97% of people looking to purchase, repair, or customize a car start their journey online.

Within any particular industry in the automotive space, it’s clear that the online space is something you need to take advantage of. Search advertising in particular is a strategy you have to take advantage of as soon as possible, especially because Search is the first place people turn when they need auto maintenance information quickly, as well as it’s where every potential customer starts their journey.

To really take your search marketing strategy to the next level, here are a few secrets that we use for our marketing.

Optimising Campaigns to always be at the top of SERP

Although this is obvious, it is something that is not easily done, unless you have lots of money to throw away or you have expert skills in analysing campaigns at a professional level.

We recommend having an extremely organised account, by having ad groups with specific keywords within a campaign – It’s suggested that around 15-18 keywords is the optimum amount.

We recommend having the ad text be specific to each ad group, and relevant to the keyword search. This way it will be pushed to the top by Googles algorithm.

Use optimised ad extensions. Google prefers ads with these as well as it boosts interactions of you search ad.

Regularly do keyword reviews on an ad set level as well as a campaign and account level. This can prevent your ads being too broadly presented to wrong audiences, with can decrease the CTR and ultimately make it’s quality score low.

When reviewing data, it’s important to review trends. What is working efficiently, what has the highest impressions, what are people searching. From this data you can make informed decisions on where to allocate more and less budget, which you need to do regularly (we do it daily) to optimise your campaigns for the best results!

Bidding on your competitors

It’s pretty clear that when people search for things relating to the automotive sector, many people search brand related terms. This is the perfect opportunity to take away traffic from your competitors, and to gain a new customer!

  • Ensure ad copy is persuasive!

Remember, competitors are going to have their own brand ads running for their brand keywords  too! Make sure to analyse what their brand advert consists of, and make yours even better than theirs, with more call to actions and discounts and promotions!

  • Add value!

If you are able to include a price that is better than a competitors make sure to bring that in! You can add more value by including ‘limited time deal’ or ‘huge sale’ which can encourage people to act quickly.

Fast and efficient landing page

You want the page that the consumer comes to from the search ad to be as quick, informative as well as not too overwhelming. It’s important to know what works and what doesn’t work for your landing page. If it is too broad, people are likely to click off, if they cannot navigate round the site, they are likely to click off. To fully optimise your landing page, you can review competitors with similar ads to yours, and see how their landing page is and how the experience on their site is. It’s the easiest way to get a feeling of what will work and what will not work.

Remember, there’s pros and cons to everything, which differ from industry to industry. What works for a regular service page might not work for an emergency breakdown page.

Overall, we know it can be hard to manage the ins-and-outs of campaigns, to make them work on an intricate level, especially when you are managing a whole automotive business, or any business in fact! We at Blue Thirst can help manage your online strategy, providing AMAZING results. Get in contact to find out more about what we can do for your business.