ChatGPT has come out of nowhere to become one of the hottest new topics – and tools – of the year. In fact, looking at Google Search interest over time, searches for ChatGPT were literally 0 prior to December 2022 (which makes sense since it only launched in November 2022 – just a few short months ago).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT have become one of today’s most game-changing – and debated – technologies. Reactions from marketers to AI tools have been lukewarm thus far and all over the map in terms of the reaction. Typical responses have ranged from fear of AI taking over their job (and the world!), to straight out assertions that AI can’t help them in anyway.

The truth – at least for today, lies somewhere in the middle. ChatGPT (GTP stands for Pre-trained Transformer) is an AI-driven chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. Elon Musk has also been extensively involved with OpenAI since the company’s founding in 2015 and was part of the team that created the initial OpenAI Charter. However, he resigned from the board in 2018 (after voicing some concerns about potential issues that this publicly- available AI can cause).

ChatGPT, in its current release, is a super powerful tool that can help create content, generate ideas, and draft documents – all automatically on the-fly. While there are some concerns that it will ultimately make manual SEO content creation obsolete, for the time being – the manual component of content creation will still reign king. In fact, there are tools that can identify what content was AI-generated and I would be shocked if Google doesn’t utilize their own internal AI (don’t forget, they purchased DeepMind back in 2014!) to identify and devalue machine-generated content. My gut-feel is that within the next few quarters, Google will start not only devaluating AI based content, but they will start identifying it in the search results as such.

So where does it leave marketers and how can they use ChatGPT and any other upcoming AI based tools to their advantage? At the very least I would encourage everyone to access the tool and actually play around with it. Just spending 10 minutes on it will give you great insights and ideas of what it can accomplish.

“Generate a list of blog post ideas for a car dealership”

ChatGPT will spit out 10 ideas for blog posts that you can then evaluate and decide which make sense to write about.

Another great idea is to ask ChatGPT what kind of pages and content you should have on your site, so for example:

What kind of pages should a car dealership website have?

There are also plenty of applications for ChatGPT outside of SEO. For example, social media – where unique human-written content isn’t as important could really benefit from this AI. For example, try:

Write a 100+ word worth of Facebook Ad Copy for a car dealership in the New York city area. Include a

call-to-action.

Or perhaps

Write 5 funny tweets about working at a car dealership

ChatGPT can also be a great tool to help you with writing emails or even responding to client reviews, for example:

Write a response to a user who left this review on our car dealership google listing: “My third time getting a car from Prestige Lexus of Ramsey. All three times he gave the respect and trust that is truly hard to find at a car dealership especially these days. No pressure to buy.”

As you can see, the sky is the limit with ChatGPT and the various AI tools that will follow. Keep in mind to always review what it generates, have a concreate strategy, and always apply the human touch!

Happy learning!

P.S. This article was written manually, and aside from the screenshots and examples was not generated by ChatGPT (I feel like we’ll start seeing this kind of disclaimer more and more often soon!).

As we close up 2022 and enter 2023 the good news is that PPC Marketing – specifically search marketing (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads), continues to perform very well. In a world of chasing user attention, search marketing continues to be one of the few avenues of pull marketing. In other words, instead of forcing banners to audiences that you think might be interested, search marketing allows you to show your ad to those already looking for the cars you sell, your type of dealership, etc..

Now for the bad news – paid search marketing, dominated of course by Google Ads, continues to become more and more expensive. The cost per click (the way you pay for ads on Google), has increased significantly every year since it was launched. And no, it’s not Google just trying to take your money.

Google (and other paid search platforms like Microsoft), operate as an auction model. Your ranking on paid results is determined by the most you’re willing to pay per click. The way Google charges you is not the max CPC that you select, but actually by charging you just a penny more than the person below is willing to pay for that click. In other words, advertisers with the winning bid paid 1 cent more than the runner up.

Google’s success is unfortunately the reason prices continue to increase as more and more funds is being moved to Google Ads, causing the price per click to increase for everyone. As certain as I was that this year’s CPC’s will be more than last, I’m certain that next years will be even higher, and the year after even more. However, that doesn’t mean Google Ads is not worth investing to; in fact, paid search (along with organic search) continues to be the best investment you can make in driving visitors, leads and ultimately sales to your dealership.

However, that doesn’t mean you need to spend a fortune! There are some great ways to save money on your Dealership PPC Marketing. I cover this in more detail in my upcoming book: Automotive Search Marketing Secrets. But I’ll also highlight some of the more important ones here:

1. Conversion Tracking & AI-Driven Smart Bidding – Google Ads gives you access to very sophisticated AI- driven machine learning bidding strategies to help you bid more efficiently and save money. What this does is allows Google to use data to bid more for people more likely to convert and less for those that won’t. While your cost per click might not necessarily decrease, your cost per lead and per sale will.

However, to make use of the machine learning, you need to make sure you’re capturing all of your conversion values. Go through your website with the mindset of “what actions on the site should count as conversions to my dealership”. Some great lower funnel ones are: finance application page, trade-in form, new car lead, used car lease, contact form, live-chat start, phone call, service scheduling, etc.. For an upper funnel, something like a VDP is as far as I’d go (SRP’s are too upper funnel). Once you established all of your conversions, you need to set them up in Google Ads and assign values to them. In

9 out of 10 cases, dealerships end the process at just setting up the conversions – without assigning values. Without values, Google will treat a VDP conversion the same as a phone call – which is obviously not the case. Ideally, you’d want to assign dollar values – for example, what is a phone call lead worth to you? $100? If you don’t have dollar values for all of the conversions, you can use ratio’s: if a VDP is 1, a phone call would be 100 (worth 100 times more). With this, Google’s algorithm will make sure to bid correctly based on the expected conversions, saving you money.

2. Don’t bid on your dealership name! In most cases, your competitors aren’t allowed to bid on your name – so you don’t really have a reason to bid on it yourself. Try doing a google search for your name and see what comes up. If you’re the only one bidding on it, you can probably stop or lower the amount you spend on that. Bidding on your own name can often “goose” results, making conversion rates look great – however, you’re just paying for clicks that were already going to click to your site from your organic or GMB (now GBP) listing! I’ve seen some agencies spend as much as 80% of the total budget bidding on a dealership name.

3. Set bid caps! While I have full trust in Google’s machine learning algorithm, it’s not perfect and can sometime bid very aggressively for a click that might never be ROI positive for you. For example, no matter how high Google sees the propensity of a user searching something like “Mercedes-Benz wiper blades”, you might not want to spend something crazy like $50 per click on that search term since you will never be profitable on it even if they do buy wiper blades from you! While most of Google’s machine learning strategies discourage setting bid caps, you can still do so by creating portfolio bid strategies and setting them at the portfolio level. Just to keep Google in-check, you might want to set something like $10 CPC limit on most campaigns (or maybe even lower depending on what your average cost per click is).

4. Add negatives on an ongoing basis! Google continues to go broader and broader with keyword bidding. Even if you’re bidding for phrases, Google will automatically bid on similar or related phrases in an effort to get you more traffic. This can often lead to bidding (and paying for!) unrelated keywords. For example, just because you’re bidding on a new “Porsche 911” doesn’t mean you want to pay for someone searching for a “Porsche 911 watch” or a “Porsche job working on an a 911”. Make sure to review your search terms and set negatives on a monthly basis (and more often if you can!). This will make sure to trim the wasted spend while at the same time improving your campaign metrics.

5. Always experiment, test and improve! Managing your paid search campaigns isn’t a set it and forget it task. You always want to be experimenting with new ad-copy, new ad-types, new campaigns – and even new platforms (like Microsoft Ads!). The best path to improvement (and thus getting more results for less spend) is to continually monitor, analyze, test and optimize.

Ready to spend less on PPC ads? The above 5 items should be a great way to get started but of course is not the end-all-and-be-all. Always engage with the agency or person who’s running your PPC Ads. The most successful PPC campaigns are a two way conversion and partnership between the dealership and the agency/person running them. When both work together, you will always get the best results and spend less.

As we kick off the new year, we find ourselves in some of the most challenging times in recent memory.

Aside from the challenges from the recent COVID surge, inventory levels continue to be very tight. “The automotive team at HIS Markit calculated that semiconductor supply won’t catch up with industry demand until late 2022… [or even] into 2023.” – HIS Markit, WSJ.

At the same time, consumer automotive loyalty as at the lowest levels ever recorded. In a Google Consumer Survey in June 2021, 339 auto intenders were asked “When you are ready to buy, what would you do in case your preferred choice of model is not in stock?”. 46% of shoppers said they would wait for it to be back in stock (meaning you should retain their consideration!). 53% of shoppers said they would buy another model from the same brand or competitor (!). Looking at the same data in Q4, almost 3/4th said they would buy a different model/brand. What’s even more interesting is that consumers are jumping between brands that we have never seen before. For example, someone in-market for a BMX X5, upon lack of availability, would now jump to a next-door Chevrolet dealership and buy a Chevrolet SUV – something we rarely saw before.

Looking at another data set – we’re seeing more and more consumers willing to wait out the industry shortage and pricing spikes (thinking that it will end very soon). For those who continue to be in-market (which is a shrinking majority), 50% reported their reason for replacing an old or failing vehicle. Another 54% reported looking for new features or technology. And finally, 26% looking for better performance or efficiency (prompted by rising gas prices!) or newer safety technology. Data provided by a Google/Ipsos US Dealer Customer Study of 325 in-market shoppers.

And the last major consumer trend we’ve watching is the jump between segments and categories. From a recent Google/Greenberg survey of nearly 10,000 respondents – more than half of those in-market for a new car have considered a used car. Similarly, half of luxury brand shoppers have considered a non-luxury brand. And lastly, half of new car buyers considered a segment other than the one they purchased.

Another confirmation of this consumer jumping trend is Google Search Data which shows a 79% YoY increase in “how to find the right car for me” along with a 46% YoY jump in “what type of car should I get quiz”.

How do we capitalize on these trends? For starters, you want to make sure you’re targeting audiences and not just search terms. More importantly, you should put a priority on your own audiences (ie: remarketing those who have visited your site before). As consumers are waiting more and considering more brands/models, it’s more important than ever to continue to be top-of-mind to your potential customers. That also means being present in search results, optimizing your Google My Business and being as visible as possible while minimizing your spend (especially if your current inventory is low).

As we start off the new year – I’ll leave you with one more golden nugget of data. In a recent Google study (that was conducted from May to June, 2021). Along with inventory constraints and pricing challenges – what is the 3rd biggest consumer pain point right now? Too much waiting and too many processes! 31% of new car buyers said “The process takes too long”, “they spent too much time waiting”, Or “the paper work takes too long”. While letting your marketing agency optimizing your marketing efforts, it will go along way to also optimize your in-person experience, keeping mind that consumers are already very frustrated and agitated by inventory and pricing and try to lesson their “waiting” and “process” as

much as possible.