Do you ever find yourself confused by all the (numerous!) digital marketing related terms that different agencies throw around?
Even though we at Bluesky try to keep things transparent and straightforward, we can still find ourselves talking a bit of digital gobbledygook from time to time. Plus, we know that a lot of dealers receive unsolicited sales emails from lots of digital companies – so, here’s how to never get blinded by jargon again!
Link Building
Link Building is something that you will probably be contacted about by various SEO companies at least a couple of times a week. In short, it’s creating links on blog posts and websites that link back to your website, which Google can use as one of many indicators that tell them how authoritative your website is.
A word of warning about link building.
Google are savvy to this technique, so link building needs to be sophisticated and careful. Ignore companies offering to build hundreds of links a month, as they can incur you penalties with Google that can stop your website getting traffic from search engines. This is why our internal link building focuses on smaller numbers of higher quality links, using sources we trust. Speak to your Account Manager if you’d like a quote.
Dynamic Stock Feed
As you’re aware, a dealer website usually relies heavily on stock feeds – stock lists either coming in to your website from a manufacturer or DMS, or being sent from your websites to third parties such as Auto Trader or Motors.
A dynamic feed is a similar concept, but the content of the feed is used to power adverts online. The most common use is showing specific used cars people have viewed to that person on other websites when they have navigated away from your site.
SERPs
The digital world does love a good acronym! SERPs stands for Search Engine Results Pages, meaning the pages of websites that you are shown if you type a search into Google.
HTML5
You might encounter this phrase if you run any animated adverts, as it’s a type of file format. More traditional advert formats are jpegs (standard image files) or gifs (animated image files with a small file size). HTML5 is the next generation of these, offering enhanced graphics. Not all ad platforms accept them, though you can now run them through Google AdWords.
Crawler / Spider / Bot
All day every day little pieces of code trawl through your website – for various reasons. These may be crawlers from Google, helping to make sure your pages show in their search results, or from various other websites and third parties.
Sometimes these little code snippets show up in Google Analytics and can skew your figures by making it look like people are using your site in a way they aren’t really (such as viewing every single page for a split second!). For these, we can usually exclude them for you.
Conversion
When we talk about Conversion for our car dealer clients, we are generally referring to the number of enquiries that we have sent through to your dealer (whether on new cars, used cars, aftersales or something else), divided by the number of unique users on the site. If you don’t have call tracking (which we’d recommend for all dealers!) then we will only be able to report the email conversion rate, and this is the figure you’ll often see in our automated reports.
Attribution
You know how sometimes when comparing postcodes of sales with users on their site, both Auto Trader and Motors (and all the others!) will try and claim that it was their involvement that gave you the sale? This is one of the constant problems with attribution.
In short, attribution is about identifying the traffic source, website or supplier that gave you the lead or the sale. Where it can get tricky is if there have been multiple points of contact, and different people have different approaches for how to attribute in these scenarios.
CRO
Another acronym, this one stands for Conversion Rate Optimisation, and is the art (yes, really!) of optimising your website to deliver as many leads as possible.
GDN
This stands for the Google Display Network. The best way to think of it is that when you advertise on google, you can do it in two key ways. You can advertise on the Search Network, which allows you to place adverts in the search engine results. Or you can choose the Display Network, which is a network of affiliated websites, blogs, forums and o on that display google-powered image, animated or video adverts.
As a car dealer, we’d generally advocate that if you only have a small PPC budget, you should spend it on tactical campaigns, ideally driving leads. In that case the Search Network is your best choice. If you’re already doing that, and want to do more, than the Display Network lets you run brand or awareness campaigns that may not drive as many leads, but can reach thousands of people in your local area. A full digital marketing strategy will involve both.
Google 360 Tours
A great way to show off your fancy dealership, a 360 tour is an extension of Google’s street view functionality. If you have a Google My Business or Google Places page, an official photographer can record a 360 tour of the exterior and interior of your dealership, and upload it. This tour can also be featured on your website, where it can even be enhanced with buttons, text, Call To Actions and more.
Listening Service
This is a Social Media Service that we provide, which involves monitoring your social media accounts and responding to any comments or mentions, negative or otherwise. It’s the ideal “first step” into social if you’re a little wary…
That’s the end of today’s jargon list. If you have any other words to suggest or any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch!