Generations Digital Blog

Dealers spend large sums of money driving visitors to their website. They spend on digital marketing such as paid search, paid social, display ads, and purchased referral traffic. Dealers also spend on traditional media to drive organic and direct traffic to their website. The expectation is that all of this traffic belongs to the dealership, and that there is no way their competitors could ever harvest this data. However, with the growing number of pixel trackers and tra

Most dealers have heard of Google Analytics (GA), and they may know it is installed somehow on their website. They might even understand that GA gives them performance data on click-throughs, visitors, leads, etc. What many dealers don’t really know or understand is, who controls the administrative access to their analytics, and why does that matter? It matters because today a few unscrupulous automotive website providers and ad agencies are holding dealers’ Google Analytics

Of the many marketing “train wrecks” I uncover in auditing digital advertising results for dealers, the most common is runaway paid search spending. Dealers overspend, under-inspect, and blindly trust their digital marketing agencies to invest their money wisely. This is perhaps the only advertising category where a dealer gives the vendor a blank check and lets them spend money on paid keywords without a method for inspecting what a good job looks like. I’ve written about

This past weekend I attend NADA 2018 in Las Vegas. A few of my industry friends asked me how many NADA shows this was for me. I think 1995 was my first, so that makes this my twenty-third NADA show. For folks that know me, you know that what was most significant, was this was my first NADA outside of Dealer Specialties, Trader Publishing, Dominion Dealer Solutions. I had a great run with those companies, starting with my family business in Dealer Specialties, growing into

Paid search typically consumes the largest part of a dealer’s digital advertising budget, and from my experience there are many dealers who are wasting a large portion of this spend. Most of these dealers have no idea how to inspect the quality of these campaigns, and there are many reasons this waste is occurring. For instance, their keyword lists are outdated, computer generated, aren’t updated for new models, and peppered with too many short-tail broad match search terms