Category: Search

Fuel pump, fuel injection pump, electric fuel pump, fuel injector pump, fuel injection system. The language of car enthusiasts and aficionados. The language of online searchers. Keywords.

A recent research report from Borrell Associates projects that the total U.S. ad spend for new cars will rise to $19.2 billion this year from the low of $18.4 billion in 2009. Of that total spend, franchised car dealers account for the majority of all auto ad dollars spent online. In 2009 they spent about $3 billion online, compared to $1.7 billion for manufacturers.

At this point most automotive marketers know that search marketing is an incredible vehicle for reaching their target customers. It’s highly relevant, highly targetable and is generally one of the most efficient and effective channels in a marketer’s ad mix. The problem with search marketing, though, is that it doesn’t scale beyond the level of user-initiated searchers. For most businesses, this is a problem, especially when their search-marketing campaigns are mature as are most campaigns of OEMs who have been active in the search space for many years.

If search engine visibility alone were a leading indicator of sales, the Big Three Detroit automakers would still be on top. Last month iCrossing released the findings of its Vertical Visibility Index: Automotive, its first study analyzing the paid and natural search visibility leaders amongst automotive OEMs in the U.S., and revealed:

Richly interactive websites are an integral part of the automotive industry. To sell a product as complex and as nuanced as an automobile, requires the use of engaging web technologies such as Flash, DHTML and AJAX. In the past, this would mean sacrificing organic search indexing of the dynamic content presented in these interactive experiences. Due to technical constrains by the search engines they could not see the dynamic content in these experiences and thus not have the ability to affect search ranking by indexing that content. (See Figure 1 at right, which illustrates how typical Flash sites are indexed, showing the exclusion of xml and media content.) The only other option then was paid search to compensate.

In When your car is your phone, which appeared in the Mobile issue of the Headlight blog, I covered phone/car integration and the potential impact of the current mobile-application-development frenzy. I posited that the platform of choice for automakers will likely be the iPhone for two reasons:

Searching for a new car? If so, your search won’t be simplified by the paid search ads on Google, Yahoo or MSN.