customer email lists from their DMS and CRM, encrypt the lists (to ensure appropriate security for handling your customer data), and then upload them to Google.  Facebook and Twitter have provided a similar service for months now, but for Google, this a completely new advertising channel, and a very exciting one for car dealers.

At DealerOn we are currently working with some of our clients on testing out this new platform.  There are obvious security concerns, based on using actual customer email addresses and sharing them with a 3rd Party (Google).  Fortunately, Google has put in some very strict encryption requirements to ensure that your dealership’s customer data won’t be compromised.  This means that setting up your initial Customer Match campaigns is a bit more involved than just logging into Adwords and creating some new ads, but that security for your data is worth it.  

An additional benefit of the Customer Match advertising platform is the “Similar Audience” functionality.  Google not only lets you serve ads to your actual customer base as they browse the internet or surf YouTube, but Google also lets you target people similar to your customer base that you’ve never interacted with before.  How does Google do this?  

Google uses a series of algorithms, based on the demographic, psychographic, and geographic information of the people in your database to construct customer profiles of similar people in your market, with whom you may have NO relationship at all.  You can then market to these people who are most similar to all of your customers, without ever having to spend additional resources to figure out exactly who they are.  

If you are interested in testing out Google’s new Customer Match offering, please contact me at chris@dealeron.com and we can discuss whether your dealership would be a good fit for our beta test of this service.

Working in a dealership, you have a million more important things to worry about than how Google’s Paid Search Auction works.  But your dealership is probably spending thousands of dollars a year on paid search because it’s a proven, high ROI marketing channel for your dealership.  Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, just put out a quick, new video updating how the Paid Search Auction works.

This new video does a great job of explaining updates to the ad auction (including items like Ad Format Impact), presenting why Google uses the different factors that they incorporate into their auctions.  Among the concepts he addresses are:

1. The (updated) 5 Ad Rank Factors
   1. Bid Price – Your Keyword’s Cost Per Click
   2. Expected Clickthrough Rate – Google’s measure of how often Google has determined someone using that Keyword Search Query will click on your ad
   3. Landing Page Experience – Highly Relevant (to the Keywords and the Ad Copy) Landing Pages are best; specifically a High Quality Landing Page is:
      1. Relevant and Original Content
      2. Easy to Navigate
      3. Transparent – about the nature of your business, how your site interacts with the user’s computer, and what you will do with the user’s information if you collect it
   4. Ad Relevance – Google uses your ad copy to make sure that it is relevant to the Keywords in the Search Query; they don’t want to serve ads that have no relation to a search
   5. Ad Formats – Enhancements to your Ad.  All of these add more information and more reasons to click on an ad.  This information would include:
      1. Phone Number
      2. Site Links
      3. Website’s Domain in Ad Headline
      4. Ratings
          
2. Quality – It appears that Hal is suggesting that “Quality Score” is an aggregate of Bid Price, Expected Click Through Rate, Landing Page Experience, and Ad Relevance (these have traditionally been the components of Quality Score).  Hal’s video suggests that Google actually looks at “Ad Format Impact” as a separate factor from Quality Score.

3. Ad Rank – Ad Rank is the number that Google assigns to each eligible ad to determine which ads and in what order to show them for any auction.  Ad Rank is based on a formula of Quality Score x “Ad Format Impact” x Bid Price.  The higher your ad’s Ad Rank, the higher up it will show for a particular Search.

4. Second Price Auction – this is how Google’s Adwords system actually determines the price that you pay when someone clicks on your ad.  Advertisers don’t actually pay their bid amount.  Once Google determines that an Advertiser’s ad is going to show, they charge the price that the advertiser would need to pay to beat the next highest Advertiser’s bid.  So, if you bid $4 for an ad, but based on your ad’s Quality Score AND Ad Format Impact, you might only need to pay $2.50 to beat the next Advertiser’s ad, so you are only charged $2.50 for a click on your ad.

The video is not even 9 minutes long, and if you use this outline while you watch it, you will probably be able to understand how Google’s Paid Search ad auction works in less than 30 minutes.

Working in a dealership, you have a million more important things to worry about than how Google’s Paid Search Auction works.  But your dealership is probably spending thousands of dollars a year on paid search because it’s a proven, high ROI marketing channel for your dealership.  Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian, just put out a quick, new video updating how the Paid Search Auction works.

This new video does a great job of explaining updates to the ad auction (including items like Ad Format Impact), presenting why Google uses the different factors that they incorporate into their auctions.  Among the concepts he addresses are:

1. The (updated) 5 Ad Rank Factors
   1. Bid Price – Your Keyword’s Cost Per Click
   2. Expected Clickthrough Rate – Google’s measure of how often Google has determined someone using that Keyword Search Query will click on your ad
   3. Landing Page Experience – Highly Relevant (to the Keywords and the Ad Copy) Landing Pages are best; specifically a High Quality Landing Page is:
      1. Relevant and Original Content
      2. Easy to Navigate
      3. Transparent – about the nature of your business, how your site interacts with the user’s computer, and what you will do with the user’s information if you collect it
   4. Ad Relevance – Google uses your ad copy to make sure that it is relevant to the Keywords in the Search Query; they don’t want to serve ads that have no relation to a search
   5. Ad Formats – Enhancements to your Ad.  All of these add more information and more reasons to click on an ad.  This information would include:
      1. Phone Number
      2. Site Links
      3. Website’s Domain in Ad Headline
      4. Ratings
          
2. Quality – It appears that Hal is suggesting that “Quality Score” is an aggregate of Bid Price, Expected Click Through Rate, Landing Page Experience, and Ad Relevance (these have traditionally been the components of Quality Score).  Hal’s video suggests that Google actually looks at “Ad Format Impact” as a separate factor from Quality Score.

3. Ad Rank – Ad Rank is the number that Google assigns to each eligible ad to determine which ads and in what order to show them for any auction.  Ad Rank is based on a formula of Quality Score x “Ad Format Impact” x Bid Price.  The higher your ad’s Ad Rank, the higher up it will show for a particular Search.

4. Second Price Auction – this is how Google’s Adwords system actually determines the price that you pay when someone clicks on your ad.  Advertisers don’t actually pay their bid amount.  Once Google determines that an Advertiser’s ad is going to show, they charge the price that the advertiser would need to pay to beat the next highest Advertiser’s bid.  So, if you bid $4 for an ad, but based on your ad’s Quality Score AND Ad Format Impact, you might only need to pay $2.50 to beat the next Advertiser’s ad, so you are only charged $2.50 for a click on your ad.

The video is not even 9 minutes long, and if you use this outline while you watch it, you will probably be able to understand how Google’s Paid Search ad auction works in less than 30 minutes.