By participating in several dealer conferences we discovered that nobody has more influence on influencing dealer opinion than other dealers – qualified word of mouth is the key to success!

So to overcome this skepticism towards the impact of digital marketing on sales we needed to team up with five of SEAT’s flagship dealerships in Germany and Google to run a pilot. We need to ensure users searching for SEAT car models on Google are directed to the closest SEAT dealership instead of being bombarded by auto comparison sites. Convince digitally-skeptical SEAT dealers of the effectiveness of paid search by ensuring that the offline deals (data) on new cars, used cars or dealer services are correctly attributed to our SEA campaign.

The most challenging aspect about digital dealer campaigns is to drive the user to the landing page of the appropriate dealer which is closest to them. Luckily IP targeting enables us to deliver dynamic & customised ads only showing details about the appropriate dealer within the relevant region. So once arriving on the landing page an individual phone number is only shown to those users who have previously clicked the Google ad. This ensures that calls generated by the SEA campaign can be clearly differentiated from regular calls. In addition unique e-mail addresses were created on the dealer landing page if users clicked on an ad related to the campaign. All emails sent to this email address were automatically assigned to a customized inbox at the dealership. To validate the leads we implemented a trading tool at all participating dealerships. The tool automatically assigned leads to salesmen and aftersales staff providing them with all relevant information about the qualified prospect by email. The responsible assistant at the dealership agreed to contact the prospect and update the status of the lead on the system. In addition he took note if the prospect was a new or existing customer. All this information was transformed into anonymous data and matched with the effective costs of the Google campaign. In this way we were able to evaluate the impact of SEA on offline retail sales.

Within only 7 months 34 cars were sold and 134 aftersales services provided across these 5 dealerships, directly as a result of the Search pilot. All with a budget of less than 30.000€.

These outstanding results enabled us to convince almost 350 dealers to participate in the subsequent national roll out of the campaign until end of 2015.

So if users are looking for SEAT cars on Google they now find the SEAT brand positioned 1st in the results, followed by the most appropriate dealer in 2nd place. We successfully managed to displace portals such as autoscout24.de and mobile.de having a local ad visibility of 95% for relevant keywords.

As a consequence:

• The current cost per lead of 35€ equates to just a third of the expected cost

• One in two leads lead to an appointment at the dealership, double the expectations

• 12% of queries for new and used cars end in sales

• 95% of the generated customers are new to the brand.