It is pretty obvious for anyone who has worked in the automotive industry that the guidelines for media planning and marketing in Google Ads, and Facebook etc are pretty messy and not well planned.

It is common to see the OEMs, Tier 2 partners, and Tier 3 dealerships all in the same Google Ads auction.

What's worse is it does not just stop at bids being inflated by poor guardrails set throughout the chain of command.

Start adding the 3rd party classified listing sites in the mix and you start to reveal a serious compound loss of efficiency in multiple channels!

Here is a classic example of the lack of coordination that leads to inflated bids in Google Ads and inefficiency.

All three tiers in one auction! Talk about low hanging fruit!

What's worse then having dealers bid aggressively against themselves, tier 2 partners, and the manufacturer?

3rd Party classified listing site stealing their customer's domain authority by ranking for their DBA!

This one really has me confused. Dealerships spend a fortune in maintaining their reputation via online reviews within Google and 3rd party reputation management companies.

Yet, here we have a classic example of a vendor that gets payed to use the dealership's inventory AND leverages the dealership's business name to rank their own site.

Moral of the story...

Its obvious that the automotive industry has a huge opportunity ahead.

That opportunity will span both the paid media space AND opportunity to help refine the SEO madness that lives within Google's search results.