Generations Digital Blog

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

None of us like being copied. We want to be unique, have our own style, our own design. Now if we’re talking about our business marketing, we definitely want to be unique, especially if your dealership is paying good money for a website, and thousands more on paid SEO. Unfortunately for many dealers nationwide, they are saddled with a cookie-cutter design for their website's fixed operations pages. It’s surprising how many dealers are not inspecting their fixed ops pages for

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 For instance, their keyword lists are outdated, computer generated, aren’t updated for new models, and peppered with too many short-tail broad match search terms

I'm enjoying my new role consulting with dealer principals, VPs or partners on their digital marketing investments. Working one-on-one with these business owners to help them both shed waste, and make better investments is fulfilling. While I've uncovered many areas of waste for dealers I consult with, the most consistent problem is managers paying attention to the wrong success metrics for paid search. I can’t really fault the dealers, since they are depending on their vendo