Are you getting streams of auto buyers to your website flowing day in and day out? That’s great! It means your ads are well-performing and you’re generating tons of traffic. But, what about conversion? Is your website converting your traffic into buying customers?
As it turns out, 97% of people who visit your website for the first time leave without giving you their information. Bringing these buyers back to your website increases your chances of closing them.
That’s where retargeting comes in handy.
Retargeting ads allows you to remind your website visitors of your cars when they leave your website without taking any action.
But what exactly is retargeting and how does it work? That’s what you’ll learn in this blog article.
1- What is retargeting and why is it important for your dealership?
2- How does retargeting work for car dealers?
3- How to create a successful retargeting campaign?
4- What are the best platforms to run retargeted ads?
1- What Is Retargeting And Why Is It Important For Your Dealership?
Retargeting is a marketing strategy that allows you to track your website visitors and target them with online ads, based on their behavior and interactions with your dealership.
There are two types of retargeting: pixel-based and list-based retargeting. When you use pixel-based retargeting, you basically place a pixel, which is a small piece of code, in your website to track who visited each specific page on your website.
List-based retargeting, on the other hand, consists of uploading a list on Google or Facebook Ads accounts. This list contains specific prospects you want to retarget with your ads.
Where can you find this list?
You can collect these lists from campaigns you ran in the past, or you can collect email addresses from in-person events or through forms on your website.
You can advertise to the same car buyer more than once with retargeted ads. This gives you a second chance to bring back clients that are interested in your cars.
Why is retargeting important?
It’s proven that a retargeted ad performs 10 times better than a regular ad. In fact, retargeted car buyers are 70% more likely to buy from you than someone that would have just seen your vehicles once on your website.
Retargeting is also cost-effective. It leverages your existing website visitors who just need a little push to convert. It has helped some dealers reduce their cost per acquisition* by half.
*The cost per acquisition is how much it costs you to get one customer, from the first contact to completing the sale.
2- How Does Retargeting Work For Car Dealers?
Let me introduce you to Mark, a dealer who runs a Buy Here, Pay Here dealership. Mark is getting a good number of website visitors, yet his conversion rate is still low.
That is because over 50% of visitors left his website without leaving their information.
Using retargeting ads, Mark is actually able to bring back his lost traffic. How? By running a retargeting campaign that will show his car ads on the websites his lost buyers visit online.
3- How To Create A Successful Retargeting Campaign?
For a successful retargeting campaign, your dealership needs to follow these four steps:
A- Track Your Website Traffic:
Before launching a retargeting campaign for your dealership, you need to make sure you are tracking your visitors’ behavior on your website. You can use tools like Google Analytics to see how many people are looking at each page.
It’s also important to add Facebook and Google pixels to your dealership website. This way you will be able to tell where your website visitors are coming from, and you’ll be able to follow them around with retargeted ads.
B- Set Your Campaign’s Goal:
It is important for you to identify what goal you want to achieve. Do you want to increase awareness or convert lost website visitors?
As a used car dealer, both can work for you. You can run awareness retargeting campaigns to inform car buyers about new cars in your inventory, promos or special announcements.
While conversion retargeting campaigns, will be more about convincing your past visitors to go back to your website and follow through with their purchase.
C- Start Retargeting:
Now that you’ve decided whether you want to run awareness or conversion campaigns, you’re ready to go! It’s time to push your ads and start retargeting.
Retargeting ads are precise and dynamic. This means that they will follow your website visitors everywhere they go online, and show them the exact car they’re interested in. This way, you’ll remind your visitors of your dealership and bring them back to your website to check your exclusive offers.
4- What are the best platforms to run retargeted ads?
There are multiple platforms where you can run your retargeting campaigns, like Adroll, Perfect Audience and ReTargeter. However, Google and Facebook remain the biggest and most effective ones to date.
Google is the powerhouse for retargeting. They own a huge network, counting for more than 2 million websites where you can display your retargeted car ads.
Facebook, on the other hand, is the world’s largest social network. With more than 179 million American users, Facebook is a very effective way to run retargeting campaigns.
As you can see, retargeting your past website visitors will highly impact your conversion rate. However, this is only one battle-tested strategy that successful dealers apply to take their dealerships to new heights and triple their sales in the process.
To learn other strategies to grow your dealership, give us a call at (650) 264-7556 or click to schedule a free marketing strategy call.