Dealer.com Wins Best Of Show at NADA Convention

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The 23,000 NADA Convention attendees in Las Vegas had over 1,000 booths to visit in the exhibitor hall. The 2012 Convention broke all attendance records according to Stephen Wade, NADA Chairman. The automotive industry is healthy and the diversity of exhibitors and products on display this year has never been greater.

At the NADA Convention I take time to visit the leaders in our industry as well as new comers to see what dealers will be offered in the coming year by their vendor partners. There were five products that made my Top Pick list, and I will be writing about each product separately.

This year there was one clear winner for my annual BEST OF SHOW Award. This product will be a major game changer for automotive advertising because it brings the power of display advertising and remarketing to the masses. Formerly, the level of sophistication and labor needed to create a powerful display advertising campaign was out of the hands of a dealer.

Dealer.com hit the ball out of the park with their Display Advertising Platform which will revolutionize paid search marketing for car dealers. The product will be officially released on March 1, 2012.

Any existing Dealer.com customer should be advised to request a demonstration of this powerful automotive advertising platform. In fact, I would uniformly state that ALL Dealer.com dealers should increase their paid search budget and turn on display advertising immediately.

What Is Display Advertising

Display advertising, also known as banner advertising, has two aspects: Acquisition and Retargeting. In the example above, you can see that there are “grey” boxes that represent where ads can show on a website. You can also see how this Toyota display banner advertisement would look on a live website page. Millions of websites are in the Google Display Network that offer banner advertising.

For acquisition, Dealer.com has preloaded ad campaigns that can be activated with a click of a button. For example, if you wanted to target luxury car buyers, Dealer.com has already selected the thousands of websites in the Google Network that would match that criteria and that offer banner ad space. Just drop in your ad, and your banners will appear on those websites.

How easy is it to create a Banner Ad?

This feature is what made this product an award winner. In seconds, dealers can create customized banners using thousands of images preloaded by Dealer.com. They have also included all appropriate OEM artwork for all brands, so creating CONSISTENT ads that match national advertising can be accomplished without a graphic artist’s.

If you work with an advertising agency, custom banners can easily be uploaded and used with the existing ad formats. In fact, this product is an advertising agencies dream product!

Want animated banners? No problem, they are included. Want to create banners of various sizes? No problem, all Google ad sizes are supported. Need to run banners for a limited amount of time? No problem, each banner has a start and stop date.

Increasing The ROI Of Existing Web Visitors

Once a customer visits your website, re-targeting will allow you to follow them around the Internet with your banners. Re-targeting gives dealers MULTIPLE opportunities to get visitors back to their website as well as creating considerable brand awareness.

For example, if your dealership website gets 5,000 visitors a month, by activating re-targeting you can have over 60,000 local car buyers seeing your banner ads by the end of the year.

What is revolutionary for dealers, is that the Dealer.com Display Advertising product has very granular re-targeting groups. If a customer visits your 2012 Toyota Camry vehicle detail page, you can follow them after they leave with Toyota Camry banners without ANY manual setup.

One question you may be asking, what about Fixed Ops? Imagine with a click of a button, following local consumers who visited ANY service related page with banners that offer them service specials or reminders about seasonal maintenace. The consumers will think that you are spending LOTS of money on advertyising when in fact, you are only charged if they CLICK on the banner and come back to your website.

Slick User Interface

The Display Advertising dashboard is well designed and graphically shows the current inventory and activity for all campaigns using display advertising. This is a super powerful advertising strategy for car dealers that has just been made affordable.

When you really understand this product and the potential for your dealership’s digital advertising strategy, you will thank Eric Mayhew and his team at Dealer.com for their innovation. This product is a game changer and if you need any help understanding the power of this tool, just give me a call.

Brian