Vertical Dealer

San Jose SEO - Automotive SEO Strategy

Another great find for our dealership marketing list. San Jose SEO has partnered with the Better Dealer Network to offer dealerships the largest network of automotive related websites available for advertising and marketing to your target audience.

San Jose SEO has been a leading search engine marketing company since 1998. Serving a host of impressive clients including some of the country’s top dealer groups San Jose SEO Automotive SEO Strategy is worth a look as we turn the corner into the new economy.

Internet Reputation Management 2009

Vertical Dealer occasionally recommends top tier talent that has delivered outstanding services to dealerships and individuals. Marc King Consulting offers the best Internet Reputation Management solutions we have seen, and weve seen more than a few. Online reputation is one of the fastest growing problems in the free-for-all world wide web. Having a comprehensive Internet Reputation Management program in place can add dollars to your bottom line.  Marc offers a FREE and CONFIDENTIAL review and recommendation consultation from his website. www.marckingconsulting.com

We rate this service 5 stars ***** - a true value with exceptional ROI.

Internet Reputation Management - Marc King Consulting
Confidential online reputation management services form a veteran search engine developer. With 16 years experience in development of web search technologies, Marc King Consulting can get the job done. Contact Marc King Consulting - Internet Reputation Management for more information about your individual case.

Tags: Internet Reputation Management

Dealer Public Relations

Dealer Public Relations is the new buzz going around the automotive marketing world. This is partly because a key factor for dealers in this tightening market is  squeezing every penny out of your dealer marketing, and that means more and more dealers are moving to the web for their marketing efforts. Dealer public relations professionals have known for some time that a dealer’s online reputation is as important as brand positioning.

Whether you advertise on TV, radio, or in print eventually 90% of your potential customers will go to the web to research your dealership prior to a showroom visit. Dealer public relations professionals will tell you that your dealership’s online reputation will be the deciding factor in almost every case. Research has shown that a typical dealership with a negative online reputation will lose as much as 41% of potential sales.

In a recent article from JD Power a negative online reputation was partially attributed to the total collapse of Bill Heard Chevrolet, one of the country’s largest dealer groups with over 2 billion in annual revenue.

With so much at stake it’s no wonder discussions of dealer public relations and dealer reputation management have reached a crescendo.

Here are some excellent resources for further information: Dealerpr.org - Dealerpr.net

Tags: Dealer Public Relations

The Cost Per Click Spend Control Formula

Every dealer knows the value of a properly managed Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign. It is relatively easy to get involved with Google AdWords as well as Yahoo and MSN pay per click (PPC) advertising. While it can be relatively simple to launch a campaign, if you expect to turn a profit you had better understand the math behind your campaign ROI and have a strategy to not only manage campaign spend but also improve landing page conversion.

Consider this:

If you sell a product for $500 and realize a 10% profit margin with a 2% conversion rate. For every 1000 visitors (click-throughs) to your landing page you will achieve 20 sales for a total of $10,000 gross income with a net profit of $1000.

If we take the $1000 divided be the 1000 visits we can now see that our maximum or break-even bid per click is $1.00. So the maximum cost-per-click (CPC) we can spend on any Ad without losing money must be $1.00 or less.

In other words:

(I/M)/V = MCPC

Income/Margin = Profit
Profit/Visits = Max CPC

This formula is of key importance to the potential profitability of your online business. CPC will rise over time and you had better know where your Max CPC limit stands before you get into a bidding war over a top position Ad placement.

Under the above conditions at the 2% conversion rate if the CPC required to place an Ad for certain prime keywords rises above the $1.00 mark you are effectively priced out of the market for those keywords.

So what would happen if you now were able to improve your conversion rate to 4% or 10%? At 4% conversion with the same 1000 visits you now have 40 sales for $20,000 gross with $2,000 net profit. Your Max CPC now also rises to $2.00 and you can once again compete for the higher priced keywords. At 10% conversion your PPC program becomes extremely profitable with 1000 visits bringing 100 sales with $5000 net profit.

So beyond the control formula to protect against runaway CPC spending the most important activity you can undertake as a PPC advertiser is… drum roll please… Landing page optimization. Let me say that again, “Landing Page Optimization is the key to increased profit through PPC advertising”.

Every Ad group should have a unique landing page and every landing page should be involved in a continuous A/B testing strategy.

You can test:

1. Page Layout
2. Fonts and Color
3. Graphic Treatments
4. Content Copy
5. Incentives

You need to test each page thoroughly to achieve optimum returns and then keep testing trying to beat your top performing pages. If you do this level of continuous testing you will make more profit. There is simply no excuse not to.

Here is another CPC strategy for your consideration. Take your current CPC and reduce it by $.05 every 4th day. Do this until you see a point of diminishing returns. What you will find is that as price is reduced your daily budget goes farther and clicks will actually increase as a result. You need to track your clicks and conversions religiously during this process but what you learn about click to spend ratios will be invaluable to your bottom line.

If you employ the cost control strategy, landing page testing, and the minimum cost exposure strategy you will be well on your way to protecting your Ad spend investment and increasing your dealership’s profits.

Tags: Cost Per Click, PPC