Google Ads

Rev up the car shopping experience with Automotive ads

Mar 30, 2016

2 min read

Bhanu Narasimhan

Senior Director of Product Management, Fitbit

The way people shop for cars has changed. The days of going from dealership to dealership are over. People now turn to their smartphones in critical auto shopping moments to research models, find deals, and get real-time advice. In fact, 1 out of every 2 automotive searches on Google, like those for make and model, occur on smartphones¹ - up 51% year over year.² To help you reach these auto shoppers with the most relevant and useful experience in those critical micro-moments, we’ve fully rolled out Model Automotive ads, a new mobile ad format now available to all OEM automotive advertisers in the US.

Engage shoppers in your mobile showroom

Undecided auto shoppers turn to images to help narrow down their choices. Searches for “pictures of [automotive brand]” are up 37% year-over-year³ with 80% of those searches occurring on mobile.⁴ In fact, viewing images of cars and trucks is the most common mobile action when shopping for a vehicle.⁵ That’s more than any other mobile action taken when shopping for a car. Model Automotive ads recreate that showroom experience by featuring images of your cars along with additional information about each of them, like estimated MPG or advanced features, right within mobile search results.

Shoppers can swipe through high-quality images of a car’s exterior and interior, view details about performance and features, find a local dealer, or navigate directly to your website to build the car of their dreams. Brands are seeing more than a 30% average increase in engagement rate with Model Automotive ads compared to standard text ads.⁶

“Google's Model Automotive ads provide an immediate and immersive mobile experience for our guests, and the ability to show and tell our story helps highlight the value of the Toyota brand and our vehicles. Across our core line of car models, we’ve seen a 45% increase in conversion events and a 30% decrease in CPA compared to standard text ads.” - Dionne Colvin-Lovely, Director, Traditional and New Media, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A.

"Our goal is to make the car buying process better. Dealer Automotive ads lets us do this by giving shoppers the option to find the closest dealer, get directions, or call them for more information. Results to-date have been incredible. This format is driving 30% higher CTRs and has increased website visitors from intent-based dealership queries by 40%." - Chris Vessey, Director, Digital Media Solutions at Dealer.com

Learn more

Dealer Automotive ads are available to franchise and authorized dealerships in the US. You can learn more about Model Automotive ads or Dealer Automotive ads by reaching out to your AdWords account team.

^{1 Google internal data, United States, February 2016

2 Google internal data, United States, April 2014 vs. April 2015

3 Google Trends, United States, September 2015 vs. September 2014

4 Google internal data, United States, September 2015

5 Mllward Brown Digital/Google Vehicle Shopper Path to Purchase Study, September 2013

6 Google internal data, United States, March 2016

7 Google Trends, United States, July 2015 vs. July 2014

8 Google Trends, United States, August 2015 vs. August 2014}

POSTED IN:

Rev up the car shopping experience with Automotive ads

Engage shoppers in your mobile showroom

Learn more

Related stories