Digital Advertising Tips for Powersports Dealers

Successful digital advertising for your powersports dealership is more than just great visuals and ad copy. It’s about creating an exceptional start-to-finish experience for the user that ends with a conversion. Make the most of your digital advertising efforts — for you and your customers — with these five tips.

Smart Keyword Selection

Capitalize on low-funnel activity across all of your profits centers by investing in the right keywords such as:

• Dealer Terms & Locations: “Polaris dealer”, “Polaris dealer near me”
• Dealer Shopping Intent: “Polaris snowmobile for sale”, “Buy a new Polaris”, “Polaris incentives”
• Dealer Name: “Adpearance Polaris”
• Dealers Parts & Service: “Polaris service center”, “Polaris parts near me”
• Local OEM Shoppers: “Polaris”, “Polaris snowmobiles”
• Used Inventory: “Used Polaris snowmobiles”, “Used Polaris RMK”
• Models – Type Category: “New Polaris RMK”, “Polaris RMK for sale”
• Model: “Polaris RMK MATRYX incentives”, “Polaris RMK Slash near me”

Create Clear Connections From Your Ad to the Landing Page

Successful ad copy should provide a clear and detailed indication of where clicking on an ad will take you. It’s even more important that the landing page you send users to is a continuation of the ad. Not only does this provide a better customer experience, but it will save you wasted ad spend from users who click on your ad, but quickly leave the subsequent page when it doesn’t align with the information they saw in the ad.

Use the same copy and calls to action in the headline of your ad and the header of the related landing page whenever possible. If the ad is for a specific brand or model, the page should be pre-filtered to only show inventory for that same brand or model with vehicle specs and a clear call-to-action. A clear connection between your ads and landing pages will help visitors to your dealership’s site find what they’re looking for.

Optimize Your Website to Convert

Maximize conversions from your digital advertising efforts and budget with a website that encourages lead generation. Having a mobile-friendly site that loads quickly is more important than ever. Not only will a slow site that doesn’t work on mobile frustrate your customers, but Google’s mobile-first indexing means that sites that work well on mobile will rank higher.

Customers also need to be able to navigate through your site to find the inventory they are looking for. Filtering options are critical to your customers the ability to filter by the things they care about: price, category, year, etc. Clear clutter by removing filters they won’t know or care about, like VIN number, or serial number. And of course, make sure every page on your website has clear calls to action to turn visitors into leads.

Understanding Your Market

Geo-targeting is one of the few components in a digital advertising strategy that can make or break your success. Understand your geography before you start advertising. Finding the right reach for geo-targeting requires finding the right balance between not going too small and overlooking “hot zones” in your area while also not going too big and using your ad spend on prospects who are less likely to convert from far away. Closely monitoring and adjusting your geo-targeting to maintain the right balance will give you the highest return.

After creating an initial targeting strategy, it’s important to monitor and adjust your geo-targeting on a monthly basis to make sure you’re reaching the maximum number of buyers in your market and spending your digital advertising dollars effectively. If you notice your digital advertising budget is running out quickly, consider increasing your ad spend to increase your Search Impression Share (SIS). By increasing your SIS, your ads will show to more interested prospective customers. Aim for an SIS above 70% to ensure adequate market coverage and use monthly reporting and KPIs to finetune your paid search strategy. While there’s no final answer to geo-targeting, a periodic digital advertising tune-up in addition to daily monitoring allows you to keep an eye on changes among buyers and competitors, so that you can continue to improve your ROI.

Tracking, KPI Definitions, and ROI Expectations

Put your dealership in the position to achieve better marketing performance with cleaner, more accurate data. Paid search metrics should help you quickly understand what your biggest lead drivers are and where your budget is being spent most effectively. Track the following key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure you’re generating leads across dealership, model, display, branded, and local campaigns.

• Clicks
• Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
• Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
• Search Impression Share (SIS)
• Conversions (Forms, Calls, Chats, and Store Visits)
• Cost-Per-Conversion
• Conversion Rate
• Qualified Sales Prospects (QSPs)
• Sales

Make sure that you are getting enough high-quality, low-funnel leads to reach your dealership’s goals. Understanding what your data represents is key to optimizing your digital advertising campaigns for return on investment (ROI). Pay attention to what is considered to be a conversion and that you aren’t including sales leads in your conversion data. Know how many leads you are getting, how many of those leads are quality leads, and where they are coming from.

What’s Next?

Looking to hit the ground running with digital advertising for your powersports dealership? With more than a decade of experience in optimizing digital advertising, Adpearance is driven to help dealerships sell more, faster. Get started with a free digital analysis to see how your dealership stacks up against the competition.