3 Ways Ad Agencies Waste Your Money

In this day and age, it’s important to make sure that every dollar spent in advertising is spent correctly. That means spending on quality targeting, meaningful creatives, and up to date performance tracking throughout your campaign lifetimes. While many marketing agencies may claim they provide just that, it’s important to know what to look out for to know when a company is actually wasting your ad spend.

Here are the top 3 indicators that a company is wasting your ad spend:

1. Advertising “Coming Soon” or placeholder pictures.

One of the worst ways that dealers drive away potential customers is by having ads that are incomplete. This generally occurs when a dealer’s advertising agency does not correctly filter out photos from their feed that they put in their ads. Instead of having complete, consistent ads, dealership ads will instead show up like this:

Now, we all know as consumers ourselves that this is not eye appealing nor does it even look like a real ad. It’s something that is very easy to skip over or scroll by without giving it a second glance. Unfortunately for a dealership, the very fact that the ad was shown to someone costs them money. Being charged for an incomplete ad that generates little to no results is what we call a waste of advertising spend. Luckily, here at VIN Logic, we generate custom feeds specifically to filter out unwelcoming placeholder images to ensure your ads are always up to date with relevant inventory pictures that customers WANT to see when looking for a car.

2. Ads that are generic, ‘cookie cutter’.

No dealership wants to spend their advertising budget on ads that have the same exact wording as their advertising agency’s 20 other dealership clients. Unfortunately, many marketing agencies have tried to simplify their process by generating generic phrases that they then distribute to every account that they have. This results in generic, boring, ‘cookie-cutter’ ads that customers KNOW are not tailored to them. The downfall of allowing your dealership’s advertising budget to go to ads that are not custom are poor results. See below an example of a generic ad that was clearly not reviewed before it was published as the verbiage is quite clustered.

It’s important to be able to stand out from the competition by having completely custom content, down to the wording on each ad.

3. Poor campaign structures

Are you aware of how your advertising agency structures their campaigns for your dealership? Do they have any structure? Are they using proper targeting techniques? Transparency in what types of campaigns that are running for your dealership is important in knowing where your ad spend is going. All too often dealerships are left without knowing what types of campaigns are being run, or if they are structured at all. This is usually due to the fact that advertising agencies have a ‘one size fits all’ method to their campaign structure, which obviously does not work depending on your dealership’s goal. Here at VIN Logic, we have multiple different campaign structures depending on your dealership’s size, goals, and geographic location. Want to sell more used in a metropolitan area? We’ve got that specific structure set up and ready for you to see results. Looking to enhance your dealership image with your OEM and sell more new vehicles in a rural area? Our Rural Brand-focused campaign structure has you covered!

Now that you know what to look out for, answer the question for yourself! Is your advertising agency wasting your ad spend? If your dealership is working with VIN Logic, you’ll know the answer is a great big NO. Our team works tirelessly for each of our dealers to ensure they have proper image feeds, personalized ad content, and custom campaign structures for you to get the most out of your ad spend.

Want to try out? Click below to schedule a demo today!