Selling Cars with Google 101: Search

Welcome to Selling Cars with Google 101, the first in a
series of educational videos created
specifically for car dealers.
This presentation was put together by a team at Google
that works with car dealers across the country.
We've seen firsthand how Google can help you sell more
cars and trucks while saving time and money.
We want to demystify how Google can work for you.
Selling cars with Google 101 is focused on Google search
advertising.
We'll start off by looking at some research and trends that
every car dealer should know about.
Did you know this?
Americans are now spending as much time online as they are
watching TV. Both TV and the internet now account for 41%
of Americans' media consumption.
This is the new media reality.
Is your advertising strategy consistent with where people
are spending their time?
We know that not only are people spending more time
online, but that the internet is an important
tool for car buyers.
Just as a fun example to make this point, we used a free
tool called Google Trends to compare four popular search
terms, cars, restaurants, Iraq, and Britney Spears.
Which terms do you think are most often typed into Google
and searched for by our users?
So yes, cars is the most popular search term of this
pack, even beating out Britney Spears.
And remember, this just includes the term cars.
This doesn't include all of the searches for different car
related terms such as brand and model names or dealer and
price information.
Hopefully this gives you a rough picture of how many car
related search terms happen on Google.
As you can see, Google is a leader in search in the United
States for all sorts of internet searches, as well as
for car related information.
Overall, Google accounts for almost 68% of all searches
conducted in the US.
For car information, 71% of searches happen on Google.
So what are all these car buyers searching for online?
We see that many of these buyers are looking for car
dealers, but even more are looking to compare vehicles
and get detailed information about
make, model, and pricing.
And in all of these different categories, we see that the
searchers have been increasing year after year.
This search screen is hopefully
very familiar to you.
We want to walk you through the two basic
components of this page.
First is the area outlined in blue.
These are the organic, or natural, results.
These listings are found by our web spiders that crawl the
entire internet for the most relevant webpages.
These results are unbiased and unpaid.
If you aren't familiar with your strategy to appear in
these natural results you should talk to your web master
about your search engine optimization strategy.
Hopefully your web site appears on this list when
somebody searches for your dealership name.
It's less likely, however, that you will appear in the
organic results when someone searches for the makes or
models you sell.
The second section on the screen is in red.
These are the sponsored links.
They are paid advertisements that appear when you start a
paid search advertising campaign with Google.
In that campaign you'll specify which keyword search
terms you want to trigger your ads, as well as a price that
you're willing to pay.
You only pay for your ad when it is clicked on and a user
goes through to your site.
All other times your ad appears for free.
This is the cost per click, or CPC model.
When you determine what is the most you'd be willing to pay
for a click through that price gets entered into an auction.
The ads are ranked according to the price that you're
willing to pay, and the relevancy of your ads, based
on their past click through rate.
When you win an auction, you are charged only as much as
you need to pay to win that auction, which is usually less
than your actual bid.
This auction occurs automatically every time
someone does a search on Google.

Here you see some of the key benefits of paid search
advertising on Google.
First, bidding on makes and models and other car related
terms allows you to reach car buyers that are raising their
hands, actively searching the internet for car information.
Our cost per click model means you only pay when your ad is
clicked on and you never pay more than the price you set
for your campaigns.
You decide which keywords you want to bid on, and also what
the ad text will say when it appears.
Finally, by watching the performance of your campaigns
and tracking the leads they create, you'll be able to
determine your exact return on investment.
Our technology allows us to target your ads based upon
geography, so your ads won't appear for internet viewers in
places that you're not interested in.
You can target by states, DMAs, cities, zip codes, or
even a radius around a location you specify.
You decide what geography you want to target, and by using
the IP address of Google users we'll make sure your ads only
appear in the geographic area you want.

Our online interface allows you to track your campaigns
and get up to date information on how they're performing
around the clock.
You'll be able to track which campaigns are converting into
the most leads and sales, and you'll be able to make changes
on the fly to your bids, your key word
list, and your ad copy.

This concludes selling cars with Google 101.
We hope you found this presentation useful.
Our next presentation, selling cars with Google 102, focuses
on local business ads.