Don’t Be Afraid to Try New Paid Search Campaigns

During the month of June, a car dealership client was running a large campaign for their used inventory. This dealer carries a wide variety of cars, trucks and SUVs with various makes and models. We had campaigns built for the six largest vehicle brands, but believed we were still missing out on a lot of searches for used cars. Our solution was to create a segment campaign, a campaign with more generic keywords and ads, hoping to gain the attention of customers who are less concerned about the vehicle make and model but just want a used vehicle. Some examples of these keywords would be: used cars for sale, used cars near me, or pre-owned vehicles for sale. Some of the ads we ran look similar to this: The user would then be brought to a used inventory listing on the dealer’s site where they could scroll through a variety of used cars searching for one that fits their needs and their price range. This style of campaign can be useful to dealers with a large used inventory and also useful for potential customers who are not quite sure what kind of car they want to buy. There are a few things to keep in mind when creating and using segment campaigns. First, these keywords get searched a lot and could be traced back to searches that aren’t necessarily related to buying a used car. Users could be searching to list a car they are trying to sell or looking for a private owner selling a car rather than a dealership. This is a good case to make use of negative keywords in which you specify that if a certain keyword is included in someone’s search, your ad doesn’t show. Example: Someone is searching for toy cars – your ad shows up (unrelated search). Add the word “toy” as a negative keyword to prevent this from happening. Also keep in mind that since a lot of people are searching for these keywords, you may want to decrease the geographic region you are targeting compared to your other campaigns. If your target radius is too large, you will run your daily budget out quickly and be missing out on people closer to your location who are unable to see your ad because it is out of budget. Segment campaigns are a great way to add to your arsenal of paid search strategies and may be able to find new customers for your business. Always feel free to test new types of campaigns because you can always pause or delete if it fails, but you could be missing out on a huge opportunity if you never try new ideas or strategies.