Yago Paramo

Automotive Entrepreneur

AD VS landing page, a failed relationship

IMG_3971I was recently reading automotive articles on Flipboard https://flipboard.com (iPhone version) and clicked in an Amazon ad (the screenshot is of the actual ad), rather than continuing with a browser open request it offered to open the Amazon app. I clicked open and the App Store opened form a brief second, then phone automatically refreshed as if it knew that I have the Amazon app installed and… happy I was that could go from advertisement to 1-click purchase but… the app failed to recognize the browser request (probably because it went thru the App Store) and it failed to open. I just got an error. Consequent tries found the same problem.

I remember for a second that time when car dealers wanted to have apps to show their inventory.  Recently at NADA 100 in New Orleans a group of foreign investors looking for possible ventures to bring back to their country asked for my opinion about apps for car dealers. While the failures of these were related to other things (not enough customer base, low download enticement, awareness, etc) it also reminded me how important is for digital advertisement to be in complete sync.

If the total resolve of the landing digital assets is not viewed and measured by the team producing the front advertisement, you run the risk that the request of one doesn’t match the digital assets functionality.

The front of the ad is as important as the landing page. In a recent dinner with my mentor @brianpasch we came up with some prophetic words as we talked about the lack of interest by automotive dealers on investing on fantastic landing pages;  “The bait is as important as the net”.

Dealers tend to focus only on the ad, have different companies producing a website and a digital campaign, and run one as separate from the other. Our best results for SEM campaigns have not been from some golden bullet the we forged, but by tedious fine tuning of the landing pages. SEM worked best when followed by fine tuned SEO.

OEM coop programs are worse, they are based on the ads we can submit to the manufacturer but not on the final customer destination.

De-integration of the process forces us to measure, in the best cases!, the activity of one (clicks, views, opens, etc) versus the activity of the other (less, calls, submissions, etc). We work on them individually when they need to work together as one.

Measure total campaing flow.

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VP Business Dev.

#sep #sem #automotive #cardealer #ppc #automotiveseo