When marketing technology provider Search Optics got off the ground in the early 2000s, executive vice president Christian Fuller described the digital marketing environment for dealers back then as one where dealers weren’t doing digital marketing themselves.

“It was really just an environment where people would buy leads from third-party lead providers and pay $20 to $25 a piece for those leads,” he said.

Times would soon change, however, as Fuller pointed out, and the environment would become one where measuring digital marketing performance became important.

Fuller walked through this process with Auto Remarketing in a recent interview and shared how Search Optics is helping dealers get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

Dealers, he said, began to “understand the value of potentially putting their own dealer sites in the places where those third-party providers were.”

Online traffic continued to grow, he said, and automakers pushed the idea that “dealers needed to be online.”

“There were little pockets in some of the major metros of dealers going in and getting in the game of digital marketing. But because there were no real measurement techniques or measurement technologies that allowed for a good analysis of what that traffic did, dealers would, in a sense, write a check for traffic or clicks,” Fuller explained.

“And at the end of the month, they’d get a report that said ‘we’ve delivered you 1,000 people to your website,’” he added. “And what Search Optics found is that never resonated with the dealer at all. What they wanted to hear is ‘how many leads were generated as a result of my marketing dollars?’”

Thus, the philosophy Search Optics used in building its programs was, “You can’t close a click,” Fuller said.

What’s important is the value of a consumer visiting a site and then being converted into a phone call or email. And that, he said, gives dealers a cost-per-lead on their marketing spend.

“As the years have gone on, we’ve come up with some very unique, proprietary technology to track individuals as they get onto a site and then measure that conversion rate to a phone call or email,” Fuller shared. “And then cleanly and easily report it back to the dealer, so again, they know at a glance or any point, exactly what they’re getting for marketing dollars spent.”

Auto Remarketing also asked Fuller about best practices from the more successful dealers with which Search Optics works, and how they utilize data and performance metrics.

“At the Tier-3 level — at the dealership level — you’re really at the end of the line where you want to set that hook and pull the fish on to the boat … and the idea that you’re just going to drive a bunch of clicks to your website is part of the equation, but really what the dealer can make marketing decisions on is how many of those visitors are turning into leads,” Fuller said.

“If you have a tool such as UPTRACS, where you can measure all of your digital sources … you can then tie back what the dealer’s return is in terms of cost-per-lead.”

If the dealer has this type of info, he or she can look back it and determine the most cost-effective of their various digital marketing campaigns and more effectively manage budgets, he said.

To add some color to this concept, Fuller talked about Google AdWords platform.

“They’re built in a way to reward very good marketing technique. So if you build a very good campaign and manage it effectively, you improve what’s called a quality score. The better the quality score, the less you actually pay for that visitor. So, with that philosophy, we’ve taken our company and we have the most Google certified people in our digital automotive space,” Fuller noted.

“We take that and we overlay it with technology. We have real people making marketing decisions. And when you talk about, ‘I need to market a Chevy Silverado versus a Ford F-150 versus a Dodge Ram versus a Toyota Tundra,’ you need that human interaction with these platforms in order to maximize the performance,” he continued. “I believe some of the mistakes you see in the marketing space are when people try to get a computer to talk to another computer, to make a marketing decision for them.

“So we utilize technology, but then we layer in highly skilled, certified  humans on top of it to make the marketing decisions to ultimately drive the best traffic because the best traffic is ultimately going to turn into the lowest cost per lead,” he concluded.

For more information, visit www.searchoptics.com.

Editor’s Note: This article appears in the Dec. 1-14 print and digital editions of Auto Remarketing, which also includes four other stories in a special section designed to give dealers the “Advertising Advantage.”