For many dealers, digital marketing is a blind-faith investment to a certain extent. Dealership leaders must trust their agency partners to help them make the smartest possible decisions. The issue is, that faith is often misplaced, and agency partners are profiting at the dealership’s expense. Since dealers do not have extensive knowledge in digital marketing they cannot thoroughly inspect campaign performance for themselves.

PCG strives to create a better automotive digital marketing world. With our research reports, we unveil the dark truths of the auto industry. Check out our latest reports discussing the truth behind conquest email marketing bot traffic, as well as dealer’s use of Google AdWords.

new PCG Research reports

The Orbee Uncovers Conquest Bot Traffic research report proves how dealers are being misled about their ROI with traffic generated by bots and/or a combination of bots and incentivized traffic. If you have read our Conquest Email Marketing research report, you have learned about the countless opaque email marketing agencies preying upon the auto industry. You have also learned the many ways in which you can protect yourself against these dishonest agencies.

Orbee specializes in software to inspect the quality of website traffic and specifically, the identification of bot traffic. Working with PCG to investigate conquest campaigns, Orbee analyzed the email traffic generated by one of the companies included in our Conquest Email Marketing report. A summary of our findings is as follows:

  • 78% of the traffic was identified as high-risk bot traffic
  • Nearly 100% of all bots were malicious with less than 0.1% of bots identified crawlers (google, bing, etc)
  • The referring URLs suggest that the email conquest companies were buying traffic from click-farm/ routing companies such as myhittracker.com and www.easyhits4u.com
  • Over 95% of the traffic was generated by myhittracker.com. UTM tags were used to log traffic in Google Analytics (Source/Medium) as coming from an email marketing campaign.
  • There was a high percentage of traffic coming from cloud servers (Amazon, Digital Ocean, etc.)
  • Of the 14,309 website visitors, not a single session resulted in a lead form submission

Orbee confirmed and supported the beliefs founded in the Email Conquest Marketing report. Conquest email marketing partners are blinding dealers with high quantity reports. These campaigns have minimal quality, and are designed to take advantage of dealer’s.

In the Dealer Deployment of Google AdWords research report, PCG surveyed over 500 automotive retail managers (Dealer Principles, GMs, Marketing Managers, and Internet Sales Managers). Of these, 94% of dealers surveyed said that AdWords is a requirement for U.S franchise dealers, yet 1/3 of the dealers stated that Google AdWords advertising did not meet their ROI expectations.

We also found the following:

  • OEM co-op programs have a high tax on the AdWords agency’s gross profits while also requiring the agency to offer a low-cost, month-to-month contract. This model has commoditized Google AdWords and has created an incentive to sell less effective, higher margin advertising.
  • Dealers are changing their Google AdWords agency partner, on average, every 25 months.
  • Some AdWords agencies are losing focus on what is best for the local dealer because they are chasing financial incentives and bonuses from google based on advertising volume commitments.
  • Most dealer reports present quantity metrics which makes it nearly impossible to calculate the ROI of their AdWords investments.
  • Dealers are using last click attribution models and are ignoring multi-touch attribution research and changes in inline consumer shopping behavior.
  • Dealers are not taking advantage of fixed operations with Google AdWords

Each month, millions of dollars are handed over to partner agencies with ulterior motives. You are the only one who can protect your dealership. To ensure that you are optimizing your budgets and getting the most out of your campaigns, download our latest research reports!

About the Author

PCG Digital Marketing is an award winning digital agency headquartered in Eatontown, NJ. We help our clients get found online through innovative search, social and online advertising campaigns.