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Help Needed in Choosing Digital Advertising Company

ARobb

Green Pea
Jul 16, 2015
5
-1
First Name
Adam
Our group is looking for a digital advertising company to start SEM, Display Advertising and Retargeting. We are expanding our digital advertising with all 10 of our dealerships and want to make sure we choose the right company.

We previously used dealer.com for digital advertising at a few of our dealerships, but cancelled due to lack of communication of results. We are now considering Mudd Advertising but don't really know who else in the industry to consider as we are fairly new to this form of advertising.

Who do you guys recommend and why?
Also, who do you use and what do you like or dislike?
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!


*UPDATE: Would like to hear from dealerships only. No product or service pitching from vendors. :thumbup:
 
Hey Adam, great convo starter. Are you looking for feedback from dealers exclusively or would you like to hear from non-dealers as well?

I'd be curious to know what your group's goals and objectives are with the digital paid media? Do you need your partner to tie in the digital strategy with any traditional media initiatives? Is your digital paid media strategy just for branding, or website traffic, or will it be more targeted and campaign driven? Maybe all?

You already mentioned the challenges you had with DDC on customer service so clearly this is of concern for you in consideration of a new partner. What other top concerns or priorities are you evaluating in your next partner?
 
Hey Adam, great convo starter. Are you looking for feedback from dealers exclusively or would you like to hear from non-dealers as well?

I'd be curious to know what your group's goals and objectives are with the digital paid media? Do you need your partner to tie in the digital strategy with any traditional media initiatives? Is your digital paid media strategy just for branding, or website traffic, or will it be more targeted and campaign driven? Maybe all?

You already mentioned the challenges you had with DDC on customer service so clearly this is of concern for you in consideration of a new partner. What other top concerns or priorities are you evaluating in your next partner?

We would probably like to incorporate a little bit of all of the mentioned. Overall, we are hoping to sell more cars and service more vehicles. We are open to different ideas to help accomplish these goals.
 
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A major factor we are looking at is the percent the company is taking out for running the advertising. We don't want to pay too much for what we are getting out of their services. We want a good quality service at a reasonable price.

Also, regarding our strategy, we already have great brand awareness in the area because we've had an extremely strong tv and radio presence over the years. In that lies an issue because there hasn't been any targeting strategy. We are looking to balance out of advertising spend between all mediums, instead of only focusing on traditional.
 
Don't go with anyone who uses a % to determine their "fee" - they will always make more money by recommending you spend more so it's a conflict of interest. I typically see a fixed fee of $500 a month for most and I think that's fair. I'm not a dealer, but I've partnered with a number of vendors out there and it's all over the map.. I don't think there's a best or a worst or even a top 3 in my mind.

Things to consider:
- Ask each vendor for a ballpark spend recommendation. This can be fairly revealing
- See if you can figure out who your competitors use - not always a great idea to use the same vendor as your competitors
- Determine if you want to do inventory specific ads or not (used inventory) - this can change your vendor list specifically because many companies that specialize in that (in my experience) tend to be less great on the generic side, whereas companies that don't do inventory based adwords won't likely jump into properly doing so for a single client.
 
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Hi Adam! We've tried going with a couple different digital marketing companies, and in the end we decided on doing it in house. We cut our marketing costs by 50% and still managed to maintain the same effectiveness if not better. The key here is to find the right employee. You may have to hire a digital marketing specialist if you don't already have someone on board with a background in SEO/SEM. The benefit of doing it in house is that you have someone who is loyal to the dealership, which means better quality, faster turnaround, and one less channel to go through to get the results you want. Just my two cents.
 
Don't go with anyone who uses a % to determine their "fee" - they will always make more money by recommending you spend more so it's a conflict of interest. I typically see a fixed fee of $500 a month for most and I think that's fair. I'm not a dealer, but I've partnered with a number of vendors out there and it's all over the map.. I don't think there's a best or a worst or even a top 3 in my mind.

Things to consider:
- Ask each vendor for a ballpark spend recommendation. This can be fairly revealing
- See if you can figure out who your competitors use - not always a great idea to use the same vendor as your competitors
- Determine if you want to do inventory specific ads or not (used inventory) - this can change your vendor list specifically because many companies that specialize in that (in my experience) tend to be less great on the generic side, whereas companies that don't do inventory based adwords won't likely jump into properly doing so for a single client.

This.

I've recently seen fees that range from $600-$1,000. I'd suggest trying to find a company/agency that is smaller and local. I've expereinced issues in the past where a national company just uses some program that will create a generic strategy that yields generic results. For example, I'm in the Chicago area and have 3 Mustangs on our lot. I don't want to use up a good portion of my budget on +Mustang (yes this happened) in the winter months.

Whoever you go with take the time to learn how to use Google Analytics and AdWords. Make sure you have access to both accounts. Make sure the AdWords account that gets created is YOURS and not the company you use. Finally, like any other vendor/partner inspect what you expect.
 
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