How to improve Google Ads performance in automotive markets
Discover the ultimate 3-step guide to help improve your Google Ads performance and overcome the biggest paid search challenges.
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Intro: Prepare to see the entire automotive search landscape
Whether you’re a global car brand breaking into new markets or managing an extensive network of dealers, Adthena can help you achieve your goals. Our award-winning AI driven, whole market view technology gives you visibility of the entire automotive search landscape, so you can:
Contextualize performance with informed search insights
Reduce cost without impacting sales
Increase sales without impacting margin
In this 3-step Enterprise search guide, reveal how leading automotive brands like Arnold Clark, Ford, CarMax, and CarGurus can improve Google Ads performance and overcome the biggest paid search challenges, and save money while increasing ROI and conversion quality.
1. Contextualize performance with informed search insights
Limited visibility and control over your campaigns at local level?
Do you know when local dealerships are using your brand terms?
Are you striving to avoid cannibalization and improve alignment with dealerships?
Are you trying to enhance performance in generics but lack insight within subset categories?
Dealerships, ask yourself:
Are you limited by the level of performance context in Auction Insights?
Do you want to enhance your understanding of organic using category-level data?
Are you trying to reduce CPAs and boost tROAS at the campaign level?
Do you understand how local-level competitors are influencing market share?
The Adthena Solution
Adthena’s award-winning solution, Local View will show you what your audiences are searching for by location, tell you which ad copy performs best and who you’re competing with.
You can get to the heart of cultural, language and needs-driven user intent by location and understand the search landscape of your target cities, countries, regions, or DMAs. You’ll also get automated alerts to threats and opportunities in your local markets, and the insight to determine distinct search term patterns and competitor strategies.
Below, we can see the spend efficiency for specified Arnold Clark locations. Spend efficiency is simply the ratio of share of clicks vs. share of spend.
2. Reducing cost without impacting sales
Is your brand protected from partner violations or fraudulent ad activity?
Manufacturers, ask yourself:
Is your goal to increase sales while minimizing costs?
Are costs surging due to dealerships bidding on brand and generic terms?
Can you identify dealerships’ top organic performance alongside active paid advertisements?
How do you detect and mitigate partner violations and fraudulent ads?
The Adthena Solution
With Adthena’s Infringement Tracker, you can catch trademark infringements and identify competitors or dealerships stealing clicks from you, driving up CPCs, and damaging your brand equity. As part of our Whole Market View solution, you can also stay on top of CPC trends by tracking key benchmarks, including CPCs in the market, competitor market share, and share or spend.
Adthena’s Infringement Tracker allows you to map and monitor all competitive and partner activity around your brand terms by the hour, meaning you can efficiently respond to trademark infringement and instantly submit trademark infringement evidence to Google. In the example below, 10 competitors, 168 ads, and 416 infringement instances have been identified on Ford.
Cannibalizing organic traffic and wasting budget on brand?
Dealerships, ask yourself:
Do you struggle to identify when you’re leading organically but still running paid ads?
The Adthena Solution
Adthena’s multi-award-winning Brand Activator identifies Google Ads bidding on brand terms a company is already winning organically and where no other competitors are bidding. These terms are automatically paused or restarted by being added or removed from your negative keyword list in Google Ads.
With Brand Activator, you could save up to 20% on brand bidding.
Brand Activator indexes your targeted brand terms to identify when your brand is #1 for a term in both paid and organic rankings, and no other brands are advertising on that term. For CarMax, $15,767 savings have been identified, with cars.com their top competitor.
Take the free brand savings test to identify your wasted brand spend
Do you struggle to pinpoint opportunities to reduce CPA at the campaign level?
Do you manually monitor the SERP to gather insights on competitor text ads and high-performing ads?
The Adthena Solution
Within Adthena’s Whole Market View, you can track the creative phrases your competitors are using across all of your search term groups and view competitor ads, giving you visibility into offers, prices and CTAs, average position, and ad frequency. With this insight available at the click of a button, you can save hours in manually monitoring the SERP.
Using Top Ads, within Adthena’s Whole Market View solution, you can see competitor desktop and mobile ads, giving you visibility into:
Offers, prices and CTAs used
How each ad is affecting the average position
Number of ads each competitor is running
How frequently ad copy is refreshed
If a competitor is AB testing
In this example, we see that CarShop has received 1,821 impressions for their “Used cars” ad. This ad has appeared on 163 search terms and has reached position one of the SERP.
3. Increasing sales without impacting margin
Is competitor search term performance going unnoticed?
Manufacturers and Dealerships, ask yourself:
How do you understand competitor sales, price points, and spend levels?
Does the absence of Google alerts on competitor shifts and ad spend result in missed opportunities?
Do you struggle to compare SQR with competitor insights, and search query coverage with competitors to identify gaps in keyword coverage?
Do you rely on manual research to track competitor and dealership activities on Google?
The Adthena Solution
Adthena’s Smart Monitor tracks creative phrases in your competitive landscape, notifying you of new or high-performing phrases used by competitors or dealerships – so you can react to market movements as they happen.
In this example, we see that cargurus.co.uk has incorporated new terms ‘analysis price’, ‘price quotes’, and ‘value price’ in their mobile ads.
Case study: Volkswagen increase brand conversions by 13%
Adthena is far more than just a data tool. It’s an insight platform that has revealed countless opportunities to improve our accounts. By using Adthena, we can identify where competitors are encroaching on our market, and quickly take action.
Laia Pérez Puigdomènech PHD SEM, PPC and Social Specialist
Below, we can see the spend efficiency for specified Arnold Clark locations. Spend efficiency is simply the ratio of share of clicks vs. share of spend.
In this example, we see that cargurus.co.uk has incorporated new terms ‘analysis price’, ‘price quotes’, and ‘value price’ in their mobile ads.
