This session, originally presented by C-4 Analytics on the Digital Dealer platform, addresses a critical challenge for 2019: the pressure to increase sales and lower costs in a cooling market. If your sales and marketing success has plateaued, the issue is that your digital presence is built on a shaky foundation due to flawed decisions made in previous years.
To tackle the increasing competitive pressure, you must make fundamental changes across the digital spectrum. The fix is not simple, but the rewards—increased sales, share, and reduced costs—are real.
The underlying principle of your entire digital presence must be the Google Buying Moments. This framework literally tells you what matters most to buyers at every stage of their 87-day cycle:
Which Car is Best? (Top Funnel Research)
Is It Right for Me?
Can I Afford It?
Am I Getting a Deal? (Bottom Funnel: Specials, Offers)
The Problem: Most dealers, unaware of this structure, are not gearing their SEO and SEM around these moments. Their efforts are being undermined by vendors who haven't aligned their services with this roadmap.
You can quickly assess if your current partners are setting you up for success by testing against these moments.
Offline/Hard Goals: Your success criteria must align with the dealership’s core objectives: Increase Sales, Increase Market Share (move up regional rankings), and Drop Cost Per Acquired Customer.
The Testing Methodology: Clear your browser history, go to a neutral location (like a Starbucks), and search like a car buyer, using the language of the Google Moments.
The Unveiling: Testing often reveals that dealers are invisible in organic search for critical moments (e.g., "Jeep special offers"), or are paying for poorly constructed PPC ads that lead to high-abandonment pages.
The good news is that the foundation can be repaired. The bad news is that it requires hard, focused work.
Eliminate Templated Content: Do not accept templated SEO that sounds like every other dealer. Your content must be unique and relevant to your local market, competitors, and buyers. Use the Google Moments to reorganize all your site content, meta tags, and schema code.
Optimize Quality Score: Your primary goal in paid search must be to increase your Quality Score. This requires tight integration between your ad copy and your landing pages. A higher Quality Score directly reduces your Cost Per Click (CPC) and makes your campaigns dramatically more efficient.
Demand Smart Partners: In evaluating vendors, ask critical questions about their business model:
Conflict: Are they supporting your on-brand competitors?
Expertise: Is your account manager Google-certified?
Transparency: Do they provide access to data sources, and do you pay the ad networks directly?
The Reality: If you were the top performer in a cooling market, would you want your competition to have the same tools? The foundation must be fixed now to ensure you don't surrender sales to competitors in an ever-tightening environment.
For a deeper dive into these topics and to hear directly from Rob Stoesser, Vice President of OEM, watch the full webinar below.