Today on Secret Car Marketing Tactics we are looking at Custom Affinity Audiences and how savvy automotive dealerships and sales people are leveraging a new feature in Adwords that allows you to remarket to people who have visited your competitor's Websites so you can sell more vehicles to conquest customers
Now if you haven’t yet watched the video Mike and I did where we explain WHY you should consider adding Custom Affinity Audiences to your digital strategy to sell more cars, I would do it now. I made sure to include a link in the description of this video.
Now here’s what you’re going to need to complete this execution plan to remarket to your competitors:
First, you’re going to need a Google Adwords account. If you don’t have an Adwords account yet, just visit adwords.google.com where you can set one up for free.
Second, you’re going to need a list of your competitor's Websites. If you can have them all in a text file or a Word document separated by commas that will save you time in the last step.
Without further ado, let’s begin!
So the first thing you need to do once you’re logged in your Adwords account is to create a DISPLAY NETWORK ONLY campaign. Don’t worry if it’s another type of campaign you want to run. We’re only creating this "dummy“ campaign for the purpose of creating the CUSTOM AFFINITY AUDIENCE. We’re not going to be using it.
I don’t know why Adwords make us jumps through hoops like this, but it will only make it harder for your competitors to figure it out if they don’t have this road map to help them.
Name your campaign and choose any objective. Again it doesn’t really matter since we’re not going to use it in the end.
Once that step is done, scroll down and leave all the default settings. Use only $1 for your daily budget and click save.
On the next screen use $1 for the MAX CPC bid. Choose INTEREST AND REMARKETING and then CUSTOM AFFINITY AUDIENCES from the drop down. Then click CREATE CUSTOM AFFINITY.
On the next screen enter a name for your campaign and a description. Then enter in the larger rectangle all the domain names of your competitor's Websites separated by commas. That’s also where you could copy/paste your list from the text file or Word document like I suggested earlier to save you a little bit of time.
At this step you can also get very granular by creating custom affinity audiences for NEW, USED, PARTS, SERVICE, FINANCE, or BODY SHOP by creating separate custom affinity audiences for each interest. To do this, instead of putting the domain name of your competitor's Website, or in other words the URL of the home page, simply input the exact URL of your competitor's Website section for each category (pre-owned, service, parts, new, etc. and repeat the process to create each custom affinity audience.
Once you’re done, click PREVIEW CUSTOM AUDIENCE and Google will provide you with an overview of the audience you created including the size, the demographics, and other useful information.
That’s it! From now on you’ll be able to add your CUSTOM AFFINITY AUDIENCE to any campaign within your Adwords account and start remarketing to your competitor's visitors!
I hope you liked the video and that you will use it to sell more cars and grab tons of business from your competitor’s. If you did, make sure to subscribe to our channel to be the first to have access to these secret car marketing tactics.
Until next time, have an awesome week and most of all… Let’s sell some cars!
Sean Cassy is co-owner and the automotive digital marketing strategist at Turbo Marketing. You can contact him here by email or reach him from 8am-6pm every weekday at Turbo Marketing Solutions.