Kijiji announced this week two new partnerships which will add even more value to its dealers and users. The new partners include a photo and video capture service as well as a dealer review add-on provider, resulting in greater transparency for buyers.
Officials said the new agreements — with Car Pics 2.0 and Mobials.com — will deliver Kijiji’s ongoing commitment to provide a safe and trustworthy, high-quality environment to Canadians looking for vehicles online.
“We’re making the Kijiji user experience considerably more effective, by delivering as much of the dealership experience as possible to the online shopper,” said Leanne Kripp, head of autos for Kijiji. “Through these new partnerships, our users will have the clearest possible views and understanding of both the vehicle and dealership they are considering before they even leave home.”
Oakville, Ontario-based Car Pics 2.0 provides its dealer clients with a complete online merchandising suite, which includes high quality image and video solutions for new and used vehicles for sale.
“Captivating media content is a proven business driver for vehicle sales, and under this new partnership, all dealers who are Car Pics 2.0 clients will have those images automatically and seamlessly uploaded to their Kijiji ads,” said Bart Tecza, managing director for Car Pics 2.0.
“Our goal is simple: get buyers excited about the car they’re looking for, because the best decisions in life are the ones we’re excited to make,” Tecza continued.
To fully maximize the new vehicle capture service, Kijiji will also be expanding the number of photos which can be posted in a single vehicle ad to 40, up from 20.
Kijiji explained that helping dealers be more transparent in their advertising by sharing true customer-generated content within the dealer’s add-on was the impetus for a partnership with Mobials.com, creators of Reviewsii. The business review platform generates customer-written and verified dealer reviews, equipping users with deeper knowledge of the dealership and how they operate as a company.
“We are excited to extend the reach of Reviewsii and Google reviews to Kijiji, with early results showing that dealers with reviews have up to a 12-percent increase in lead generation,” said Marty Meadows, president and co-founder of Mobials. “Now Kijiji and dealers have a solution for consumer trust that delivers both Reviewsii and Google reviews from the same platform.”
Kripp closed by saying, “Together, these new partnerships further enhance our users’ experience, increasing their ability to fully explore the vehicle they’re interested in, as well as the dealer with whom they are considering starting a relationship.”
Some consumers are being overcharged when they buy a vehicle, according to the Ontario Motor Vehicle Industry Council.
“Since 2010, all-in price advertising has been the law in this province,” explained Terry O’Keefe, director of communications and education for OMVIC. “Unfortunately, our research shows that a small minority of car dealers continue to add hidden fees or extra costs that exceed their advertised prices.”
For that reason, the regulator this week launched a 10-week consumer awareness campaign to help further educate Ontario car buyers about their right to all-in price advertising.
Details of the campaign
Picture a dog relishing a car ride — tongue lapping the air and fur flying in the wind. It’s a sight that exemplifies simple joy, right? And it happens also to be the imagery supporting OMVIC’s message: all-in price advertising. O’Keefe explained that it’s putting the fun and excitement back into buying a vehicle — not to mention, it’s the law.
OMVIC indicated the province-wide campaign utilizes TV, radio, online and social media advertising.
“While the message delivery is lighthearted, it’s hoped the outcome will have an important affect,” O’Keefe said. “That being, consumers will avoid dealers who break the law and instead buy vehicles from those dealers who provide the fair and transparent advertising required by Ontario’s consumer protection legislation.”
To access OMVIC’s TV or radio commercials, go here.
Understanding all-in price advertising
OMVIC reiterated all-in price advertising is the law in Ontario. If an OMVIC-registered dealer advertises a price for a vehicle (new or used), that price must include all fees and charges the dealer intends to collect. The only additional fees a dealer can charge are HST and licensing, which refers to the actual cost of vehicle registration and plates and it cannot include extra fees added by the dealer.
An advertisement is any inducement to buy or lease a vehicle. This would include — but is not limited to — ads:
—In print (newspapers, magazines, etc.)
—On the Internet (dealer site, online marketplace, etc.)
—On social media
—On radio or TV
—On signs (including those in or on a vehicle)
—What must be included in an all-in price advertisement?
Examples of fees or charges that must be included in an advertised price include:
—Freight
—PDI-PDE (pre-delivery inspection/expense)
—Administration (admin) fee(s)
—Government levies (air tax, etc.)
—Safety and e-test (unless the ad contains a mandated "Unfit Vehicle" or "As-Is Vehicle" statement)
If a dealer intends to charge for products or services they have already pre-installed on a vehicle, those costs must also be included in the advertised price. This includes, but is not limited to:
—Nitrogen/tire protection package/locking wheel nuts
—Warranties
—Security or theft deterrent products/services (etching, etc.)
—Fuel
OMVIC pointed out that all fees must be itemized individually on the contract.
OMVIC went on to mention it does not regulate vehicle manufacturers; therefore, advertisements placed by manufacturers do not have to comply with the Motor Vehicle Dealers Act and all-in pricing is not required in manufacturer ads.
“That said, some manufacturers voluntarily comply with the all-in pricing provision and commendably provide transparency to consumers,” officials said.
TRADER Corp. has announced an exclusive partnership with Toronto-based Coherent Path that is bringing “big data” to the Canadian auto industry.
Years of data on autoTRADER.ca indicates that consumers don’t tend to begin their journey with a clear path to purchase, and that many factors can influence them along the way.
By applying Coherent Path’s patented data mining and predictive analytics platform to autoTRADER.ca customer data, TRADER Corp. will be able to identify where customers are in their car buying journey, enabling manufacturers and dealers to reach these shoppers at the right place and time and with the right message on autoTRADER.ca as well as elsewhere online.
The idea is that online advertising no longer needs to focus simply on placing an ad in front of a shopper who is looking at a particular vehicle. TRADER will now be able to understand each customer's journey and give manufacturers and dealers the ability to tailor messages to shoppers based on where they are in the buying process.
This advanced process will map “big data” such as transactional web impressions and vehicle searches on the marketplace, to understand consumer purchase behavior and apply more data-driven advertising solutions for dealers and manufacturers. Initial deployments of the technology have delivered more than 40 percent better ad performance than traditional targeting techniques.
For example, a shopper who started by considering a particular make/model on autoTRADER.ca may now be leaning toward buying from another manufacturer. By using predictive data and analytics, the advertiser can then strategically place an ad in front of the shopper to stimulate and influence the customer’s buying decision.
“Most Canadian car-buying journeys involve autoTRADER.ca at some point, and that creates a lot of data,” said Roger Dunbar, vice president of marketing at TRADER. “By leveraging this marketplace data high-ground, we will be able to project and stimulate the car buying journey for individual consumers.
“Our customers will have the ability to strategically place messages within the various stages of the consumer’s journey, increasing ad effectiveness and driving incremental revenue as a result,” he continued.
“autoTRADER.ca sits atop an incredible asset — a digital record of most of the car-buying journeys in Canada,” said James Glover, chief executive officer at Coherent Path. “We're proud to partner with TRADER to turn that asset into significant value for its customers and for the end consumers.”
Naked Lime Marketing has officially launched in Canada, the U.S.-based auto dealer marketing company announced on Monday.
Naked Lime will provide Canadian auto retailers with its Aptus Websites plus digital advertising, SEO, social media, and reputation management services.
"Beginning last year, we started preparing for this launch by gathering insight from dealerships in Canada and working with our pilot customers to tailor our services to their business needs and the needs of the Canadian market," Chris Walsh, vice president at Naked Lime, said in a news release. "Everyone at Naked Lime is looking forward to the opportunity to help Canadian dealerships better manage their online presence, while generating more leads and attracting more customers to their stores."
Walsh added: "Automotive retailers recognize it's important to have a strong online presence to capture consumers' attention and attract them to the dealership. They also recognize how difficult it can be to stay on top of the latest digital technologies and trends.
“That's where Naked Lime comes in. Our specialists have a proven track record of delivering the best possible digital services so dealerships can focus on what they do best — selling cars and serving customers."
More information about Naked Lime in Canada can be found at nakedlime.ca.
The gap between a mediocre sales person and greatness lies with one’s capability in maintaining contact with prospective buyers. Extending communication and building relationships with these individuals after they walk off the lot are significant determinants in closing a sale.
This requires dealerships to truly understand the preferences of their customer base when it comes to continuing a conversation. The lives of Canadians have been completely changed by our mobile devices, and more particularly, the way we use them to interact with friends, family and professional contacts.
One of the early breakthroughs we were able to achieve as part of the growth of Canada Drives was better understanding these communication patterns, and adjusting accordingly.
Currently, there are over 29 million wireless subscribers in Canada, and 68 percent of those Canadians own a smartphone. This is why land lines are increasingly being phased out of households, and more interestingly, how short text messages are taking the place of verbal exchanges.
Have you ever tried calling someone with no answer, only to receive a text back a few minutes later? This is a sign of the times. When people are engaged in activities, texting is something that can easily be done simultaneously, as opposed to talking on the phone which distracts from whatever they are involved in. As an example, during the traditional hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., consumers are also working, meaning that replying by text becomes a far easier option than answering the phone to have a conversation
Canada Drives’ management and staff began to see this in our follow-ups with consumers who had contacted the company. Multiple phone calls back turned into a black hole of silence and wasted time, which indicated to our team that we needed to do something differently.
As a result, we started to look into current statistics, and what we learned was staggering. Mobile Marketing Watch reports that texting has a 98 percent open rate, which dwarfs email’s 20 percent. Further, Velocify reports that text messaging has a 45-percent response rate, which again makes emails 6-percent rate of response anemic by comparison.
Velocify also reports that sales prospects who are sent text messages convert at a rate 40 percent higher than those who are not sent any text messages. The benefits of texting prospects in improving sales volume is real, even though it is a practice that dealership purists often dismiss.
To take advantage of this opportunity, Canada Drives developed an SMS platform that allowed our customer relations team to contact consumers from our office’s computer system directly to their phones in real time. The technology was customized for our specific needs, which dramatically increased our staff’s ability to reach consumers, as well as our company’s overall productivity.
However, the status quo in Canada’s auto industry is an environment where texting is not being used to its full potential, in spite of the obvious challenges being encountered by salespeople.
When properly integrated into the entire sales process, while at the same time deployed with discretion and in accordance with anti-spam legislation consumers are open to receiving texts from businesses; in fact, they have even come to expect it.
In today’s cluttered communications landscape, dealerships must take full advantage of any tools that make customer contact more efficient. Whether it be an emphasis on texting, or the adoption of a new customer relationship management (CRM) system, it is imperative to utilize the mediums that are best suited to your customers’ lifestyles. Finding a way to incorporate texting into your sales process will allow your dealership to overcome the barriers to contacting customers in a wireless world.
Cody Green is the Founder and Co-CEO of Canada Drives, the country’s largest consumer auto financing brand. Having previously worked in dealerships across Western Canada, Green offers insight into how technology is changing the face of auto sales in Canada. www.canadadrives.ca.
With all of this competition, you and your dealership need to stay ahead of the curve. Being that you are reading this blog, you are already a step ahead.
Here are three ways that I’ve seen dealerships fall short with their marketing and how you can fix the problems.
Investing in ads that drive traffic to generic offer pages (or worse, the homepage of your site)
What is it?
Traditional display advertising or generic SEM advertising that drives traffic to a non-specific landing page on the dealership’s site.
Why it’s ineffective
Here’s the problem: buyers can’t indicate interest in a specific car on typical landing pages. They can only do that on VDPs and some SRP’s (which is one reason these pages are so important). This means you’ll need to get this buyer to a VDP from the landing page. On most sites this process can take up to 4 steps: The landing page, the search page, the search result page (SRP) and then (finally) the VDP.
Any digital marketer worth their salt will tell you that the more pages a person needs to navigate to find the information they’re looking for, the more site abandonment you can expect. Assuming half of the traffic continues on after each page, you can only expect about 12.5% of traffic coming from a landing page to ever reach a valuable VDP. For example:
What you should do.
Aim to invest into ads that drive traffic directly to your VDP. By doing this, you eliminate site abandonment and effectively only pay for ads that bring you highly valued VDP traffic.
Targeting your advertising only based on demographics & psychographics
What is it?
Any targeting based on zip, age, sex, income or any other demographic as well as using general psychographic variables such as, promoting minivans in parenting content and Accords or CRV’s in seniors content. Targeting methods like these are very prevalent in social media advertising or when investing in ad space with specific publications. If you're thinking social, the term used most today is to buy a “Like” audience. These people are “Like” these other people so let's show them the same stuff. Sounds good enough, right? … but as we mentioned, there is a ton of competition out there so good enough — isn’t any good!
Why it’s ineffective
When you target by demographics and psychographics, you are painting everyone in that category with the same brush. By doing so, you completely disregard the buyer’s personal preferences, and people are unique. You don’t have to look far to see examples how this type of targeting falls short.
Simply look to your peers: do they all drive the same type of car? Of course not. Even though they are similar to you, they all have their individual preferences. Some like trucks, some like sedans, some like coupes, some even prefer minivans, though I have trouble imagining why. As I have mentioned in previous articles and blogs, my favorite example is my Mother-in-Law (who is nearly 70 and a grandmother to 5 kids) has her eyes on the Dodge Charger SRT for her next car. Go Grandma Go!!
What you should do.
Try to target based on behavior, real live action from an individual. The easiest way to do this is to use an ad technology that builds the profile of each buyer it encounters using a Data Management Platform (DMP). Marketers talk about segmentation of demographics and psychographics to find the right group of people more likely to have an interest in your cars. Whereas, today’s ad technology allows for a segment of 1. This allows your ads to be served only to people who have an interest in the vehicles you have on the lot. By targeting the actual behaviour of the buyer (rather than the demographics or psychographics of potential buyers), the traffic generated in this way has a significantly higher probability of filling out a form or performing other meaningful actions on your site. This effectively increases your conversion rate and reduce your CPA.
Only targeting active car buyers
What is it?
Only investing in SEM or in listings advertising.
Why it’s ineffective.
The cost of purchasing a vehicle makes impulse buying prohibitive for most people. As a result, car buyers will spend numerous hours researching and selecting the vehicle that best fits their needs. This process takes 60 to 90 days (if not more, the last time it took me six months – I’m way too analytical). During this research and selection period, there will be times where the buyer isn’t “actively” shopping for their car; they’ll be on sports sites, news sites, celebrity sites like TMZ (checking out the latest Justin Bieber debacle) or any number of other sites that aren’t Auto specific sites. By only promoting your inventory through SEM, listing sites or other “active shopping” environments you are missing a massive opportunity to get your right vehicles in front of the right buyers.
What you should do.
Get to in-market buyers no matter where they are online. Choose an ad technology or agency that will promote your inventory to buyers during all phases of the purchase path and to all areas of the internet – not solely on SEM or listing sites. This ensures that your dealership and your vehicles are always top of mind for an in-market car buyer.
By avoiding all (or, at least, some) of these short falls, you can increase the effectiveness of the ads you run, drive quality traffic to your website and, ultimately sell more cars.
This post originally ran on Speed Shift Media's Dynamic Display Advertising Blog. For more posts from Speed Shift Media, see www.speedshiftmedia.com/blog.
Digital marketing firms have been encouraging dealerships to utilize tools such as blogs to engage shoppers as well as improve search results for years now.
But why stop at one?
That’s the question Steve Arsenault, chief executive officer of OneBigBroadcast.com, poses to his digital marketing customers.
“What we have found over the years is that a single blog can only attract so much visibility. Multiple blog engines can attract different subject matter or a different following of search terms,” Arsenault told Auto Remarketing Canada.
His digital marketing firm has seen impressive results using this strategy and more, especially with its first auto dealership client, Key West Ford in New Westminster, British Columbia.
Arsenault said the dealership’s weekly SEO reports show that over 60 percent of website traffic arrives from organic search. And the average time a user spends looking at the store's inventory is over 27 minutes.
The dealership runs five separate blog engines housed on its website, and each engine touts impressive horsepower.
For example, the blogs powered by OneBigBroadcast.com feature Facebook and Twitter APIs, tiny URL creation and automation, RSS feeds, widgets, social sharing tools, multi-blog site feeds, scheduling tools and more.
Arsenault also said his company employs a tool it has coined the “Knowledge Bank,” which serves to constantly build a library of information from the dealership’s content and subject matter for future use.
“The idea is having fresh changing content easily accessible where the reader may want to locate it. Forming a deeper connect via education and content people want to read makes a difference in people's future auto purchase decisions,” Arsenault said.
In order to get search results, you need a solid content marketing strategy. That’s what the team at OneBigBroadcast had in mind when then began working with client Key West Ford.
“And a solid content marketing strategy means creating content, putting it out to the Internet and tracking visibility to the site … what we have focused on is content means writing articles, and the platform of choice are blogs,” said Arsenault.
When he began building the platform, it became clear to him that the full potential of blogs to drive search results is often not taken advantage of by most businesses.
“I thought if I’m going to build an SEO engine, and I know that blogs are really SEO-friendly, and I know that search looks at them all the time, why don’t we break the mold in terms of what everybody else does and ask the question, why do most businesses only have one blog?” Arsenault said.
So the company designed a platform that allows dealer to run a number of blogs on their site on a variety of topics.
Arsenault and his team designed their own content management system and blog engines, instead of using tools such as WordPress, to do one thing above all: “attract search.”
“Everything else was built on top of that, so it’s a very tight framework and is designed to attract SEO,” he said.
The full potential of blogs
When the company created its blog engine, they wanted to be able to focus on key phrases and create them on the fly, making them visible to search engines as posts are written.
With this in mind, they created The Knowledge Bank. To illustrate the Knowledge Bank’s uses, Arsenault gave this example: If you are writing about a Ford Focus, and you do 100 articles over the course of the next year on this topic, the tool will put all of these together in a knowledge bank, the idea being keeping “key bits of knowledge for the business and customers” in one place.
“If we are able to actually put information that is specific to the auto dealers, specific to key phrases, and we are able to get Google to come back to it, then it is actually going to see these guys are really organized and in the subject matter we are looking for,” said Arsenault. “And the theory is if we can do that if they are comparing us to other businesses and their expertise level on these subjects in regards to where they will put us on local search, we will win the game.”
OneBigBroadcast has writers producing content for many of the dealership’s blogs, but the blogging engine can also benefit individual salespeople.
The whole sales team at Key West Ford has their own blogs and profiles, so they can promote their own sales careers and attract visibility for the dealership. There is also a photo app within the system that can be used to create testimonial photos of customers, which can be fodder for blog posts, as well.
“From our blogging point of view, what we are doing is we are actually sending the information from all these blog posts they are doing and creating automated links so every post that we send out creates a link back to the platform,” Arsenault said. “So we have thousands of links coming back to the platform, and that is what is spiking their local search visibility.”
Utilizing community events
Multiple blogs were obviously helping their clients, but Arsenault didn’t stop there. After discovering how successful multiple blogs were for attracting local search engines, the company switched its focus to community engagement.
The next step was building community event calendars into the content management system. For example, the dealership could create an event page for a Black Friday sale, and implement what Arsenault called an online “event world,” where dealers can create a special blog, gallery and event calendar in one place.
Take the Vancouver Auto Show. Arsenault and his team ran an event for Key West Ford for the show, sending photographers down and using its event applications to blog, which pushed the dealership to the top of search results for the show during the event.
“The idea is yes, we can attract local search during the events, but what we found is when we were doing the blogging, we would have trouble finding the blogs again, because they would be back 50 or so posts; so, this way, you have got an anchor for the events these guys are running in their local communities,” said Arsenault.
Arsenault shared this part of the content management system is focused on extending a dealership’s search reach into areas and topics “they really shouldn’t show up in.”
“So we are extending their reach in the community in different search terms that they wouldn’t normally be associated with by building specific applications,” he said.
Crowdsourcing for SEO
Yes, there are many things a business can do to improve their search results, but how about using your own customers to drive SEO?
That’s just what Arsenault asked when promoting a Key West Ford contest. The company decided to promote the event hashtag as well as creating a “hashtag experience” on the event page housed on the dealership website where social posts of customers using the hashtag are aggregated.
“It gets them out in the community and stimulates crowdsourcing,” he said. “We can create as many of the hashtag experiences and call them whatever we want from our console. It’s all about attracting visibility to their platform and trying to engage social.”
The company’s event galleries also have the capability to use a Google Maps location and populate it with photos that will tell the viewer about what happened at the past event.
“Again, the whole idea is to attract visibility by putting everything on a common platform," Arsenault said.
Another interesting tool OneBigBroadcast is utilizing to enhance visibility for its clients is creating communities for businesses, which the company thinks is a big “sleeper” within the industry.
“Facebook and Twitter get people to your gate, but it’s the communities that nail the people down and attract them to your business,” said Arsenault.
At Key West Ford, the dealership has an online community customers can join for free, but they have to rejoin every month to be entered into a $300 contest draw, which keeps them coming back to the site.
“The whole idea is involve and engage the community members on a deeper level. It’s free, members have privileges, and from that standpoint, we know on a much deeper level what people are doing on the site,” said Arsenault.
Volkswagen Canada kicked off December with a nationwide apology campaign, utilizing ads featured in over 100 newspapers across the country as well as a digital campaign to apologize to the Canada’s Volkswagen owners for the company’s damaged reputation following the diesel scandal uncovered earlier this year that is still not entirely fleshed out.
Thomas Tetzlaff, VW Canada’s manager of media relations, spoke with Auto Remarketing Canada to help clarify the situation, saying that the point of the message was not only to apologize to the Canadian VW ownership and fanbase, as well as VW dealers, but also to thank them.
“The campaign explains the impact of this situation on our proud legacy, values and trust in the Volkswagen brand,” Tetzlaff said. “We take great pride in the base of support we have built in Canada and felt we owed it to our employees, dealers and customers to publicly acknowledge the damage done to Volkswagen’s relationship with Canadians and to declare our full commitment to restoring faith in our brand. We hope that our customers will go to our microsite for additional information, and to register directly with us so as to facilitate further communication about this issue. By registering at the site, affected TDI owners will initiate the process to receive our appreciation package.”
Tetzlaff said that the package is not intended as “compensation,” but more as a sincere “thank you” for customers and dealers maintaining their patience while the company works on a remedy for the vehicles alongside regulators.
Similar to the deal offered in the United States, the VW Canada said the “thank you” package includes:
- A $500 pre-paid credit card for use anywhere credit cards are accepted
- A $500 dealer credit, which can be used at the Volkswagen dealer of their choice for service, parts, accessories or as payment towards a car purchase
- 3 years of complimentary roadside assistance (an added three years for customers that still have their “original” roadside package in place)
“Thus far, we have received positive feedback from our customers, many of whom have already registered on the site,” Tetzlaff said. “We are hoping to reach as many of our affected owners as possible, as this will improve the flow of information, and will expedite the repair process when it has been established.”
Marketing vehicles (or anything for that matter) can be broken down into four parts: message, creative, distribution channels and measurement. Of course, what is typically implied in all of this is execution and the money that fuels this execution.
You can have all the greatest plans and strategies in the world but without the funds to execute, that’s all they’ll ever be: plans. As we’ve all found out while growing up, money doesn’t grow on trees. Raise your hand if you’ve ever buried a dollar bill in hopes that a money tree will sprout. I even went so far as to buy a “Money Tree” — I call it Ben. (Yes, Franklin)
This can especially be troublesome for smaller dealerships or groups that are starting out where advertising dollars are sparse.
Luckily, OEMs are there with co-op programs. These funds are available for your dealership to advertise the brand’s vehicles. Typically OEMs will reimburse you back with a percentage of the cost to run the advertising. In some cases, they will cover the entire cost of the program.
So, if you’re not taking advantage of your OEM’s co-op programs, you’re leaving money on the table. My guess is that 95 percent of you know that there are funds available, but it’s the co-op process that gets in the way. This time, raise your hand if you have a stack of co-op affidavits/tear-sheets that need to be submitted. I’ll bet that the total annual unused co-op funds are in the 10’s or 100’s of millions annually.
Here are some tips on how to take advantage of co-op programs for your brands:
Follow the guidelines
Sounds simple enough, that is until you start reading the 50+ paged guideline book. I was cleaning up my office just this past week and I found a stack of them: BMW, CDRJ, Ford, Mazda … all thicker than the last issue of the Strategy Mob magazine. However, you have to appreciate that OEMs (like you do … or should), need to maintain a consistent brand. As a result, OEMs have spelled out everything for you. The good news is that typically most of these requirements make sense and their “restrictions” are in line with the best practices you should have when designing an ad.
Pay attention to the specifics for each brand
While this may seem straightforward, in practice things can get tricky. For an automotive group that may represent multiple different brands the task can be fairly tedious. Heck, even if you have one brand, you may actually have four: Chrysler, Ram, Dodge and Jeep are all different brands. Some need a disclaimer (Toyota); some need the model code (Nissan); some require specifics on pricing (MSRP vs. list price). The point is, each brand is willing to provide you funds to advertise their cars. You just need to follow their rules.
Be aware of changes in guidelines
Brand standards will change from time to time and OEMs will typically send you new guidelines when this happens. It’s important to fully re-read the documentation as small details may change that will affect the approval of your ads.
For example, in May of 2015, Volkswagen changed their corporate font from “VW Utopia” to “Volkswagen Text” and more recently, Volkswagen has decided to remove "Das Auto" from the logo completely. After a grace period, any ads with the old font and the tag line "Das Auto" will be rejected from co-op funding.
Take the easy way out — Get your agency to do the legwork.
If you think this is a lot of work, you’d be right (They are giving you “free” money – after all). So why shouldn’t they want things done correctly. In many cases, each ad needs to be submitted to the OEMs for pre-approval and then resubmitted with a screenshot of the ad as it appeared “in the wild” before your dealership is reimbursed.
Think for a second about the years and years that brands have spent developing their brand. Now imagine you and all your DP and GM buddies coming up with your own Chevy, Audi, and Kia ads. Do you think they would look better or worse than the guidelines?
Now as a result of the hurdles, we’ve found that only a fraction of dealerships are taking advantage of co-op funds from OEMs. Most cite the lack of capacity or resources to submit their ads properly. Others tell us that they can’t keep up with the changing guidelines. Many have submitted ads which were rejected and that left a bad taste in their mouths.
Typically advertising agencies that specialize in automotive dealerships will have a service that will handle this process. When selecting an agency that does this, try to find one with a motto similar to “We do the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to”. This likely means they have a turnkey solution and you won’t have to do much work.
Some will charge a fee, however, the fee is usually nominal and by not taking advantage of co-op funds, you literally are leaving money on the table. In other cases you may be able to find Agency partners who are fully certified by the OEM such that all activities they manage for you are co-op approved. Many Auto Audience Network Certified Partners have taken the time to setup these relationships with your OEM and you should ask them for a list of “approved vendors”.
Remember, it’s in the OEM’s best interest that you sell more of their cars. Co-op is another tool that they provide you to do that. By taking advantage of this tool, you’re able to stretch your advertising dollars, reach more buyers and sell more cars.
What are some other interesting things you have learned about co-op funds? Or, challenges you’re facing. Share them in the comments.
This post originally ran on Speed Shift Media's Dynamic Display Advertising Blog. For more posts from Speed Shift Media, see www.speedshiftmedia.com/blog.
I’m a car guy at heart, and it’s my 5-year old son who reminded me. We all love cars – that’s why we do what we do. Their lines, their smell and the rush you get when you climb inside a car with more horses than you could fit on a football field. I love how old cars have so much character and meaning. As a tech nerd, I also love how new cars are beginning to push the boundaries of technology and connectivity. I’m an analytical guy and at the same time, I’m a feelings guy, so I choose my cars with fairly equal parts heart and head.
Like many of you, this is why I initially had so much trouble understanding VDP analytics – they were nothing but numbers!
As a leader in your dealership, you need to understand the significance of these numbers to make informed decisions about the performance of your website, and to evaluate your marketing spend. In brass tacks, you need to choose how you drive traffic to your website and your vehicle detail pages based on numbers, instead of which vendor rep is more fun (I’m not saying you think that way … I’m just saying …).
I’ll let you in on a little secret: It starts making sense when you equate website numbers to numbers you would normally find on your dealership’s lot.
Think about it, a dealer’s website is the virtual representation of a brick and mortar lot. The unfiltered search results page (SRP) is the representation of every car on your lot, and, if someone searches for all the SUV’s, that’s the equivalent to the big row of SUV’s at the back of your lot. The vehicle detail page (VDP) is the representation of a specific car on your lot – like when a customer is effectively saying I like that Black XLT.
Once you start thinking about it this way, your dealership's Web analytics start making much more sense. Instead of focusing on the technical metrics themselves, focus on the numbers that you would otherwise ask your sales manager.
Here are some of the basic (less useful) metrics.
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Website Analytics
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Real Life Dealership Equivalent
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Why it’s not as Useful
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Time on Site
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The average amount of time someone spends on your lot.
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There are many reasons why someone would come to your lot. Only one of which is to shop for cars. When you include time spent on all pages (instead of time spent only VDPs) you get a skewed result that raises more questions than answers.
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Pages per session
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The average amount of things a shopper interacts with on your lot, showroom and service center.
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This metric is the easiest to get skewed as it counts everything. Imaging if you were counting the number of times a person was interacting with the coffee machine or your dealer group’s magazine. These numbers only tell you that the shopper is doing something and doesn’t accurately tell you if a shopper is interested in your cars.
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What are some of the "more" useful metrics?
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Website Analytics
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Real Life Dealership Equivalent
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Why it’s Useful
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Time on VDP
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The average amount of time someone spends on your lot looking at specific cars.
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This gauges the level of interest people have in your cars. Typically the longer they look at a car, the more interested they are in it.
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VDP per session
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The average amount of cars a shopper looks at per visit.
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This indicates the level of interest your market has in the cars on your lot. The more cars they look at per visit, the more likely buyers are going to find the cars they want to buy.
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Return VDP views
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The average amount of visitors that come back to look at the same car.
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This determines how many people are interested in a certain car. This metric refers to the amount of people that come back into your lot to look at your cars again.
As with the behavior of someone looking to make a large purchase (a TV, a home, a car), the shoppers will typically visit the product page over and over again if they are interested in purchasing it.
Likewise, the more return visits a VDP gets, the more likely someone is interested in that car. If you begin to see spiking traffic on specific cars, you’ll likely see that car leave the lot in the near future.
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See? It isn’t so bad once you translate these virtual metrics into plain English and think about them in terms of real life scenarios. With this method, you can make sense of all the technical mumbo jumbo, discuss VDP quality in a language that’s easy to understand and make the right decisions surrounding the performance of your website.
This post originally ran on Speed Shift Media's Dynamic Display Advertising Blog. For more posts from Speed Shift Media, see www.speedshiftmedia.com/blog.
