Running a paid advertising campaign for a car dealership comes with many challenges—reaching the right audience, optimizing budget allocation by model, and ensuring ads appear for the best searches. Google’s Performance Max (PMax) campaigns have provided a powerful way for dealerships to consolidate their advertising across Google’s entire ecosystem. However, with the addition of “campaign-level negative keyword exclusions” in PMax, car dealerships can now optimize their ad campaigns even further, ensuring ads are seen by relevant audiences, avoiding wasted ad spend on irrelevant clicks, and driving better results.
In this blog post, we’ll dive into how these new features can benefit car dealerships running paid advertising campaigns, and how you can leverage them to drive more leads and sales to your showroom.
What Is Performance Max (PMax) and Why Is It Important for Car Dealerships?
Google’s Performance Max, or PMax, campaigns are designed to allow advertisers to run ads across multiple Google properties, such as Google Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, and Maps, with a single campaign. In automotive, PMax can create a unified advertising strategy without managing separate campaigns for each Google property. This simplifies the advertising process, while providing access to all of Google’s powerful machine learning features to drive results.
The key benefit of PMax for car dealerships is the ability to consolidate marketing efforts into one campaign, meaning dealerships can create and manage fewer campaigns while optimizing the performance of each campaign across Google’s ecosystem. PMax uses machine learning to optimize bidding, budget allocation, and ad placement, ensuring that your ads are shown to the right audience at the right time.
However, one of the biggest concerns for advertisers has been a lack of control over keyword targeting. This is where the latest feature of “negative keyword exclusions” in PMax come into play.
What Are Negative Keyword Exclusions, and Why Do They Matter?
“Negative keyword exclusions” allow advertisers to prevent their ads from showing for specific keywords that are not relevant to their business. This is especially important for car dealerships that want to avoid showing ads for unrelated search terms, protecting their ad spend from being wasted on irrelevant clicks.
Previously, negative keyword exclusions were only available at the account level, but with the new PMax update, you can now add exclusions at the campaign level. This gives advertisers even more flexibility to tailor their ads to specific campaigns, allowing you to exclude keywords for different vehicle models, services, or offers within each campaign.
Benefits of Campaign-Level Negative Keyword Exclusions
Car dealerships, in particular, can benefit from this feature in several key ways:
Better Control Over Targeting
With campaign-level negative keyword exclusions, car dealerships can fine-tune which search terms trigger their ads. For example, if you’re running a campaign for new car sales, you can exclude keywords like “used cars,” “car rentals,” or “car repairs,” ensuring budget is spent only on keywords directly related to your objectives.
Optimized Ad Spend
Negative keyword exclusions help protect your advertising budget by preventing your ads from showing for irrelevant searches. This reduces wasted spend, allowing you to allocate more of your budget to users who are actively searching for a new vehicle, increasing your chances of driving qualified leads.
Improved Ad Performance
When your ads are shown to more relevant audiences, the likelihood of clicks and conversions increases. Negative keyword exclusions ensure your ads reach the right audience at the right time, which improves your overall click-through rate (CTR), conversion rates, and ultimately, the return on ad spend (ROAS) for your advertising campaigns.
Enhanced Customer Experience
By excluding irrelevant search terms, car dealerships can ensure that potential customers have a more tailored and relevant ad experience. For instance, a user searching for “SUVs near me” will see a relevant ad for SUVs instead of an ad for car parts or services, which could lead to a more positive interaction with your brand.
Supercharge Your Dealership’s Campaigns
The addition of campaign-level negative keyword exclusions in Google’s Performance Max is a powerful tool for car dealerships looking to optimize their paid advertising campaigns. By excluding irrelevant keywords and ensuring ads are shown to the right audience, dealerships can reduce wasted spend, increase conversions, and improve the overall ROI of their marketing efforts.
By keeping a close eye on the search terms that are triggering your ads and refining your negative keyword list, you can maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns and ensure your ads are always aligned with your dealership’s goals.
As Google continues to lean into algorithm reliance, changes like this provide great optimism in advertisers’ abilities to mold marketing campaigns. If you are interested in optimizing your dealership’s paid advertising campaigns, schedule a demo with us!