Whether you’re a global automotive brand or managing an extensive network of automotive dealerships, understanding consumer search habits, your competitive landscape, and location-specific threats and opportunities is crucial to your success.
When it comes to enhancing your local search marketing efforts, tailoring your approach to each specific city, state, or Designated Market Area (DMA), will give you an advantage over your competition.
We’ve identified three effective tactics that will put you in pole position within your local paid search campaigns:
1. Monitor and understand competitor trends:
Assess your competitors’ local campaign strategies. Determine if they are running local campaigns and analyze their share of clicks in various areas. This insight will help refine and adjust your own campaigns for optimal performance.
Above: Adthena’s Market Trends report showing top driving ‘Auto’ search terms across desktop ads
Using the Market Trends data within Adthena’s multi-award winning Local View solution, we see that abcmotors.co.uk has steadily lost share in clicks for paid desktop ads, whilst carsupermarket.com was able to take advantage of this. With this granular level of detail, you’re able to make real-time decisions in any local market.
Above: Adthena’s Local View solution showing search terms in the automotive industry
Within Search Term Detail, we can see that carsupermarket.com is successfully bidding on relevant keywords, “car shops”, “used cars in sheffield UK” and “used car sales sheffield”.
Observing daily and long-term trends provides insight into shifts in your rivals’ paid search effectiveness, highlighting both emerging threats and opportunities.
2. Understand your market share:
To make informed business decisions and allocate budgets effectively, automotive brands dealerships must understand their market share compared to all of their competitors. It’s essential to evaluate your share within each city, state or DMA to ensure the most effective strategies are in place for sales growth.
Above: Adthena Market Share shows share of clicks for desktop and mobile across paid ads
Within the Market Trends report, we see that tesla.com holds the largest click share on desktop, for the search term “electric car” in the state of California, whereas Honda takes the majority on mobile ads.
Through utilizing this report, you can gain insights into whether competitors are allocating a higher proportion of their budget to acquire market share. Additionally, it allows you to assess if this approach has led to increased costs per click (CPCs) for specific search terms or categories.
3. Automate ad copy analysis
Understanding overall and local market trends and your share of the market is vital to making strategic search decisions, but you also need ad and campaign-level intelligence to optimize creative, connect with automotive shoppers, and capture sales.
The Google SERP is extremely competitive and automotive advertisers need every edge possible. What ads and calls-to-action are resonating with consumers and driving clicks? What price points are your competitors or dealerships offering, and which messages are hitting home? Are rivals promoting specific deals or infringing on your brand?
Above: Adthena’s Top Ads report shows top competitors for ‘Auto’ generic keywords
In this example, we see in Top Ads that cargurus.com has achieved top position on the SERP, within the Los Angeles DMA.
The manual monitoring of ad copy demands a significant amount of time, in fact, search marketing teams can spend up to 10 hours daily on this task!
Automating analysis of competitive ad copy eliminates these time and budget drains and their associated risks.
Adthena’s automated tools provide insights into the keywords associated with each competitive ad, their duration, frequency, performance on the SERP, and even the spending of competitors consuming their click share. Instantly, you can see the alignment between ad copy and performance.
With this analysis, you can see exactly how your ads and those of your competitors are performing, including estimated impressions and clicks. This gives you the power to ensure every ad and campaign has the right message to outperform competitive ads and bring in sales.
Drive your local search strategy with Adthena’s Local View
From local and market-wide trends in your search landscape to the most detailed competitive analysis of ad creative performance, Adthena gives you the intelligence you need to maximize your search performance and sales.
Get started with Adthena’s Local View, and you’ll immediately be able to:
- Automatically monitor short-term and long-term search trends for each city, state or DMA, across all your key competitors.
- Track and manage your share of clicks relative to your competitors at all times
- Understand which ad messages are resonating with audiences and getting the highest impression share across markets.
- Know which specific deals, messages, and CTAs are getting the best results, so you can save time, money, and guesswork on A/B testing.
- Automatically identify when competitors have made major shifts in campaign messaging.
To achieve local search success, get in touch with Lex or download our ENTERPRISE SEARCH GUIDE: Take pole position within competitive automotive markets.
