Google’s In-Market Audiences is Pure Gold for Auto Dealers and You’re Missing it

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Google Adwords has a bad rap these days. Companies are moving ad spend into social media–while missing hidden gems. Incidentally, I hear customers say all the time, “we tried Adwords and it didn’t work.” What they mean is, they tried search text ads in Adwords and that didn’t work.

But Adwords is a constellation of ad services and it’s the ancillary products that provide the greatest specialization and value. One such product is In-Market Audiences.

What is “In-Market Audiences”?

Google collects data on everyone’s search and browsing habits. Creepy? Yep. Let’s consider an industry: automobile sales. Google is able to tell a few things. One, Google knows when a web users visits Google.com and enters a query for “best SUV models 2017”, or when a web user is visiting car manufacturer websites. Google then makes a determination that, “hey, this user looks like they are in the market for an Acura car.” With In-Market Audiences, you can advertise to those active shoppers, web users literally in the buying stage. So, say you sell Lexus automobiles–you can direct your display ads at an audience actively shopping for Acura or Mercedes cars.

Google has in-market categories for every major brand of car, and some general categories as well…

 

What Does This Mean?

There are in-market categories for all sorts of products, like foreign language study, dating services, and baby apparel. But for car dealers, Google has gone all-out: the greatest number of in-market categories within the entire system are offered up in the Motor Vehicles section.

This product is tailored specifically for car dealers–and it’s pure gold.

How to Use “In-Market Audiences” as a Car Dealer

The strategy that follows from this program falls into place naturally. Say you are a Mazda dealer. Well, the in-market audience segment for consumers actively searching for Brand > Mazda is a no-brainer. These users might have searched the name of a Mazda model in Google search. With In-Market Audiences, you can display graphical ads targeted to those users.

Here’s another way to use this program: say you are a Toyota dealer. You have a range of models that compete with many of Mazda’s models. You can target the Brand > Mazda In-Market Audience to potentially convert those users to look at your range of models.

In a major metro area, as a car dealer, you’ll compete with other manufacturers’ products, but also against other dealers in your metro area. In-Market Audiences let you achieve both.

Why Haven’t In-Market Audiences Been More Widely Adopted?

I talk to car dealers all the time that are missing this. In-Market Audiences tend to be adopted within the national ad campaigns. GM and Jeep know the score and are leveraging In-Market Audiences. But this product is also available to any dealer. It’s a little more complicated to set up than a simple text ad campaign, so less-skilled agencies miss it.

If you’d like to get started with In-Market Audiences (if your current agency hasn’t alerted you, that is a huge red flag) then feel free to reach out to us about our PPC Management Services.

Yes, I’d Like to Learn More About Your Service With a Consultation

Display Ad Portfolio | Remarketing Ad Examples

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How To: Install Google Analytics Dynamic Remarketing on Shopify

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Intro to Installing Dynamic Remarketing on Shopify

Before we get started, let’s make one thing clear: The instructions below are only applicable to those of you wanting to set up Dynamic Remarketing through Google Analytics (GA).

Before We Begin

As with any Remarketing Campaign, make sure the following steps are completed before you continue:

  • Enable “Remarketing” and “Advertising Reporting Features” in Analytics
  • Link your AdWords and Analytics accounts
  • Link your AdWords and Google Merchant Center accounts if you’re in the Retail vertical

 

Once you have completed the above steps, you’re ready to get started with the fun stuff!

Next, Create Custom Dimensions in Google Analytics

Next, you will want to create custom dimensions in Analytics using the attributes for your specific vertical. In our example, we are working with the Retail vertical, but you can find a complete list of verticals and attributes here.

Google Analytics Custom Dimensions

Add Custom Dimensions to Your Shopify Site

You’ll want to make sure that these dimensions are added to the code of your Shopify site. This ensures that when potential customers are served your Remarketing ad, they will be shown the exact products that they viewed on your site.

If you’re in the US, you shouldn’t need to change any part of the following code, however, if you’re in the UK, you will need to replace “US” with “GB.”

Shopify Dynamic Remarketing Attributes

 

 

 

Now the big question: Where to paste it. Intuitively, you would think it would naturally go in the “Add Custom JavaScript to Analytics” box on your store preferences page. We tried that too, but quickly found that the custom dimensions were not populating in Google Analytics. To get everything running nice and smooth, you will want to follow these steps:

  1. In your Shopify dashboard, select “Online Store”
  2. In the themes tab, click the box of 3 dots in the top right corner
  3. Select “Edit HTML/CSS”
  4. Click theme.liquid in the Layout folder
  5. Scroll to the very bottom and paste your code directly after the closing body tag

Where to Paste Code in Shopify

Congratulations! You’re just about ready to start showing all of your competitors what a digital marketing wizard you are.

Create a New Dynamic Attribute in Analytics

Assuming you already have your Remarketing audiences set up in Google Analytics (if not, learn how to set up Remarketing Audiences here) the last step is to create a new Dynamic Attribute in Analytics based on your business type.

To do this, go to the Admin tab of Analytics, under Property, select ‘Audience Definitions’ then ‘Dynamic Attributes.’ Here you will click “+New Attribute” and select your vertical. For Retail, you will want it to look like this:

Dynamic Attributes

Once you have completed this step, click save, and you’re all done! Go ahead and start building out your Dynamic Remarketing campaign in AdWords and watch the revenue pour in. Sit back and relax, you’ve earned it champ.

If you get stuck…

If you’d rather get pro help with your Product Listing Ads Management, think about reaching out to Tastyplacement; we offer these services. Not convinced of our awesomeness? Check out our PPC case study, and you will be.

A PPC Case Study of Awesome Excellence

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How we tripled a client’s PPC conversion rate in 6 weeks, and lowered Google Adwords cost-per-conversion by 63.22%

We love conversion rate optimization and cost-per-conversion optimization. This is the heart of the matter–it sits at the core of what any advertising campaign should look towards. This case study will show how we did the following for one of our client campaigns with sound analysis and swift and informed action:

  • We created at least $5,000 of net benefit by our calculation (it may actually be more depending the client’s net profit)
  • We increased the client’s conversion rate by 3 times: The conversion rate increased from 1.49% to 4.49%.
  • We lowered the client’s overall ad spend while increasing conversions: Total Adwords monthly spend went from $11,592.28 to $7,301.72
  • Overall monthly conversions went from 147 to 254
  • We lowered the client’s cost of converting website visitors by well more than half: The Adwords cost per conversions went from $78.18 to $28.75

Here’s the teaser

Here’s the teaser: massive, immediate gains in conversion rate on Google Adwords immediately following our conversion rate optimization. Note that the gains were immediate, but grew incrementally throughout the month, and also remained sustainable.

PPC-case-study-overview

Ok, so now let’s move on to how we got there.

 

Step 1: Adwords campaign analysis with Google Analytics

So, we started with an analysis of the campaign performance from a conversion rate standpoint. We saw a ho-hum performance here, with a 2.2% conversion rate:

PPC-case-study-start

Step 2: Brainstorm ideas on how to improve conversion rate; where are the buyers?

The client sells a self-help course of a personal nature (we don’t want to say more than that) and so we brainstormed ideas on where the higher conversion rates are. There are always higher conversion rates somewhere: on improved landing pages, during particular times of day, in various cities and regions, by particular keywords and groups of keywords, by device, etc. The list of available optimization pathways truly is endless.

The short end of the story is that we keyed in on time of day for this particular client. Because the product is of a personal nature, we thought that customers might only purchase/sign up when they were in the privacy of their own home–and that meant outside of work hours.

Step 3: We find the gusher: Massive conversion rate opportunity

Our instincts were correct: time of day was the great divider between tire-kickers and serious shoppers. We customized Google Analytics’ Adwords Hour of the Day report to gauge user behavior throughout a 24 hour cycle, and sorted by conversion rate. The report, shown below, shows a conversion rate variance of nine times throughout the course of a 24-hour period. The prior PPC managers had spent the client’s budget uniformly throughout the day, so we had plenty of data to work with.

Remember, the client sells a personal self-help product, and sure enough, the high-converting hours were the evening like 11pm, and definitely not in the afternoon at 2pm and 11am, for example. But the data tells the tale:

PPC-case-study-gusher

Step 4: Turning data into action

The next step was easy; the work was really already done. We simply needed to direct Adwords spend into the high-converting hours [it’s called dayparting and it worked on Madison Avenue, and it works with digital marketing as well, see our article on Moz.com about another success]. At the campaign level, we used Adwords Ad Schedule feature to up the spend in our high-converting hours and reduce/eliminate spend in low-converting hours. We actually got a little push-back from the client who was afraid of losing traffic, but we persisted and pushed through the change.

There were a few other changes we made to landing page routing and some proprietary tricks we know, but the main essence is described here.

Final Results:

The final results show a tremendous success:

PPC-case-study-final

Some highlights from the end result:

  • Note that Sessions went down, from 9861 to 5652, but who cares? Despite lower website visits, the corresponding conversion rate still went up…
  • Conversions increased from 147 to 254, despite the drop in Sessions.
  • The lower number of Sessions was a direct results of a lower Ad Spend, in this case from about $11.5k to $7.3k.
  • But with conversions increasing despite the lower spend, cost per conversion dove from $78.18 to $28.75

Freddie Mercury would approve.

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