Where PPC falls short and how blogging fills that gap

When dealers evaluate the purchase of goods and services, they do as any intelligent business would do and consider the ROI. With online retail today in the automotive marketplace, ROI is typically measured on a cost-per basis, e.g. cost-per-lead, cost-per-click, cost-per-sale, etc. While these certainly are useful ways to measure ROI, I have become skeptical of how this information is assessed and leveraged by dealers.

For many years dealers have been able to know their per-vehicle cost-per-sale. But with today’s Internet technologies, there are other cost-per ratios that can be measured. Search engine marketing itself has introduced tremendous new methods for dealers to track and measure where specific portions of their marketing dollars go. But search engine marketing is a complex practice that I think benefits the search engine companies more than anything.

As SEM methodologies mature and the market grows smarter and more competitive, the cost for effective SEM campaigns will continue to rise and eventually be as expensive as radio, print, and television advertising. In fact, there are auto groups I know of today spending tens of thousands of dollars each month on search engine marketing efforts. My skepticism has to do with the fact that many dealers today are investing only in to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising with the misunderstanding that this is all there is to Search Engine Marketing.

The ROI for PPC advertising is a good bet dollar-for-dollar, plus its effectiveness can be measured to a useful extent. The problem I see with buying positioning and visibility on the Web through PPC is that it doesn’t necessarily improve your organic positioning and visibility and it lacks residual benefit too.

This is important because organic placement is equally, if not more important than purchased visibility. The reason why is because with purchased visibility, you can’t be everywhere. You can only be in a limited number of defined places on the Web according to what your budget affords you. With organics, good placement is a result of sound optimization practices and healthy and steady readership, or site visitation.

While blogging is not a silver bullet that replaces PPC, it can and should be intertwined with all your SEM efforts. There are specific uses and benefits to blogging that can compliment a dealers’ SEM efforts and spending, primarily with the fact that when done in conjunction with PPC advertising, your overall SEM efforts can be quite rewarding.