Q: What are the trends in Internet marketing in 2008?
Smith: One of the biggest trends in 2008 will be implementation and use of true ROI measurement tools that will give dealership owners and general managers the ability to see exactly what they get in return for their Internet advertising budget.

Internet marketing brings new customers to all of the profit centers of a dealership; sales, parts, service etc. and smart dealers understand that measuring results in each of those areas is important. We’ll see a vastly different Internet landscape over the next couple of years.  Internet advertising will continue to evolve and staying ahead of the competition is key.  Search Optics has the technology and industry experience to keep our dealer clients ahead of the curve. 

Q: What do you see as the near-term challenges for local dealerships?
Smith: I foresee two big challenges.

First, maintaining a dealership's visibility on the World Wide Web. Getting a dealership to rank well on the search engines used to be easy.  However, the marketing landscape continues to grow more complex with lots of different places and ways to advertise. Results are what really matters, so our goal has always been to provide our dealers with easy-to-use information so they can make informed business decisions about their marketing. Giving a single person inside the dealership the responsibility of running campaigns and keeping up with all the new marketing trends won’t provide the results most GM’s are looking for.  

Secondly, looking at the value of Internet marketing for the entire dealership. We talked before about using Internet marketing to drive buyers to all of the profit centers of a dealership but many dealers still take the entire Internet marketing budget from the Internet department – who’s goal is to sell new and used cars, not book service appointments or sell parts. Converting visitors to parts and service customers is a great way to maximize the value of your website and marketing campaigns, so getting the parts and service managers involved and creating a budget that works for the entire dealership is really important.

Q: What is changing in terms of ROI measurement in search marketing?
Smith: Measurement and tracking technology is becoming much more sophisticated, and smart dealers will continue to embrace it. The main benefit of search engine marketing is the fact that you can measure everything and with our proprietary UPTRACS technology we can even measure phone calls generated from marketing campaigns.

With this information we can generate easy to understand ROI reporting that shows our clients exactly what they are getting each month. Many of our competitors want to talk about the “number of clicks or cost per click” but clicks don’t mean anything if they don’t bring calls and emails. We tie ourselves directly to results and our clients see those results each month. The Internet is full of scams but you can’t fake phone calls.