Car Dealer PPC: 752 Leads In 90 Days!

If you want to know if a campaign is working, you must have accurate tracking.

The first problem we encountered when auditing this account was that the tracking was not set up properly.

We saw that the tracking was reporting 10’s of thousands of leads, so that seemed off.

When we dug into it, we found that this account was counting a lead every time someone hit a general page on their site – not a thank you or confirmation page, but a general page on their website.

This resulted in the campaign reporting thousands of “leads” that didn’t actually exist!

We wiped out any irrelevant conversion actions that skewed our data and started from scratch with new conversion tracking.

Our conversion “goal” was placed on the thank you page after a lead fills out a form, so we know that we actually collected the information from the lead.

In our campaign research process, we work with the client to figure out what are the driving levers of their business and what they want to target.

Once we decide on a theme, we’ll do competitive research to figure out what angles are used by competitors, what the offer should be, etc. The HOTH’s free content gap analysis tool is also available for businesses to compare keywords with online competitors.

In this case, our client wanted to target a general audience looking for used vehicles in their area.

Since the previous campaign’s data was skewed, we started fresh with 2 brand new campaigns.

The first campaign was themed around “Used Cars” and the other campaign was a branded campaign.

We crafted high-converting copy for the ads and paired them with tight ad groups. We always make sure we’re using message match to get the highest CTRs!

Then we used location targeting to limit where the ads were being served to only their local area.

In the past, the account was driving traffic to their homepage.

This is usually not optimal for lead generation campaigns because homepages are typically not designed for conversions.

Instead, we wanted to drive traffic to very specific landing pages that matched exactly what they were searching for and were optimized to convert highly.

In this case, we developed a landing page to start based around used cars. We saw that the other competitors would send the traffic to the inventory pages because people want to browse the inventory, so this became our offer.

This landing page collects the lead’s information and offers to “view” the inventory.

That way, we collect the information upfront and the client’s sales team can follow up.

After setting up proper tracking, creating new campaigns, writing new ad copy, and creating custom landing pages, we turned on the traffic…

…and the leads started pouring in!

In fact, within 90 days we had already generated over 700+ leads!

That is not including over 1,033 site visits (Not to the landing page) and also 84 actions taken for directions.

As we optimize this existing campaign, we also have plans to expand to other vehicle type-specific landing pages (used trucks, used SUVs, etc).