Google Ads for Automotive: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Google Ads marketing for automotive industries continues to grow and many businesses in these industries are launching Search, Display, Remarketing campaigns and more.

However, this is a broad sector with businesses of all sizes and budgets.

This includes businesses that offer solutions to the automotive sector like data and pricing experts and those that sell new and used vehicles.

Whatever automotive solutions you provide, you can get started easily and affordably. First you’ll need to create a Google Ads account at ads.google.com if you don’t already have one.

Next, you’ll create your campaign and the instructions below will help you do that successfully.

 

Campaign objective

Google Ads has all the ‘Objective’ settings automotive businesses need to target their audiences. These include Sales, Leads, Website traffic and others and each has settings and features that help you reach customers or clients who are ready to act.

And you can also setup your campaign without an objective but this means you won’t get guidance in the setting up of features.

 

Campaign type

Next you’ll choose the campaign type that is most relevant for you. The best Google Ads campaign type that your automotive business can use is a Search campaign. And it’s the most relevant for objectives like Leads, Sales and Website traffic.

So, the Search campaign is the one for you because it helps you target people and businesses that are searching for your solutions on Google.

These are highly qualified customers that are usually ready to signup, and not just regular browsers or general information seekers.

 

Budget

Now you’ll set your budget to place a limit on what you want to spend on a daily basis. This is usually harder to set at the beginning and so it is fine to start with a small budget initially and then increase it as performance improves.

A good Google Ads budget to start with for automotive companies is about $40 or £30 per day. And then as you increase sales or leads and optimise your campaign for maximum performance you can increase this month by month.

 

Bidding

To get bidding right, you need to know a lot about your keywords, search queries and auction-time context. So, you need to know what keyword bids to set and also how to adjust them as you manage your campaigns.

This is possible with manual bidding and it helps you control your cost per click limits. But this is much harder to get right especially at the beginning because the right bid is often a moving that is hard to reach at scale.

The best option is to use an automated bid strategy, so your bids are set automatically, saving you a lot of time and being more efficient.

And a good strategy to use is Maximise Clicks which is an effective automated bid strategy and gets you as many clicks as possible. And you can use a manual bid strategy later when you have more data and insights and want to have more control over keyword bids.

 

Keywords

Google Ads has some tools to help you research the best automotive keywords to bid on. Using the Keyword Planner tool you can find historic keyword metrics for the keywords you find and look at the forecasting tools to see what you can expect in the future.

 

Text ads

Google Ads text ads for automotive businesses should run targeted Responsive search ads with great benefits and features. And these ads have much more text space than previous text ads like expanded and standard ads.

 

Locations

Pick the right locations to target your audiences. Whether it’s countries, cities, towns and so on, you can set that easily in your account, but make sure to exclude any locations that are not relevant.

You can also use the Location Options feature to make sure you’re only targeting “people in or regularly in your targeted locations”.

This ensures that you don’t get clicks from people that are outside your targeted locations and that saves your budget.

 

Ad schedule

Running a Google Ads campaign for an automotive business means you can target your audience on any days and hours you like. Whichever part of the industry you are in and products or services you provide, you should consider the type of customer you are targeting.

The Ad schedule feature allows you to update these settings to your requirements. The default settings are that your ads will run on all days and hours as the screenshot below shows.

And you can check your Segment reports to see how your campaign has performed on individual days and hours. Later you can choose to just advertise on the best performing ones for you.

 

Where your ads appear

Where and how your ads appear is important. With a Search campaign, your ads will appear on Google as you bid on the keywords that you added. The bid will also determine where on the page they appear and what they look like.

Ads in the top positions usually have more prominence with more text space available for them, compared to lower ranked ones.

Your ads can also appear on Search partner websites too. These sites use Google search tools to show ads to people who are searching on their sites. Some of these partners include Google owned and operated platforms like Gmail, Maps and Play.

The Display Network is also available but it’s a very different model and on there you’re targeting people who are browsing and not necessarily searching, so it’s best to separate these campaign types. If you do select it however, you will need to create a Responsive display. And your ads will only appear there when you still have budget left from the Search ads.

 

Get in Touch

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