Today, Automotive buyers don't simply walk into a dealership to learn more about a vehicle of their choice.
Instead, their purchase journey is much more complex and involves research from multiple sources, primarily online.
87% of potential vehicle buyers use online tools for research – EY Mobility Consumer Index
So, how do you stay visible and top-of-the-mind in an ever-growing digital environment?
Google Display ads can help you with just that.
What are Google Display ads?
Google Display ads are visual banner ads that are served to audiences when they browse the Google Display Network. This network includes websites, videos, apps and Google's platforms such as YouTube and Gmail.
Display campaigns help you target potential buyers throughout their journey, nurturing intent to purchase.
You can collect lead data from Google Display ads by sending leads to your website or specific landing pages. Then, encourage users to share their contact details via web forms in strategic positions throughout the page.
Why consider Google Display ads for automotive lead generation
Here are 6 reasons to consider Google Display ads for generating auto leads:
- Expand reach beyond Google Search
The Google Display Network includes over 2 million websites, videos and apps. Its massive size allows you to reach a large audience across platforms.
- High visual impact
Visual ads have a more substantial impact than text. They help you differentiate your brand and vehicles from competitors better.
- Optimised targeting
You can use optimised targeting within Google display campaigns to reach high intent audiences. Optimised targeting uses 'targeting signals' (like audience segments or keywords) to find audiences who could become potential customers.
- Choice of placement
Google lets you choose your preferred sites and placements for each ad. You can select placements based on interests and demographics in addition to keywords.
- Nurturing intent
Because display ads are placed on various sites, apps, and Google platforms, you can stay visible to potential leads throughout their buying journey. This further increases interest in your brand and vehicles.
- Ripple effect on ad performance
Audiences become increasingly familiar with your brand and vehicles through Display campaigns. As such, they're more likely to engage with other campaigns (such as Search and YouTube ads), which boosts the performance of other ads.
Examples of automotive Display ads on Google
Source: Google Ads Library
Volvo uses Google Display ads to target not only B2C customers but also B2B customers. The brand leverages multiple display banner sizes and specifications to create ad variations and keep leads interested.
Source: Google Ads Library
Source: Google Ads Library
Toyota makes the most of Google Display ads across Asia, running demographic- and location-specific ad campaigns.
The brand recently launched Taisor (India-specific) and enticed potential buyers with discounts and special offers.
Source: Google Ads Library
Toyota also leveraged the much-anticipated launch of its latest-gen Camry with a string of Display ads to stay top-of-the-mind.
Source: Google Ads Library
Plus, Toyota tapped into special events to reinforce visibility for the brand and vehicles, such as the display ad below for New Year's.
Source: Google Ads Library
How to create Google Display ads
You can create Display Ads using your Google Ads account. Here's a quick, step-by-step guide you may follow:
- Create a campaign
Click
Campaigns, then +New Campaign.
For Display ads, choose your campaign objective from Sales, Leads, Website traffic, Awareness and consideration or Create a campaign without a goal's guidance.
Under Campaign type, select Display.
Next, enter the URL for your business website, which users will be redirected to when they click on your ad.
Name the campaign and click Continue.
- Enter campaign settings
First, choose the Locations where you want your display ad to appear. You can also exclude locations here.
Add the Languages you want to target. It should match the ad copy and the language your target audience speaks.
You may set up Ad rotation to optimise the rotation of your best display ads. This is recommended for better conversions or clicks.
Set up the Ad schedule, Devices, Campaign URL options, Dynamic ads (if you want to run dynamic display ads), Start and end dates and Content exclusions.
- Set budget and bidding
Enter your average daily budget under Budget.
You can use Automated bidding (Maximise clicks, Viewable CPM) or Smart Bidding (Target CPA, Maximise conversions) strategies for Google Display campaigns. If none of these align with your objectives, choose Manual bidding (Manual CPC) instead.
- Set targeting
You can choose Optimised targeting, wherein Google finds the best-performing audience segments and keywords to target similar audiences.
Or you may set up your targeting signals. To do so, click Add targeting and enter your targeting signals.
Under audience segments, you could add a Custom segment.
Uncheck the box in the Optimised targeting section labelled Use optimised targeting and click Next.
- Create ad
You can choose between creating a Responsive display ad or Upload display ad.
Responsive display ad (Image Source)
Upload display ad (Image Source)
Add the Final URL and Business name.
Next, upload your assets, including Images, Logos, Videos, Headlines, Long headline and Description.
Under Ad URL options, click on More options and choose a CTA to match your objective.
CTA options (Image Source)
Based on your assets, Google uses AI to generate the best ad combinations for its display network.
You can preview your Display ad before finalising it.
Lastly, you may opt out of Additional format options (such as Use asset enhancements and Use auto-generated video).
- Publish
After creating your display ad, click Next.
Review your campaign, and if you're ready to go live, hit Publish campaign.
Best practices for Google Display ads
In a crowded online environment, potential leads could experience ad fatigue and miss your display ads. We've listed some best practices to improve your ad performance and capture attention:
- Focus on a key message
Your ad copy, creative copy and visuals should tell users exactly what they get from your brand or vehicle. Keep your message easy to understand and visually clean; it's best not to overwhelm users with too much information at once.
If you're promoting limited-time or exclusive offers, add urgency to your copy and visuals using exact numbers. For example, '10% off on accessories'.
- Monitor performance on the regular
Check how your display ads perform regularly for each headline, description and image. You can do this by using insights from Google and integrations with tools like Driftrock.
Continually A/B test new variations to improve your ad performance steadily. You can replace or tweak assets that don't perform well and adjust the bids.
- Keep an eye on referral traffic
Using Google Analytics, find out which websites link to yours the most (under referral traffic).
You can check if these websites serve audiences that are similar to yours. If the audiences are similar, they could be potential buyers for you.
You can choose to run your display ads on these websites. It helps generate more leads and drive better ROI.
- Leverage retargeting and remarketing
Engage with users who have shown interest in your brand or vehicle or interacted with you previously. Retargeting and remarketing engage with these leads and help you stay top-of-the-mind.
How Driftrock helps drive more vehicle sales from Google Display ads
Driftrock's automotive marketing platform is geared towards increasing lead quality and volume, reducing CPL and improving conversion rates to boost vehicle sales.
With Google Ads, higher conversions have positive implications–a higher ad rank, lower CPC and, therefore, higher ROI.
Here’s what Driftrock enables:
- Integration with multiple lead sources
Our platform has over 40 lead sources that you can integrate with to capture leads and sync their data with your CRM.
Some top choices for Google Display ads could be Lead generation landing page, Website launcher lead forms, Website banner lead forms, Automotive chat assistant and more.
You can further streamline the integration process with our central model tree and location lookup.
- Generating more leads
Our integrations are customised and tested for automotive lead generation. Over time, we've generated more leads for clients and reduced the CPL by up to 50%.
Plus, you can set up auto-responders and email notifications within Driftrock so you don't miss out on leads.
- Increased lead quality
Driftrock lets you connect, validate, qualify and deduplicate leads into your CRM. We also have automated lead quality controls like transformation, mapping and enrichment.
You can set up custom qualification rules for lead acceptance and segmentation to increase lead quality.
For example, you can qualify high-intent leads looking to purchase in the next 3 months versus those in 6 months (who may need more nurturing).
- Simplified Conversion API (CAPI)
Setting up CAPI yourself can be a time-consuming and expensive process, which is also challenging to scale as you grow.
Driftrock simplifies the CAPI setup for Website, Lead and CRM so you can track leads effectively.
- Smart bidding and conversion tracking
You can track website leads at keyword and ad level to optimise your display campaigns.
Plus, Driftrock offers click, lead conversion and CRM conversion management for smart bidding and measurement.
With advanced downstream tracking, you can determine ROAS, allocate the budget and optimise display campaigns.
- Lifecycle marketing
"Avoid looking at channels in isolation. For example, you can build a high-intent audience on Google and use this to improve the quality of Meta.
The reach will likely be small, but the quality will be very high. You can also build lookalikes of these custom audiences to broaden the reach."
- Noreen Abdallah, gestionnaire de compte senior pour les médias payants chez Driftrock
Sync your CRM and lead segments with Google Customer Match. You can also leverage first-party data you've collected from other platforms to nurture leads to conversion.
You can standardise lead data with Driftrock and integrate with multiple sources to meet buyers with the right ads wherever they are in the purchase journey.
Our platform lets you understand which audiences, ads and forms drive the best quality leads. Use these insights to optimise current and future campaigns.
Here's how to get started with Driftrock for Google Display ads
- Se connecter à Driftrock
- Click on Setup New Capture on your dashboard.
- Or, click on Lead Capture Library and choose the most relevant lead source for your display ad.
- Follow the Setup widget for the next steps to sync lead capture.
- Veillez à inclure toutes les informations essentielles sur les prospects que vous souhaitez envoyer à votre CRM.
- Hit Finish
You can also generate leads from Google through other campaign types. Find out more about:
Driftrock's automotive marketing platform has fueled more than £360 million in Vehicle Sales across 15 markets in the last year alone. We work with 62% of the auto brands in the market, generating over 400,000 leads for them.
Our clients have experienced, on average, an increase of 15% in automotive market share for New Car Sales.
