Election season got you down?

If you're a dealer doing business in a battleground state, the answer is most likely yes.

A recent analysis by Dealer.com revealed that car-shopping behavior in states where the vote can “swing” either red or blue – Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — was down 9 percent year-over-year in September.

And with new-vehicle sales also down 2 percent year-over-year in September, the election is compounding challenges for car dealers in battleground states. Year-to-date, visitors to car dealership websites across the Dealer.com platform are 6 percent lower in battleground states compared to non-battleground state dealerships within the network.

James Grace, director of analytics for Dealer.com, said a major factor hurting car shopping behavior in these states is the rise of digital advertising costs, as battleground states have averaged 7 percent higher paid search costs than non-battleground states since January, and a bigger increase in year-over-year advertising costs (11 percent) than non-battleground states (7 percent).

 “We have seen this trend in past election years where the consumption of and cost of advertising in the traditional ad space that would typically be bought by dealers caused a shift to the digital space,” Grace said.

“Dealers that cannot account for additional advertising spends suffer, which can lead to a decline in online traffic, and ultimately a hit to their bottom lines.”

But Grace said there are steps dealers can take to combat the dampening effects of election season.

Incorporating election-related content

The key to bringing the election into your advertising and marketing is to keep things nonspecific, Grace said.

“But nothing dealing with the rhetoric side of the election,” he cautioned. “I wouldn’t recommend dealers get into that fray, for obvious reasons. But acknowledging the election is going on.”

How about an Election Day special? Dealers could run a banner/slide on their home page offering a discounted or free oil change for customers who present their “I voted” sticker.

Or maybe post-election promotion around “Election got you down? A new car might cheer you up!”

“To me, the best time for that would be late November,” Grace said. “You want to try to get some November sales out of this thing. So letting the smoke clear for a week or so and then looking to drive some end-of-month sales with a post-election message.”

Grace said he suspects that people’s hesitancy to make big purchases at this time may run below the surface.

“My suspicion is this trend of reduced shopping behavior is not a conscious thing for people. I think it’s just a general … there’s so much content. Advertising’s getting more expensive, you’re able to drive fewer shoppers to dealerships.

“I think it’s also just the general these of ‘the economy is not doing well.’ Hearing that message constantly in battleground states kind of created the same mood as 2008, when we actually had a big recession. My sense is that will clear up as the election finishes up. But we’re also seeing a flattening in the industry in general the past couple of months. I think of all that together is adding up to a problem for dealers in these states.”

Optimizing your advertising budget

When asked how dealers can achieve this, Grace pointed to what he called Dealer.com’s “portfolio approach.”

“We’re selling a portfolio to our customers and saying, ‘Let’s use different products to capture different pieces of the market.' We look on (a dealer’s) website, and we’ve got a bunch of tools to say, ‘How are people showing up on your website?’ And then looking at what they do on the website to sort of measure ROI.”

Grace mentioned that dealer.com is unveiling a bunch of tools to measure ROI. One is a quality scoring mechanism being introduced at NADA.

Here’s how it works: Every website visit will get a quality score based on things like time on site, bounce rate, number of page views, etc. This will be available in January, and will make things a lot easier for dealers, Grace said.

"One of the things that I’ve been talking to dealers a lot about is what I call the quality gap, and their need to focus on quality rather than quantity,” he continued. “If we look at measures of traffic, visits to websites, for instance, it’s up substantially over the past year by 10-12 percent, and sales are roughly flat, maybe plus-2 percent in the past 12 months. So that creates this gap between the traffic we measure and actual results.

It kind of puts to bed this whole idea that more advertising equals more visits to your website equals more leads equals more opportunity equals more sales, he continued.

“That very linear thought process where ‘all I have to do to sell more cars is to drive more traffic to my website’ just really doesn’t make any sense anymore.”