Dealer.com continues to advance advertising products and opportunities by leveraging strong partnerships with companies like Google.
Recently, the search engine giant announced new search ad listing placements to its mobile search engine results pages, or SERPs, to deliver a stronger user experience. Over the last few months, Dealer.com has implemented these placements with many of our dealers, and has encouraging data to support the effectiveness of this new mobile advertising experience (more on that in a minute).
Google asked itself how to create a more engaging – and more converting – paid search experience for mobile shoppers. Traditional paid search listings are essentially expanded text ads, taking up a lot more screen space to display things like sitelink extensions, and certain linkable calls to action, to name a few. It turns out that these items, while all good information, are extraneous for the mobile user. New dealership listing ads (DLAs), on the other hand, provide a more structured, cohesive, and simpler format to enhance the delivery of highly actionable ad results to shoppers based on their local intent.
Consider the two images below:
The first things you may notice are bigger phone call and directions icons. Research shows that calling a dealership and locating a dealership are the two most frequent actions taken by auto shoppers looking for dealer information on a mobile device*. The importance of this change is underscored by Google’s declaration that more searches are now performed on mobile devices than on desktop. Because mobile now accounts for more than 50 percent of auto queries, DLAs that are mobile-optimized will advance Google’s mission to provide a great user experience, and get more shoppers contacting or finding your dealership more quickly. Simply, DLAs will help local dealers better connect with their on-the-go customers.
Dealer Listing Ad results thus far have been very positive with 155 percent more clicks and a nearly 32 percent less cost-per-click than traditional mobile paid search ads. This means that customers are more engaged with these ads and are finding the information they’re looking with greater efficiency.
*Source: Mobile Research from Automotive Path to Purchase Study, 2014.