News

PCG Digital Marketing in preparation for the 2010 Automotive Website Awards has launched a nationwide survey for consumers who shop and research automobiles on the Internet.

The survey contains seven questions and seeks to determine which popular automotive website is consumers first choice when shopping for a new and used car.  The survey also seeks to collect feedback on which website consumers consider the best designed for the needs.

How to Take The Survey

Consumers and members of the automotive industry are invited to participate in the 7-question survey by visiting this link:

Automotive Shoppers Survey

The data from the survey will be used in conjunction with scoring from PCG’s website review panel to determine the best designed automotive website that serves consumers shopping online for a car.

Awards For Automotive Website Design

According to Brian Pasch, CEO of PCG Digital Marketing,  “We are expanding the scope of our annual awards to include categories for website design.   We will be presenting awards for website design in three areas:

• Car Dealer Websites
• Car Manufacturer Websites
• National Automotive Shopping Websites

The awards will be presented at our annual industry breakfast in Las Vegas on Tuesday, October 12, 2010 at 8:00 am. The new awards were inspired by the success of our annual ASMA awards which recognize the best automotive websites in the industry for their search marketing architecture.”

Submit Design Candidates

Members of the automotive industry are invited to submit their recommendations for best-designed automotive websites on this link: http://www.automotivewebsiteawards.com/design/

I had the opportunity to participate in a two hour review of the latest features in the Dealer.com automotive advertising platform in August and it is clear that the Dealer.com development team in Vermont has been busy. Last year Dealer.com was a 2009 ASMA Awards dual award winner so this year they had big shoes to fill. They did not disappoint our review team.

This summary is not a full review of the SEO architecture and search strengths of the new platform. A full review will come when PCG Digital Marketing presents the 2010 ASMA Awards and Study Report on October 13, 2010 in Las Vegas.

It is hard to improve on a product that has so many strengths but Rick Gibbs, CEO of Dealer.com, has managed to inspire his team to greatness. One of the highlights of the presentation was the demonstration given by Eric Mayhew who is the chief architect behind their TCD Platform (Total Control Dominator). The Dealer.com TCD platform is truly one of the most important automotive advertising tools that car dealers can utilize for digital marketing success.

TCD is best described as a car dealer’s personalized digital advertising dashboard. TCD directly communicates with Google, Yahoo and Bing paid advertising networks so car dealers can adjust Pay-Per-Click budgets and targets without being a Digital Marketing Geek.

TCD is Google Adwords on steroids!

(If I had to rename the product I would call it Total Competitor Domination.)

Dealer.com TCD digital advertising platform takes business operating rules and translates them into actionable tasks in Google, Yahoo and Bing’s paid advertising network. One rule could be to advertise all off-make used cars as soon as they come into stock.

Another rule could be to start a weekend advertising campaign which offers a $2,000 reduction off of MSRP on select new models starting at 5:00 PM on Friday. Google Adwords out of the box is not designed for the average Internet Sales Manager to operate proficiently and in many cases, self-managed Adwords campaigns can be very costly to dealers.

In the screen shot above, a dealership executive or Internet Sales Manager can easily see their current cost per lead and current balance. Need to make a change? Slide the $ button to increase or decrease spending. The Marketing Focus panel allows high level adjustments of spending by marketing focus. Do you want to increase the distribution of spending in your current budget to include “Used Vehicles”? Simply click on stars 1 – 5 to activate those keyword goals.

Innovative Phone Number Tracking

Dealer.com has integrated phone number tracking with all Pay-Per-Click campaigns. You may not be impressed by that fact since other companies offer similar services. However, Dealer.com takes it to the next level by scraping all pages on the dealer’s website that has a phone number and replacing it with the PPC tracking number. This includes all custom text content pages created by the dealership staff or advertising agency that may have embedded different phone numbers.

This creates more accurate PPC campaign metrics so more calls can be attributed to their true source of visitor engagement.

What is brilliant with TCD is that once campaigns are setup, these high level executive controls can really keep the dealer engaged with digital advertising success. I could write a 20-page report on the unique benefits of TCD but that is not the focus of this overview. Suffice to say that Dealer.com clients have a distinct advantage in automotive digital advertising if they choose to leverage the power of TCD.

Automated Integration of Dealer Inventory

TCD is the leader in integrated car inventory management that is seamlessly connected to Google Adwords as well as Yahoo and Bing PPC services. Pay Per Click advertisements can utilize information in the dealers DMS about any new or used car in stock. (See graphic below) Dealers who use PPC campaigns for used cars will save significant setup time if they compare the time it takes to create campaigns for individual used cars.

Behind these well-designed executive level controls is an amazing drill down user interface that can control every detail of a Google Adwords campaign from inside TCD. In the graphic above, dealers can decide what time slots to allocate their paid advertising dollars.

This panel also provides check boxes to turn on or off their powerful integrated inventory advertising features. Other automotive website providers can operate Google Adwords from inside their administrative panel but offer little in terms of user interface and integrated business intelligence rules.

Dealer.com has even enhanced the Google Adwords platform by adding new geo-targeting functionality that even Adwords does not provide. Dealer’s ability to create custom advertising “bands” could not be easier with the custom interface provided by TCD. What this means to potential critics is that TCD does not “dummy-down” Adwords so proficient PPC experts will not be held back.

It is hard to capture my excitement for the TCD platform because there is nothing on the market more perfectly designed for car dealers who believe in paid digital advertising, aka Pay-Per-Click (PPC). I tip my hat to Eric Mayhew, TCD’s chief architect, because not too many people can claim that they reinvested Adwords functionality for the automotive industry.

One more kicker that Eric added to TCD put a smile on my face. Dealer.com looks at the top organic search phrases that bring consumers to a dealer’s website and that produce leads. If these keywords are not in the current Adwords campaigns, they can be automatically added. Slick!

Those that don’t believe in the benefits of PPC will be out of business shortly. Why? Because Automotive SEO strategies cannot place a car dealer on Google Page One for broad search terms like “Toyota Camry,” “Used Cars,” or “BMW Dealer.” As long as consumers continue to use broad search phrases, dealers will need to invest in Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns to stay on Google Page One.

Managing OEM Incentives

Dealer.com announced a new integrated Incentives Manager package after the 2009 ASMA Study was completed. This month we had the opportunity to drill down into the features of this add-on product. Car dealer websites are notorious for having “specials” pages blank and clumsy integration of manufacturer incentives. Normally, these incentives are not listed on inventory pages where consumers spend the majority of their time on a car dealer website. Go figure!

With Dealer.com Incentives Manager, dealers can leverage direct incentives data streams to their dealership website. These incentives can be controlled to integrate with car inventory listing pages as well as car detail pages. Attempting to integrate incentives manually is impossible and that is why this feature is a great value to Dealer.com customers. Since consumers “shop price” as part of their online purchasing decision, having the lowest price in real-time can make a big difference in lead volume.

Not to dwell on the TCD platform again, but Dealer.com can also take the real-time OEM incentives and create PPC campaigns that advertise their current programs. This is another innovation that is ground-breaking and a time saver for dealers who like to advertise OEM incentive programs and be first to market.

Automotive SEO Architecture

Once again, the Dealer.com administrative management tools show careful consideration to the skill levels of car dealer employees. The user interface to change SEO Page Titles and META tags continues to be a breeze.

One of the nicer elements of editing pages in Dealer.com is that once you are in editing mode, you can navigate through the website using the same menus that visitors use. This may not seem important but it is a time saver. Try matching website pages to cryptic back-end file naming conventions and before you know it, you can waste hours of your time.

The Dealer.com Page Builder tools continues to grow with more widgets (see graphic on right) to create pages on the fly.

The Page Builder tool is intuitive and customers do not need to call technical support to create a blank page to edit.

One limitation in the current version of the software is that custom pages cannot be placed more than two levels down in the navigation tree.

Content is King

Consumers search for answers and recommendations for the questions that are top of mind and car dealers need to build content on their websites to meet this need. Dealer.com has a multi-pronged approach to adding content; video blogging, integrated car reviews, and consumer reviews.

The video blogging feature creates optimized blog pages for each car in stock with unique text and META tags based on the audio script for the vehicle. This feature creates a large number of content pages that are indexed by Google which has many benefits from an SEO perspective.

Consumers who purchase a car from a Dealer.com dealer can add their comments on the car that they purchased. Dealer.com will compile and leverage these positive consumer comments on similar cars in stock. Over time, this feature will allow car inventory pages to have more content and targeted keywords to increase the authority of their website pages. This is another example of Dealer.com’s leadership in applying proven Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies.

Dealer.com offers a blog with their base platform which is a customized WordPress installation. This was also added after last year’s ASMA Awards. This move further reinforces the automotive industry’s growing love affair with content building tools. I’ve been preaching that all dealers need to have content writers as part of their advertising budget. Dealer.com’s latest platform offers many ways to leverage content writers and third party SEO companies.

Fixed Operations Marketing

Lastly, Dealer.com and DriverSide made an announcement in April 2010 which an excerpt has been included below:

The two companies are partnering in an exclusive agreement to launch a series of products for new and used car franchises, the first of which will add robust fixed-ops content to Dealer.com’s industry leading platform. A full line up of further Fixed Operations and service marketing products will follow in coming months.

We agree with Dealer.com that the next area of opportunity for car dealers is in Fixed Operations SEO and digital marketing. Dealer.com has tightly integrated customer data into their product offering for targeted direct marketing. The Fixed Operations package can also be integrated into TCD to drive more service revenue via PPC.

Summary

We look forward to testing the new content management features in the latest Dealer.com platform as part of the 2010 ASMA Study. The product development team at Dealer.com should be recognized for not resting on the laurels and delivering a cutting edge product. Bravo!

Dealers searching for a well integrated digital advertising platform that masters Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing and integrates a powerful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) infrastructure should get a demo of this stellar performer.

VinSolutions makes Inc. 500 as the 33^rd fastest growing software company with three-year revenue growth of 672%

I would like to congratulate the team at VinSolutions for being recognized by Inc Magazine being named the 33rd fastest growing software company is America but I always want to recognize their team for the hard work that represented.

Automotive advertising is going through tremendous change and automotive website providers  have been scrambling to keep up with the demands of automotive retailers. 

At the upcoming Digital Dealer Conference in Las Vegas we will be recognizing the top website providers with the 2010 ASMA Awards.  This year 46 website providers will be included in the comprehensive SEO analysis and search marketing study.  Nine website companies were recognized last year and the competitive for the 2010 awards has gone red hot.

VinSolutions has been on a strong push to innovate and extend their technology platform and it looks like from this award, the fruits of their labor is paying off.  It’s nice to see passion rewarded with strong financial growth.  Here is the official press release that was sent out to media outlets.

VinSolutions Press Release

Inc. Magazine ranked VinSolutions as the 33^rd fastest growing software company in the US on its prestigious Inc. 500 list, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. VinSolutions grew by 672% in the three year period and was ranked #447 overall. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy – America’s entrepreneurs. As an Inc. 5000 honoree, VinSolutions shares a prestigious pedigree with such notable alumni as Microsoft, Intuit, Zappos, Under Armor, Jamba Juice, Timberland, Visa, Cliff Bar, Patagonia, Oracle, and scores of other powerhouses. Other Automotive technology companies that were recognized on the Inc 5000 list were vAuto at #125 with 2044% growth, Dealer.com at #1056 with 286% growth and Dealer Socket at #1829 with 150% growth.

“The leaders of the companies on this year’s Inc. 5000 have figured out how to grow their businesses during the longest recession since the Great Depression,” said Inc. president Bob LaPointe. “This year’s list is a testament to the creativity, resilience, and tenacity of America’s top entrepreneurs,” said Jane Berentson, Editor of Inc. Magazine. 

“We are honored to make the Inc 500 list and we are proud of our dealers who have fought through these difficult times by using state of the art technology to improve their business,” said Mike Dullea, CEO of VinSolutions. “I am glad there were so many automotive companies on the list and I am proud of our employees who work so hard around the clock to serve our customers.”

VinSolutions dealership marketing system contributed to over 2.8 billion dollars in automotive sales and helped their dealer partners save an estimated $33 million in expenses during a difficult 2009.  VinSolutions dealership marketing system integrates all of the tools a dealership needs to run their business and their system makes it easier for consumers to shop, buy and maintain their vehicle on the internet or through their mobile phone.  “I was spending too much with 15 different companies that did not integrate and now I pay 75% less for one system that does it all and more,” said Todd Crossley, owner of #1 retailer in Kansas City.  “VinSolutions has revolutionized the automotive market the way Apple revolutionized the consumer market – by creating a completely integrated system that is easy to use and that helps me manage my business from my iPhone.”

Despite the fact that most of this year’s measuring period of 2006-2009 took place during the latest recession, aggregate revenue among the companies on the list actually increased to $321.6 billion, up more than 50 percent from last year. The effects of the recession are seen, however, in the median three-year growth rate, which dropped to 96 percent from last year’s 126 percent. This year’s Inc. 5000 employ a record 1.4 million people, up from one million on last year’s list. With unemployment remaining stubbornly high, policymakers and business leaders will do well to look to the Inc. 5000 companies for fresh ideas on achieving growth and creating jobs.

About VinSolutions

VinSolutions has the leading “Dealership Marketing System” that helps retailers attract, sell and retain more customers profitably. Their “all-in-one” sales and service marketing system includes digital marketing, search marketing, online advertising, social media marketing tools, mobile marketing, websites, internet lead management, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Sales force automation, Sales Management and Desking, Appraisal, Finance, Used Vehicle Marketing and Market Pricing, Inventory Management and Distribution, Hand held inventory marketing tools, window stickers, automated video tours, Loyalty Management and Targeted marketing with email, text, direct mail and telemarketing services.

The “Dealership Marketing System” has complete mobile integration and is accessible from any mobile phone that has access to the internet including blackberry, Google DROID and iPhone. VinSolutions Dealership Marketing System is installed by their strategic consulting team who specializes in retail strategy and process training for large dealer groups and individual dealerships. VinSolutions is certified by Honda, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Subaru, Nissan and Audi and integrates with ADP, R&R, AutoSoft and Arkona. Vin also has alliances and integrations with Kelley Blue Book, CarFax, Autodata, RouteOne and DealerTrack. For more information visit www.VinSolutions.com

About Inc. Magazine

Founded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures LLC, Inc. (www.inc.com) is the only major business magazine dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies that delivers real solutions for today’s innovative company builders. With a total paid circulation of 712,647, Inc. provides hands-on tools and market-tested strategies for managing people, finances, sales, marketing, and technology. Visit us online at www.inc.com.

Inc 500 List Methodology

The 2010 Inc. 500|5000 list is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2006 to 2009. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by June 30, 2006. Additionally, they had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent — not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies — as of December 31, 2009. Revenue in 2006 must have been at least $80,000, and revenue in 2009 must have been at least $2 million. The top 10 percent of companies on the list comprise the Inc. 500, now in its 29th year.

Media Contact:

Jessie Tappel

786-9721351