PPC campaigns without constantly inspecting inventory levels are a big part of wasted budget.
I searched “land cruiser” from Lake Stevens WA and Google showed “Rodland Toyota” paid ad as my key words and geo matched their campaign.
Upon clicking on their ad I landed in a zero results SRP.
Could be that the dealer recently sold the only Land Cruiser that they had in stock since Toyota dealers usually have very limited inventory of this model.
Still this is a good reason why limited supply models of any brand should land the campaign on a custom landing page with availability information (“this is a limited supply unit, for more information contact our Land Cruiser expert Mike…”) and perhaps even add content about the unit (custom ordering process, custom delivery options, etc).
Spending money on a “0 results” page has to be close to one of the worst options.
On a different note, I don’t recommend building landing pages with a lot of content for volume models but for limited supply ones we have the added benefit of the content SEO and those getting indexed.
A couple years ago we found a Nissan dealer that spent 30% of their PPC budget on “gtr” related keywords. They only had one, a track edition with carbon fiber package worth $117k. While everyone dreamed about this car very few people could afford it. We looked the campaigns as far as a year back and they had zero leads. The money, about $3k/month, spent on “gtr” keywords may have been better used for that unit on eBay motors, the Rob Report, etc.
This comment does not intend to reflect poorly on the dealership showing in the ads, this is just a campaign done by a 3rd party and my goal is to discover small flaws in the systems so dealers can improve their campaigns.
I do believe that a big part of the PPC campaign problems is the focus of dealers on paying a non-percentage flat fee which resulted on campaign automation instead of custom ongoing planning.
