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In a continuing effort to bring on the best new talent, Potratz has hired on dealer research and business intelligence expert Dennis Galbraith, founder of Dennis Galbraith Enterprises, Revenueguru.com, former vice president of Cars.com and former executive director of Automotive Internet Practice at J.D. Power and Associates. In his prior position at Drivingsales.com, he served as a leading resource for dealers and auto groups offering research-driven blogs and information. As new chief marketing officer for Potratz, Dennis carries more than 21 years of experience in operations, marketing, and market research along with him.

During his tenure at J.D. Power and Associates, Dennis ran the automotive Internet division of J.D. Power and Associates from 2003 to 2006. At Cars.com, he was responsible for over $300,000,000 in advertising products. His proven track record of successful business start-ups and leadership roles has made him one of the go-to dealer research and marketing experts in the automotive industry.

To add to his accolades, Dennis is an accomplished writer and the author of two successful books entitled Sales Integration and Online Vehicle Merchandising. He is also an award-winning speaker who has been featured as a keynote speaker in many of the largest dealer events nationwide including, Driving Sales Executive Summit, J.D. Power Internet Roundtable, Digital Strategies Marketing Conference and has been featured at dozens of other dealer events.

Dennis’ ability to share his wisdom is what separates him from others in the industry; he has a knack for delivering insightful and invaluable lessons. Having facilitated marketing trainings at Revenueguru.com and taught marketing courses at both the graduate and undergraduate level, he is no stranger to teaching and is sure to be an influential addition to the Potratz team.

Potratz employees have taken kindly to his friendly demeanor and founders Paul and Christy Potratz embraced Dennis as a valuable asset to the team and “a person who will help edge Potratz ahead of the competition in the automotive digital marketing industry.”

Learn how you can double your income digitally by choosing a positive attitude. Find out how you can market yourself with out any cash. Stop waiting for outside forces to change your future use your positive energy and develop your own personal marketing strategy. Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday and learn how to focus that positivity into productive leads.

Watch Think Tank Tuesday this week to see the final key touch points to keep your service bays full and clients coming back for more!

This week's Think Tank Tuesday dissects Service Retention, and reveals to you the 6 key touch points discovered to raise your Service Profits and keep your service bays full.

Can you think of what marketing opportunity has low competition, high ROI, a lot of traffic, and will build customer loyalty? Many dealers are ignoring this aspect of their marketing strategy, and you need to start paying attention to this opportunity.

There are 3 types of personalities, and your personality could be affecting your income. Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday now to find out which of the 3 personalities you have, and how you can make it work for your team to boost your sales.

Is your website constantly asking for or taking information from visitors? By providing information to visitors rather than requesting information from them, you can expect to see a rise in conversions and a decrease in bounce rates. Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday and find out how to rethink your web strategy.

Find out what "It" is in this week's Think Tank Tuesday, and how to best use Remarketing Segmentation to help you take steps towards reducing the likelihood of IT happening to you!

Everyone knows that im a big advocate of all things Google.  Heck, I even rooted my brand new Galaxy s4 so I could get the Google edition ROM.

This morning though, I received an email with a title that I feel may be intentionally misleading.

The email linked to a blog post by Google AdWords Titled:

New research shows that 88% of ad clicks from mobile search are incremental to organic clicks
Posted by +Mark Burke, Google Engage Ireland
(Link is below)

http://adwords.blogspot.ie/2013/07/new-research-shows-that-88-of-ad-clicks.html?m=1

This article basically says that when companoes paused their pay per click campaigns the clicls were not replaced by clicks in the organic search, so basically if you stop your adwords campaign you are in effect losing all those clicks.

It even showed a pretty infographic with Automotive being one of the biggest areas of loss with 86% of adwords clicks not being replaced by organic.

Here's why the post is BS

If you have an adwords campaign that gets 100 click per month [random number for easy math] you are usually buying that campaign because you want to be visible on Page One of Google and usually you resort to ppc because you're not on page 1 in the organic results right?

Everyone's research,  including Google research, shows that above the fold page 1 organic results get more clicks than any ppc adwords ad which is why this latest blog post by Google is so offensive.  It shows that even the great Google is willing to mislead us good old automotive industry folks if it will help keep the revenue flowing.

The problem that car dealers have is that companies lile Cars.com amd Edmunds and AutoTrader have millions of dealership vehicles they are using to optimize search for each market, plus they have your dealership name amd address in those listings too [obviously they should so a consumer knows it is your car and that they need to contact you to buy it] but what is happening by listing your cars on these sites is that  organically their links are competing with yours and in many cases you lose.

Well,  you dont necessarily 'lose'because the consumer may go through the third party to contact you but let's face it,  the third party wouldn't be in existence without your inventory and if they didn't exist you're more likely to be visible on page one because you would be a more likely relevant search result. ..I digress.

The other challenge with AdWords is that you are competing with 3rd party sites like Cars.com AutoTrader and Edmunds there too.

When I worked at Cars.com, I was told internally that we were spending as much as $20,000 per day on AdWords / pay per click to make sure we were visible when people searched for cars in local dealer markets.

Of course this was in the dealership's best interest because the more shoppers on Cars.com means more opportunity foror dealers right?

Sort of, except for the fact that they bid to grab the brand names, models and in some cases the dealership names which means dealers have to pay MORE to Google to compete with the 3rd parties that theyre already paying too much for as it is.

I say F that!

Be smart, organize, optimize, visualize and work on conquering organic results and see if you really need that adwords campaign after all.

If you're going to invest inan adwords campaign, Ask your local cars, autotrader and esmunds and CarGurus rep to get you a list of keywords they buy in your market (they have it in their adwords dashboard so their boss can get that list easy enough) and see if they are edging you out by bidding on your own name so b yiure not spending a pile of cash bidding against a company you're paying to advertise with. Heck,  if you're already paying cars.com it doesnt make sense to pay more money to compete with them via ppc.

Obviously If you are visible above the fold on page one in the organic search as it is, with relevant results of course, the chance of consumers clicking someone else's adwords ad over you is greatly reduced anywaybso let the other guys spend their money on PPC while you sneak in and crush them all using organic search. Heck, go click their ads a bunch of times so they waste budget, that'll teach them not to compete against their own dealer customers. [Just kidding, they never learn]

While I spend zero on ppc amd organically dominate my soace, I do believe at the end of the day there are great ways to use adwords as a dealer but I recommend partnering with a company that does more than just spin out an ad for you. The guys at AdSmart Online do a good job and actually create inventory level ads and my clients who use them are happy so you can see their info at www.adsmartonline.com

I would love to hear other thoughts and comments.

Helping the best get better,
Mat Koenig

If you enjoyed this post please share it, tweet it and +1 it

Your website can produce up to 600 more leads every month. I'll show you how to get customers who may be on the fence to contact your team in this week's Think Tank Tuesday. There's no reason you shouldn't be using this tool on your website. Don't miss out on hundreds of quality leads and watch Think Tank Tuesday right now!

What would you say if a customer asked "Why should I buy from you?"  Everyone can compete on price, but in order to gain more customers and increase your sales, you need to have a competitive advantage. What's yours?

In this week's Think Tank Tuesday, I'll explain why it's important to set yourself apart from all the other dealers in your market, and how to do so.

Fun idea to throw out there and we have been having HUGE success with. 

Whatever city your dealership is from, check out the next sporting event that is set to play. For us, we are in a NY/PHI market so I can alter the search either way. But for conversations sake, lets use the Yankees. Tonight they play the Royals at 7:05. 

Create a Facebook Post with the Yankees saying "Pine Belt Nissan Game of the Week! Yankees vs Royals. Pick tonight's winner and predict the score and the winner will receive a $150 gas card! It's as easy as Pick, Like, Share, and Win!"

Take 15 bucks out of your pocket and promote this post. You will be amazed at the results! People LOVE this. I also take this a step further... I will conquest our competitors cities. 

Below is an example of our last contest. No one guessed the score and there was not a winner... But the end result was amazing.

In total we generated 12 shares, 51 likes, and 50 comments. It cost our dealership 15 dollars, no one won the gas card, and we were able to market in 4 of our top competitors cities. I made the age range 25-55 and it made for a very successful event.

Try it out. Low cost way to get your name out there and have fun with the public. 

Visit out website: www.ppadv.com
Like us on Facebook: www.Facebook.com/PotratzAdvertising
Follow us on Twitter: @Potratz

http://www.internetsales20group.com
General Manager Says His Dealership Uses Skype To Sell Lots Of Cars... Does Your Store?

This is the first (and most likely last) time that I will use a Hillary Clinton book title as the concept for a blog post. I didn't read the book, but the concept is definitely applicable in social media.

I was speaking to a potential client yesterday who was telling me some of their challenges with social media. The main challenge they were having was in coming up with interesting content to post that was associated with business. As a car dealer, they had plenty of pictures of cars to post, but they weren't very active in the local community and the person in charge of social media didn't consider herself to be creative.

"Does anyone at the dealership do anything interesting?" It was a simple question that sparked a 2 minute conversation that turned into an hour-long brainstorming session. At the end, we came to the conclusion that she worked at the most interesting dealership in the world and didn't know it.

The parts manage was in a country band that played at the local steak house saloon on Saturday nights. They had a customer that came in 5-days a week to get what he considered to be the best coffee in town with their fancy cappuccino machine in the service waiting area. A sales person was a little league baseball coach that recruited the top talent in town to take to tournaments across the country.

Last night, she did some further research and found even more interesting things. The land on which the dealership was built turned out to have a rich and somewhat controversial history. One of the secretaries had a son who was likely going to he starting for the state university basketball team the following year. Another sales person had a photography business on the side where people posed in or around classic cars.

Everyone gets into a rut. We try our best to be creative and to come up with interesting things to post to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+, but sometimes it seems that you're posting the same things over and over again. Finding images is easy. Unfortunately, social media needs to be richer, more robust. It's not just about pieces of content. It's about stories that affect the local area and the people that make up your business, customer base, and community.

You don't have to live on social media island. There are people around you who can inspire you, spark an idea, or become the subject of content that can all be tied back to the business itself. The difference between being isolated on social media and having a flood of potential content is often about getting up from your desk and talking to people. In essence, the key to successful social media is often as simple as being social in the real world and applying it to your business presence.

There are thirteen steps to happiness and it all begins with a process. From recruiting to advertising, watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday to determine which processes you need to focus on in order to be successful.

There are seven ways you are wasting your marketing dollars. Watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday to learn what you're doing to throw away your advertising money.

Stressed about your Online Marketing Strategy? Don't know what you should be tracking and what benchmarks to measure? Then watch this week's Think Tank Tuesday Video, Leave Your Comments below the video and Share it Please.

It's creepy but oh so sexy! What are we talking about? Here's a hint: It has to do with how you can pin-point an individual's desires, based on other online data. Find how to to use this to your advantage as an advertiser.

Does your dealership have a process in place for a quick transition from the sales floor to the finance dept?  Are your customers waiting for a hour or more to get into the finance office?  Does your F&I producer come out to meet the customer before the consumer get's to his/her office?  Ladies and gentleman I could go on and on with questions that I talk about with automotive managers and what we find is very concerning. 

First, the transition from the sales floor to the finance office should be seamless.  I was in a Toyota store a little while back and they had what was called a finance lounge.  Now the goal with their finance lounge was to remove the customer form the sales floor over to a much more comfortable lounge so that while they were waiting to get into the F&I office they could begin the process of getting logged into the Toyota system database.  It is a very upscale lounge with Ipad's at each chair and snacks if someone is hungry.  Now unfortunately most dealerships have a completely different process in place and it's as follows: the customer just agreed to purchase your vehicle and now they have to sit in those hard chairs and round table for the next hour while they wait to get into finance!!  What do you think most of these people are doing while waiting to go to finance; they're talking about how maybe we're moving too fast we didn't plan on buying today, let's get on our smartphone and see how much the car we just bought is down the street or even worse after a hour of waiting you go to get your customer and they're gone!!  For the love of God this is not what people want to deal with after they just made the next biggest purchase next to buying a home. 

Consumers after they give us their business need to be in the F&I office as quickly as possible.  Another brillant strategy is to have the F&I producer get out of his/her office and come out to the sales floor to meet the customer for a interview to build some rapport and gather field intelligence.  What this does is make the process much easier when you present a menu to sell products. 

In this day and age the old school way of doing business has to change.  Their is too much money on the line to take the chance of conducting business as usual.