How to Improve Your Remarketing/Retargeting Campaigns For Car Dealers
Remarketing (or Retargeting) is the advertising tactic of targeting users with your ads on other websites after they have visited your site. This is often done to help reinforce your brand, bring visitors back to your sites, and convert more sales.
The Advantages Of Remarketing/Retargeting
In today’s marketing age, when digital techniques like search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising are extremely popular, remarketing/retargeting will give companies a boost in the efficiency of their online campaigns. Larry Kim, WordStream founder and CEO of MobileMonkey, stated on Moz that digital ad remarketing/retargeting is an excellent technique for businesses because it helps them turn abandoned page visitors back into leads, improve brand recognition and recall, and increases user engagement. Kim’s article reported that 18 months after beginning remarketing/retargeting, WordStream saw an increase in overall traffic, return visits, and the average length of time spent on the site by visitors.
For car dealerships, retargeting can help sway buyers that are not sure about whether or not they want to purchase a new automobile. People who are thinking about buying an item with a longer path to purchase, like a car, will often spend up to two or three months researching on websites related to cars they are interested in, including dealership sites. Keeping a dealership brand on a prospect’s radar can be integral in swaying them to do business with the dealership. Because of the value of remarketing for businesses in the automotive industry, the issue of how to improve remarketing campaigns for car dealers has become very important.
Although retargeting can be successful in building an organization’s brand – and in an ideal case, persuading a buyer to make a car purchase – retargeting is also a big challenge for car dealerships. The main obstacle to retargeting is that it can be difficult to glean important customer information from a few, or even a single-page visit. For dealers with a low number of unique page visits, it is also difficult to access a sufficient pool of prospects for retargeting. An increasing number of car dealers today are spending time thinking about how to overcome these obstacles to improve retargeting campaigns.
How Digital Advertising Helps Retargeting
One of the first steps to improving retargeting for dealerships is to focus on building a good-sized pool of visitors whom you can retarget. This step requires patience: building a retargeting pool does not happen overnight. The process can take multiple months to complete, but both the speed of pool building and the size of the pool can be improved by the use of targeted display advertising to find new prospects. Other traffic building digital advertising techniques including search engine optimization, search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, and display (banner) advertising are great ways to help boost a retargetable pool because they bring new customers to dealer sites. Moreover, using highly targeted display advertising to pursue customers based on important online consumer data, such as behavioral information, will greatly increase the prospect pool’s size and quality.
The next important factor in retargeting is the advertising content. Using a basic, branded ad to get the attention of the customer will often fall short of the desired goal, and the click through rates (CTR) on these kinds of ads are typically quite poor. However, by working with the tools available in some more advanced retargeting solutions, one can target ads to specific areas of your dealer site. For example, you could create an ad for vehicle service or a targeted ad for a particular model. To further improve results from retargeting, you should target even more precisely. If a prospective customer decides to check out a specific vehicle detail page (VDP), retargeting can help a dealership by showing that model to the prospect on other websites they visit. In some cases, Dynamic Display Advertising experts can enable VIN level retargeting for multiple vehicles. This gives the dealer the ability to target a customer with the exact vehicle(s) they have viewed on their website, increasing CTR dramatically and sending visitors that click on the dynamic inventory ads directly to the VDP.
Another important factor, when thinking about how to improve retargeting campaigns for car dealers, is the length of time that a customer is in the Path to Purchase. According to a Microsoft Study, the time spent in the Path to Purchase is approximately 60 days, and the time early in the funnel is not spent at the dealership level: instead, it is most often spent on automotive review and comparison sites. In order to get customers into your retargeting campaigns as early as possible, use display advertisements that take advantage of advertising networks like the Auto Audience Network (AAN). The AAN will help improve retargeting because these networks target people who are at the Evaluation Stage of the Path to Purchase, which is traditionally dominated by review and comparison websites. Reaching these prospects earlier in the Path to Purchase (or the Sales Funnel) will give automotive marketers the chance to target prospective customers much sooner and greatly increase the likelihood of converting the lead into a sale.
With the right kind of display advertising tactics in place, a car dealership can expand the success of its retargeting campaign, which will build brand recognition with prospective customers, increase return visits to the dealerships website, and improve sales.
If you have questions about remarketing/retargeting or any other part of your online advertising activities, please feel free to contact Speed Shift Media. We provide dynamic inventory display advertising solutions including VIN level retargeting. Our platform combines advertiser data in real time — inventory, promotions, and messaging — using sophisticated targeting, retargeting, and self-optimization technologies. We also offer an innovative, premium automotive display network that delivers unparalleled relevancy and engagement. We would be happy to provide a free audit of your current process.
