adCenter Best Practices for Automotive Advertisers - Adding/Updating Negative Keywords

The automotive industry saw its ups and downs in 2008 with the credit crunch, auto bailouts and decline in consumer spending. Digital marketing budgets are being tightened and performance is being evaluated more closely. Improving your PPC campaigns’ efficiency has become more important in 2009, especially for adCenter advertisers who are automotive manufacturers, new/used dealerships and lead aggregators. Today, I will discuss how you can improve efficiency with your adCenter account(s) starting with adding/updating your negative keyword list.

The adCenter Add-In for Excel is a great resource for researching and building out a comprehensive list of negative keywords. Currently, adCenter allows 1,022 characters (including commas) for negative keywords. Here are questions to ask yourself when adding/updating your negative keyword list:

· Am I targeting new or used vehicles? If targeting new vehicles, make sure to add years and “used” related keywords to your negative keyword list. If targeting used cars, it is a best practice to add “new” related keywords to your list.

· What type of vehicle am I targeting? For example, if you are targeting truck keywords on broad or phrase match, you may want to consider adding other types of vehicles that you do not want your truck ad to show for such as “hybrid”, “car”, “van”, etc. This helps to target only truck buyers.

· How common is my vehicle model names that I am bidding on? If you are bidding on Toyota Matrix, it is a best practice to include “movie, dvd, Keanu Reeves” as negatives. More examples include Subaru Outback (Australia, steakhouse), Chevy Malibu (vacation, fires, rum, beach) and Chrysler Aspen (ski resort, mountain, vacation, hotels). Customizing your negative list to include keywords your vehicle may be associated with will help to eliminate unqualified traffic.

· Do I have economic related negatives in my account? Example negatives include “bailout”, “bail out”, “government”, “layoff”, “plant”, “executive”, “jet”, “private” and “hearings”. Depending on your target audience and account structure, you may also want to consider “loans, financial, credit, refinance” and “news” as additional negatives.

· Is my brand or keyword list related to similar keywords I do not want my ads to show for? Often times, local dealerships will include the location in the branding (ex: Seattle Auto). If you are a local dealer, make sure to add negatives keywords associated with your location. If you are a targeting nationally or by region, you should also consider adding negatives associated with vehicles or services that you may not your ad to show for: “rental”, “freight”, “auto show”, “concept”, “classic”, “exotic”, “accident”, “insurance”, “crash”, “attorney”, “recall”, “blog”, “tow” and “towing”.

Asking these questions when building out your negative keyword list will help to increase your click through rate and costs through elimination of poor converting traffic. Currently, adCenter supports negative keywords at the keyword, ad group and campaign levels. When ready to implement your negative keyword list, I recommend implementing at the keyword level in adCenter to give you more flexibility for adding additional negatives later on that may pertain to a specific keyword. An important note is that when adding negatives into adCenter, keyword level negatives, will trump ad group level negatives which trumps campaign level keyword negatives.

Next week, I will focus on ad copy best practices for the automotive industry and ways to improve your click through rate.