Category: Advertising

How to Tailor a Winning Holiday and Year-End Advertising Strategy

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The year’s quickly drawing to a close. It’s time for you to make room for next year’s incoming inventory by capitalizing on the seasonal demand of deal-seeking shoppers that are inspired by holiday sales events. To take advantage of this holiday shopping motivation and behavior, the majority of which begins with consumers researching vehicles on their phones, you need to adopt a well-funded, mobile-first strategy from an automotive advertising agency that’s focused on positioning inventory against all other dealers in your local market. Here’s how to start:

Marshal your resources.

Your most valuable resources include competitive sales reporting, and your team of digital advertising professionals that build and deploy ad campaigns.

With your ad team and sales reporting in mind, examine your inventory’s performance on search engine results pages. If your dealership ads aren’t appearing for standard branded searches, like ‘make/model dealership’ and ‘make/model near me’, then the first step is to invest more funds in your marketing area to cover the basic searches that shoppers use as they get close to buying their new or used car.

Once you’ve locked down an optimal paid search strategy for these branded terms on Google, discuss these three points with your digital advertising analyst to tap into holiday shopping demand:

– How to distribute funding across the inventory on your lot right now.

– How to close the gap to dealers selling the same make/model.

– How to leverage competitors makes/models to sell your most critical inventory.

Your team members need to understand your unique market dynamics, and how competitors are manipulating the advertising landscape to take sales off your board. OEM reporting provided to you, i.e. sales by zip, is incredibly helpful towards generating more efficient use of your investment, but is rarely shared outside the dealership walls.

 

Take advantage of a unified media solution.

Capturing shoppers’ attention when they search for ‘make/model dealer near me’ on their phones is fairly easy to do. Vastly improve your search engine visibility, and increase the likelihood that shoppers click through to your website, by investing in SEO and SEM.

But what if you could make a stronger connection with these shoppers by influencing them earlier in the process?

For example, did you know it’s possible to target a shopper who began a search for a particular make/model on a research website like AutoTrader or Kelly Blue Book? We call this ‘audience targeting’, since you put a focus on the audience and where they shop across the digital landscape (research websites, dealer sites, search engines, and display ads). By targeting the audience at the beginning of their journey towards your inventory, you add the number of touch points you can make with the highest value prospects in your defined market – at a cost far lower than any other form of advertising.

Black Friday is next week and, yes, you still have time to capitalize.

Want to start the holiday shopping season off with a bang? Start today. Here’s a quick recap to help you make more deals:

Define your market. Where are you targeting your ads? Is it a standard 30-mile marketing radius? Look at OEM sales reporting that can identify areas of weakness.

Prioritize your inventory for sales events. Which makes/models are the most critical to sell-down ahead of the new year? Are your sales goals directly aligned with current OEM offers? If you have limited funds to work with, add audience targeting to a minimum of three of your most critical models.

Draft off of competing dealers’ TV ads. What happens when shoppers see an ad featuring your competitors’ inventory? If they search for those cars on their phones, could you be serving them the first ad (with a relevant offer and message)? Are you retargeting these conquested shoppers to keep a compelling message in front of them – enough to make them return to your website?

It’s a busy time of year for dealerships. Let’s help you calm things down with an ad strategy that will optimize your dealership’s digital visibility, and steer shopper traffic to your showroom. If you need assistance and don’t know to whom to reach out, please send me an email at joe.mescher@coxautoinc.com and I’ll be happy to connect you with the right team member.

Joe Mescher is a media sales director at Dealer.com

Evolving Your Marketing Strategy with Social Media

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There are 1.7 billion active monthly Facebook users and another nine hundred million using Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. To put it another way, about 37 percent of the world’s population are using at least one of these social media platforms. Of this 37 percent, a significant portion are actively shopping for goods and services – including cars. With such a concentrated and interconnected pool of potential consumers, easy to target and frequently engaging the platforms, it’s no wonder marketers continue to flock to social media in droves.

While it’s clear that social media, once considered by many as a promotional afterthought, has evolved to become a core element of most businesses’ marketing strategy, it isn’t clear why many auto dealerships continue to miss countless sales and customer relationship-building opportunities due either to an outdated and shaky social strategy, or none at all.

If you’re “on” social media, maybe your dealership isn’t seeing much ROI attributable to a social strategy. Perhaps social media seems intimidating or a nuisance, another digital distraction pulling you away from day-to-day operations. For whatever reason, social just doesn’t make sense for your dealership.

We’re here to help you understand that it does. And not only that it makes sense, but that with some simple steps and a little bit of marketing know-how, a sound social media strategy will greatly improve your bottom line. Here’s how to get back on track:

1. Ensure the accuracy of your brand is reflected across all social channels.

Check your contact information listed on all social media accounts. Is it correct? Are your dealership’s profile and cover photos up-to-date and optimized to reflect your dealership and brand? There’s room for lots of customization on social media platforms, giving you ample opportunity to present to the world the most polished, professional, and informative version of your business. Treat your social accounts like an extension of your store.

2. Stay active.

Once you’re in, you’ll need to stay in. Keep close tabs on your social accounts so that you can respond to comments, questions, and reviews. Lots of people will look to contact you through social media.

Just as important is your content flow. Going days without posting to your social sites can create a negative experience for followers and/or potential customers. But post too much and you compromise the value of the posting strategy as a whole.

Look to post fresh and relevant content once every other day. We’re not talking lengthy prose or dissertation quality here. For starters, take a new car off the lot once a week for a photo shoot and post the pics with some simple captions. (Don’t use stock inventory photos.) Feature staff or customers who’ve recently purchased a vehicle from you. Ask their permission, take their photos, write a quick blurb about them and their experience and Voila!, you’ve just created fresh content. Change it up a bit, too, by peppering in car reviews and other articles written by reputable publications featuring the inventory you’re selling. Actively share and retweet. Ensure that the content is engaging, timely, and relevant. Don’t rely on auto-feeds, which are not considered active posting. And don’t forget to leverage OEM marketing efforts to align with national campaigns at your local level.

3. Make social media management a key function of your internet sales team, or hire a dedicated social community manager.

Your dealership is a busy place. You’ve got your entire physical operation to run, customer walk-ins to handle, incoming inventory, a bustling service department, et cetera. And then there’s the matter of managing your digital operations as well, including social media. If you rely on staff untrained in current social media practices to handle this part of your digital marketing, you’re probably not going to see good, if any, results. Hire a dedicated social community professional – one who manages budgets for social advertising, has some design experience for graphics and illustrations, is a decent copywriter, and knows how to interact with your social community – or invest in training for existing staff to perform these skills. If this isn’t a possibility, the right digital provider can often manage social communities on your behalf, including gathering and coordinating inventory assets and optimizing across the major social platforms.

4. Include social media in your marketing strategy.

For all of the reasons to use social media mentioned above, add these stats:

– 92 percent lower cost per vehicle details page view.

– 66 percent lower cost-per-click.

– 45K+ vehicle detail page views.1

Facebook continues to blur the lines between social media and research platform, as products like Facebook Dynamic Ads are bringing display advertising into the social sphere. If social media sites let businesses advertise products, then dealers need to place social in the same category as website and advertising when examining marketing strategy. It’s digital marketing, and it all matters.

5. Budget for social media spending.

You’re going to need to allocate funds specifically for social media, which means including this expenditure in monthly, quarterly, or annual budgeting meetings. While establishing an account for most social media sites is still free of cost, Facebook and Twitter organic posts (content you post to your newsfeed and don’t promote) are not nearly as effective as they once were. To serve your content to high quality shoppers in their news feeds, you’ll need to actively promote, or pay, for placement.

Using social media is more than worth it; it’s just as valuable as having an optimized website and advertising strategy. By using social media’s simple (and fun) brand-building power, and combining it with a regular cadence of organic and promoted posts, your dealership is going to start connecting with a specific audience of motivated shoppers in your target market that you previously may have had a hard time reaching. Keep at it, experiment, and make sure that social is known throughout the business as key component of marketing strategy.

Sean Slattery is the social community manager at Dealer.com and Dealertrack

1Results reflect three-month performance of dealer group using Dealer.com Facebook Dynamic Ads.

Learn how Dealer.com, DARCARS and Facebook partnered to employ Facebook Dynamic Ads to increase and control website traffic.

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Dealer.com, DARCARS and Facebook partnered to integrate Facebook Dynamic Ads—a new and innovative digital marketing product—into DARCARS’s existing advertising platform. The following case study shares how Facebook Dynamic Ads addressed each of DARSCARS’ digital advertising goals and proved incredibly successful as an accompanying advertising strategy.

Download the Case Study

3 Steps to Help You Make the Most Out of Your Summer Retargeting Strategy

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Every retail industry has its time to shine during the year. Summer happens to be that time in the auto industry. With shopper traffic and next year’s incoming inventory increasing with the temperature, car-buying and car-selling is top of mind. Your dealership knows this, but unfortunately, so do your competitors. An easy way to keep ahead of online competition this summer is to employ a robust retargeting strategy to ensure your brand and inventory remain with your customers at every click. Here’s how:

1) Be where consumers spend their day online.

Facebook and Google are two of the world’s most popular websites, and boast a massive user database comprising people from varying backgrounds and interests – veritable goldmines of shopping behavior intel. On tap are two new digital advertising products that should be top of mind when looking at your current online advertising plan:

-Facebook Dynamic Ads

Facebook Dynamic Ads are essentially your dynamic ads reformatted to fit into users’ Facebook newsfeed. It has all the same features as a regular dynamic ad, including a direct link to the Vehicle Detail Page (VDP). But here is the kicker – we retarget customers across devices. Let’s say a shopper views the dealership’s website on his PC, but then checks Facebook on his mobile device – your Facebook Dynamic Ad will be seen on the mobile device.

-Google Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

Google Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) uses your website’s remarketing pool to bid on users searching for relative keywords on Google more competitively. This places your ad at a better position, increasing your chances of capturing a second, third or fourth visit to your website over the competition.

What does this process look like? Let’s say a potential customer just got a summer bonus, and that Audi parked outside the office looks really nice gleaming in the sunshine. She hops online and checks out an Audi on your website, gets pulled away into a meeting, and leaves the site. The meeting ends and she is back to her computer, typing a specific Audi model into the search bar. We bid higher to show your dealership’s make-model ad at the top of the search results, since this shopper has already been to your site.

2) Increase online “Be Backs”.

When the customer leaves your dealership site and moves on to another site, it’s essentially like a showroom customer telling you he’ll “be back”. How do we make sure he’ll actually come back? We immediately retarget that customer by placing your display ad above the game stats he’s scoping on ESPN.com, within his newsfeed as he scrolls through Facebook, and alongside the patio furniture he’s researching on Amazon.com.

3) Keep shoppers in the pool.

A successful remarketing campaign keeps shoppers coming back and engaging with your website. By continuing to build your remarketing pool, we can track them through a tracking window. Dealer.com’s is 30 days. This means that once shoppers click on your dealership site, they’re automatically added to the retargeting pool. No matter where they go online, they’ll see your display ads for 30 days with a frequency cap of 10 retargets per day. And if during those 30 days they go back to your site, it restarts that 30-day tracking window.

Let’s take that a step further and say a shopper is already in the remarketing pool, is served a display ad, and she doesn’t click on the ad. We keep track. If within four days that shopper goes back to your dealership site, we know because we tracked her through a four-day view through window. We know this shopper’s online path, and can benchmark the digital campaign’s performance to make the most out of your advertising spend.

Summer means heat, sunshine, activity, and new cars.

Capture your optimal shopper traffic online with a data-driven retargeting ad strategy that works your investment harder for those shoppers that have already shown interest in your inventory.

Learn More About our Summer Heat 2016 Digital Retargeting Promo! Dollar for dollar match through August. Click here for more information.

Check out our Keys to Summer Advertising Success eBook here

New Dealer Automotive Ads from Google Have Resulted in a 30% Jump in Click-Through Rates

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On March 30, Google announced that it was releasing Model Automotive and Dealer Automotive ads. Model Automotive ads are “a new mobile ad format now available to all OEM automotive advertisers in the US,” but the Dealer Automotive ads are what’s exciting for the retail community.

“Dealer Automotive ads let us [make the car buying process better] by giving shoppers the option to find the closest dealer, get directions, or call them for more information,” says Chris Vessey, Dealer.com’s director of digital media solutions. “Results to date have been incredible. This format is driving 30% higher click-through rates and has increased website visitors from intent-based dealership queries by 40%.”

What are Dealer Automotive ads?

Google reported that dealership + location queries (i.e. “dealerships near me”) doubled in the past year. As such, it built Dealership Automotive ads to make the buying process simpler for the user. When a shopper submits a dealership + location query, the ads that appear in the search engine results page (SERP) will feature the location, directions, and a click-to-call button of nearby dealerships at the top of mobile search results.

What does this mean for me?

These new Dealership Automotive ads have been automatically enabled on all Dealer.com advertising accounts and will replace standard text ads on mobile for eligible queries. Whether or not a query is eligible depends on its content: Google is focusing on queries that include dealership type + location type queries, i.e. “Nissan dealer(s)”, “Nissan dealership(s)”, “Nissan Burlington VT” or “Nissan dealer(s) nearby”.

Whether or not your ad appears is still dependent on the standard algorithm – quality score x max bid – but proximity will play a bigger role. Let’s say two dealers have comparable quality scores and bids but one is five miles closer. We can assume the closer dealership will show up above the other. Remember, however, that shoppers are much more likely to travel further these days to purchase a car.

Talk to your advertising provider and make sure that you have these new ads enabled and determine a strategy about your site extensions and call outs.

Annie Ode is the advertising product marketing manager at Dealer.com

The Most Important Factors Affecting Your Ads’ Ranking on Google

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QS x MB = AR

No, this isn’t the new slope-intercept form and there won’t be a quiz at the end of this article. We’re here to talk paid search ad performance and the simple equation above is very important to your success. Let me make it a little clearer:

Quality Score x Max Bid = Ad Ranking

Your bid is how much you’re willing to pay on specific keywords, which your automotive advertising agency will determine based on your overall investment as well as your sales strategy (i.e. bidding higher on your best sellers vs. your stales). They should, however, also be helping you on that first part of the equation, Quality Score, to ensure you have a high ranking.

Let’s explore a couple ways you work with your digital advertising provider to improve your Quality Score (QS) and increase your click through rate (CTR), which increases your ad rank on the Google’s search engine results pages (SERP).

Enable Sitelink Extensions

What are they?

Sitelinks are an extension located underneath a Google paid search ad that can be visible on the SERP when an ad is in a top position (most likely positions 1-3, but Google does not guarantee it). These sitelinks are linked to a corresponding landing page. If a car shopper searches for “Snow Tires in Burlington”, an ad would pop up with a sitelink for “Winter Tires” (see the example ad). The shopper then clicks the “Winter Tires” sitelink and is taken to a page that shows tire inventory and deals.

Why should I care?

Sitelinks influence what Google calls “expected clickthrough rate” (CTR), an important factor when calculating Quality Score. The more shoppers that click on your ad, the more relevant and customer friendly you seem to Google, which increases your Quality Score. When sitelinks are enabled, the ad looks bigger, more compelling and eye-catching to the shopper. Additionally, sitelinks give shoppers an immediate choice as to where on your website they want to shop (new, used, parts/service, etc.). Both of these factors mean your ads have a better chance of getting a high CTR and, therefore, your expected CTR is higher, possibly making your Quality Score higher.

Enable Callout Extensions

What are they?

Callout extensions are snippets of text that enhance your existing ad copy. For example, the same shopper searches for “Winter Tires” and the callout extension will read: “Hurry, Limited Inventory – 4 for Price of 3”. If shoppers click on the callout extension, they land on whichever page the ad is pointing.

Why should I care?

Callout extensions follow the same logic for QS and expected CTR as sitelinks. When enabled, the ad again looks bigger, more compelling, and eye-catching to the shopper, making your QS and expected CTR stronger.

Keep Your Ad Copy Consistent

What is it?

Ad copy are the words that make up your paid search ads, and Google’s have three parts: a headline, a display URL, and two description lines. Ad copy is created by your digital advertising partner based on your specific dealership (inventory, service department, etc.) and should be set when you launch a campaign.

Why should I care?

Changing standard ad copy can negatively impact QS and ranking. When ad copy is constantly refreshed, your ads lose history and, consequently, lose trust with Google. When Google trusts you less, your QS could drop and, even though your bid stays the same, your ad ranking could drop as well.

When you choose to enable sitelinks and callout extensions, and leave ad copy intact, your history and trust level with Google is maintained. Your digital advertising partner should use this strategy for incentives: sitelinks can deep link to a page about the incentives while keeping the ad copy history consistent.

Summary:

Quality Score x Max Bid = Ad Rank

Even though your ads won’t serve sitelinks or callout extensions every time your ad is served, having them enabled and eligible on an account helps QS and expected CTR, increasing your Ad Rank. And keeping your ad copy as consistent as possible means Google trusts you more, and prevents you from having to start from zero each month.

Annie Ode is the advertising product marketing manager at Dealer.com

5 Advertising Tips to Help You Move Your Used Inventory

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Remember 2012, when the automotive industry got an adrenaline shot to the heart a la Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction? Following several years of unpalatable news, depressed growth, and a sputtering economy, the automotive industry rejoiced when numbers finally sprang up, specifically in one category: leases. Those deals had us jumping for joy as hundreds of thousands of new automobiles drove off lots across the country.

Now, with 2016 just around the corner, it’s time to think about all of those leases once again in the form of lease turnovers.

According to Auto Finance News, “The volume of expiring automobile leases is on track to increase 100,000 units – 5% in 2015 and then skyrocket another 800,000 units – 35% – in 2016.”

That’s a big number, but don’t let it freak you out. As you can read in Auto Remarketing, moving your pre-owned vehicles makes you money pretty quickly and easily, so your attention should be even more focused on used vehicles as we move into 2016.

But how do you attend to that?

Start by asking yourself these questions: Do you have used and/or certified pre-owned campaigns running? Are you running any brand awareness building campaigns to get the guy who turns in his lease down the road to run over to you to get his next car? If not, let’s get on this stuff.

Paid search ads.

1. If you’re running a dealer general and new vehicle campaign (we hope), don’t touch those.

2. Talk to your paid search advertising provider about investing in a used campaign and make sure it helps you determine the most important models to move. Your advertising provider should:

– Work with you to get the pulse of your local market. You might have just gotten in a sweet convertible, for example, but if you’re up here in Burlington, Vermont, like we are, nobody’s buying that ride in January.

– Thoroughly review your inventory with you. What are you deepest in? Customers like to see options when they search for a vehicle. Are you more likely to move trucks than sedans? Let’s focus on trucks.

– Help to include the deals and promotions you may be running. If everyone’s turning in leases, you have to stand out from the guy down the road.

Display ads.

3. Make sure you’ve got real, on-lot photos of your used vehicles. Stock photos are a no-go here. Customers won’t trust you if you don’t show them what you’ve really got available and its condition. This is immensely important in used vehicles.

4. People are going to be turning in leases all over town. By incorporating a used vehicle display campaign, you can build local awareness of your inventory and promotions. This strategy allows you to attract new customers who turn in their lease down the street and then come into your dealership to get the next one.

Retargeting

5. I’ve said it once; I’ll say it a hundred more times: You’ve put blood, sweat, and tears into getting customers to your website. Please, please, please have your budget at a level that matches that unique visitor volume. Talk to your advertising partner to determine how to best approach automotive retargeting.

The Farmers’ Almanac predicted a dry winter for the north and a wet winter for the south, but you can take fate into your own hands with these strategies and make sure it’s a HOT sales season at your dealership.

Annie Ode is Advertising Product Marketing Manager at Dealer.com

The Importance of Impression Share

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The often overwhelming and usually confusing barrage of jargon, initialisms, and acronyms that comes with a digital advertising investment (behavioral targeting, CPC, CPL, CTR, for example) can make even the biggest alphabet fans’ brains ache (LOL).

While overwhelming, your understanding of each of these metrics is key to the ownership and understanding of the efficacy of your digital advertising dollars. When it comes to paid search, perhaps there is no more critical metric than impression share, a term which should be committed to memory and is conveyed as a percentage figure.
Google defines search impression share as: The impressions you’ve received on the Search Network divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive.
Let’s break that down: Say you have 15 percent impression share. That means for every 10 relevant search queries (automotive-focused, new car searches, lease deals, etc.) in your market area, your dealership only appears once or twice. While understanding all of the abbreviations for digital advertising might be hard, it isn’t difficult to understand that one tenth is not a good thing.
There are only TWO reasons you can have low impression share:
1. Your ads have poor ranking in the auction. Hopefully, your automotive advertising agency understands quality ad copy and does A/B testing to ensure your ads are the highest quality so this doesn’t happen to you.
2. You have insufficient advertising budget in the auction. If your budget is low, essentially your paddle was taken away at the auction block, meaning you’re not powerful enough to compete with the players in your local market area. Someone else is spending more and taking away your leads.
Want to see for yourself? Google gives you that functionality. Just go to www.google.com/AdPreview, log in, and type in a relevant search query. Make sure to change the location to your market area and then hit “Preview.”

Where are you showing up?

At the top of the search engine results page? Great! You’ve probably got a high impression share with great traffic. Your paddle is clearly visible.
On the sidebar? Bummer. You’re much less visible to customers (and you’re actually at the bottom of the page on mobile/tablet devices). Hold that paddle higher!
Not showing up? Uh oh. Better get a paddle.
Annie Ode is Advertising Product Marketing Manager at Dealer.com 

Defining the Digital Advertising Buzzwords That All Dealers Should Know

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Every industry has its own proprietary vocabulary to meet the unique demands of the work. Digital advertising is no exception. And since digital ads are nascent relative to the entire history of outbound marketing, confusion and misinformation are likely to surround the terminology that is helping shape the practice.

So what are the digital advertising buzzwords you ought to know? Which are the ones that can be used to inform strategy and improve your return on investment? And which are the ones you might steer clear of implementing?

We can help. We’ve compiled a glossary containing some of the most commonly used digital advertising terms and their relevance to Dealer.com Advertising. Let’s take a look:

Ad Extensions – A feature of an advertising platform that allows additional information (an address, phone number, business rating or additional website links) to display alongside search ads. Dealer.com leverages this offering from leading search engines.

Algorithms – A rule-based operation or set of operations of varying complexity. An algorithm, in the context of digital advertising, could be as simple as “decrease bids when availability increases above X impressions/visitors” or as complex as “increase bids until incremental cost-per-lead rises above $10.”

Attribution – A consistent data/analytics tracking framework. Cross-device attribution provides insight into visitors as they move between mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. Cross-channel attribution uses a holistic picture of all advertising and referral sources, and provides insight into how each channel influences the others at every stage of the customer engagement cycle. Improved attribution across channels and devices is a constant driver behind development and architectural work on our advertising and analytics platforms. Our goal is to provide meaningful, proven attribution model(s) to our dealer and OEM customers.

Audience Targeting – The use of behavioral attributes and advertising platforms that allow advertisers to proactively target audience segments driven by activity-based user profiles. Dealer.com works with BlueKai and DataLogix, the leaders in audience targeting.

Bid Modifiers – A simple bid rule that adjusts bids for advertising impressions by a fixed or variable percentage based on set criteria (i.e. decrease bids by 5% for mobile devices, or increase bids by 50% within a five mile radius of the dealership). Dealer.com recommends this function.

Callout Extensions – Additional text that can display below an ad. This can be information about the business, level of service, or comments on the advertised product. Dealer.com recommends this function.

Click to Call – A phone number built into an advertisement, allowing a user to call the advertising business with a simple click. Dealer.com recommends this function.

Contextual Targeting – The use of context, such as content of the page containing the advertising placement, and available user/browser attributes, to drive an automated or algorithm-driven advertising strategy. Dealer.com invests in multiple content learning/warehousing/indexing layers to take advantage of this function.

Geo-fencing­ – An advertising practice driven by bidding on all impressions available to devices within a certain geographically restricted area. This is frequently limited to a special event or specific business with the intention of capturing cross-shoppers and low funnel, in-market shoppers on mobile devices. Studies suggest that customers are visiting only one or two dealerships before making a purchase. Therefore, it is unlikely that they will “showroom,” cross-shop, or otherwise consider other makes/models. As a result, many of Dealer.com’s major OEM partners believe this will not result in an overall lift for the brand, but will rather create an unnecessarily hostile conquest environment among their franchise dealers – as well as likely annoy a competing dealership’s employees and vendors (to whom the vast majority of geo-fenced impressions would naturally be served).

Interstitial Ads­ – Advertising mainly intended for mobile devices that serves between click-throughs (requiring users to close the ad before loading the content of the page they clicked) or in-app (i.e. mobile-sized ads that display while navigating or upon exiting a game). Although the metrics look promising, Dealer.com does not currently offer them. When we are certain there is value within a Tier I/II/III advertising media mix, we most likely will.

Location Extensions – An attachment of business address and location information to an ad. This draws attention to the proximity of the business for local searchers and location-based queries. Dealer.com recommends this function.

Machine Learning ­­– The technology that allows processes and algorithms (in our case, algorithms drive real-time bidding and exchange-/channel-level budget management) to continuously improve the quantity and quality of engaged traffic, and simultaneously minimize the volume of inefficient impressions served and unqualified traffic. Dealer.com is an industry leader in machine learning.

Media Mix Modeling – The use of a cross-channel attribution model to determine the weighted value of each channel and provide an ideal mix of channel budgets to meet overall campaign goals. Dealer.com recommends this function as it drives all of our budget recommendations. It can, however, vary from dealer to dealer and over time, therefore requiring occasional monitoring and adjustment.

Native Ads ­­– Advertising that appears within actual content. This is a hot-button issue in the news/magazine publishing world, where sponsored content is often cleverly disguised and presented alongside the publication’s own content, sometimes only tangentially referring to the product receiving the sponsorship (e.g. a NY Times Online article titled Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work sponsored by the Netflix Original Series Orange is the New Black). A more benign and action-oriented form of native advertising is when single words are underlined and clickable within online articles or other digital content, or hovering over the word to cause a relevant and clickable display ad to appear. Dealer.com recommends the in-text, action-oriented form of native advertising.

Programmatic Marketing – The technology environment that allows both the demand-side (bidder) and supply-side (exchange) platforms to function in an automated way. In many cases, it involves a continuous, machine-driven optimization, ensuring each impression provides additional intelligence to make subsequent bids smarter and more efficient. Dealer.com recommends this function.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) – The auction marketplace in which bidders compete for impressions in the time it takes for a webpage to load (under .25 seconds). Dealer.com recommends this function, having substantially invested in this technology in-house.

Rich Media – Advertising creative units that expand and/or contain interactive elements, multiple click-through paths, or video. It is generally presented in contrast to “standard flash.” Dealer.com recommends this function, and will soon make it available to all of our advertising customers.

Sitelink Extensions – Links to specific pages within a website under a text ad. Dealer.com recommends this function.

View-through – The activity that takes place after a user has viewed a display ad. This can include a visit generated from any other channel (direct, organic search, other), as well as a phone call or a lead. It is increasingly difficult to attribute view-through activity across devices, given tracking limitations on many popular mobile devices and the use of tools like Ad Block. Dealer.com believes that this is the most meaningful subset of metrics available from a display campaign. Unlike click-throughs, which are the primary KPIs for paid search, the value of display is in the influence of a served impression, which can only be measured within a view-through window.

Hopefully, this helps alleviate any confusion involving digital advertising. This list will continue to grow as this medium evolves. What are the advertising buzzwords you’ve recently been hearing a lot about? Tell us which terms you’d like to see added to our glossary. Finally, stay tuned to the blog to learn about the digital advertising key performance indicators that you should be focusing on as we approach the fall selling season.