Utilizing Performance Max for Conquesting Local Dealerships
Targeting your competition in traditional paid search has always been a costly and low-converting strategy. If you've tried it before, you know that competing requires a substantial budget. Bidding on competitors' names is expensive due to low relevance, driving up costs without guaranteeing results. Beyond the financial burden, many OEMs regulate and discourage this practice.
Knowing this, we decided to test a new way to target competitors by utilizing audience signals in Performance Max campaigns. In our approach, we started with all applicable assets (feeds, images, video, text) enabled, a competitive incentive offer, and coupled that with a max conversion bid strategy.
The audience signal that we created was a mix of search themes and a custom-built segment. While this approach doesn’t directly target the competitor, we can utilize the power of Google’s audience signals to find people related to / interested in our competitors.
After some initial testing, our data shows that Performance Max campaigns targeting competitor audiences captured nearly double the clicks at a similar cost. CPCs were about 54% lower, contributing to a nearly 93% lower CPA for calls/form fills than on search.
- Performance Max campaigns serve on several additional Google Products, which helps to expand the campaign's reach and reduce CPCs while improving Conversion Rate.
- Audience Signals help find related customers based on their behaviors, where they are more likely to convert.
Based on our testing, if conquesting is an area of focus for your automotive dealership, we would recommend testing into a conquesting audience signal on Performance Max instead of a traditional paid search campaign.
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