If you've been running Performance Max campaigns and wondering where your money actually goes, channel performance is the report that finally opens the black box. It shows you which of Google's networks your ads are running on, how much of your budget each one consumes, and, critically, which ones are actually driving conversions. Related: New to measuring Google Ads performance for your dealership? This video on the attribution triangle covers how to use your Google Ads data

VLAs aren't dead. If anything, they're one of the best placements available on the most dominant search engine in the world. The dealers writing them off are usually the same ones who ran them the default way, didn't see the results they wanted, and moved on. The problem was never the format. It's what most dealers do — or don't do — inside it. There are two things worth paying attention to right now. One is how to use feed segmentation to stop letting Google decide which ve

Most dealerships have SEO. However, far fewer have SEO that drives buyers to their inventory. The good news is you can tell the difference quickly by checking whether your inventory pages appear in organic search and whether people engage when they land on them. Let's get started. What does "working" SEO actually look like? When SEO is doing its job, your inventory pages show up on Google (without paid ads) for the searches buyers are already running. Things like "new [model]

Google has started placing ads inside AI Overviews. But the more important change is how those ads are matched. If you’ve been running search campaigns the same way for the past few years, this update changes how paid and organic work together. Here, we explain how AI Overviews work, how ads are now integrated into them, and what this means for how you structure your content and campaigns going forward. Let’s get started. What are AI Overviews (and how do they work)? AI Overv

Most car buyers don't have dealership loyalty; they have brand loyalty. When someone searches "ABC Ford," there's a good chance they don't care whether they end up at ABC Ford or Bob Ford. A competitor campaign is a Google Ads campaign built on that gap: bid on a rival's name, show up when their customers search, and give them a reason to choose you instead. For a client of ours, that looked like five form submissions in five days at $26 per lead, on a minimal daily budget. H

Most GA4 users spend their time in the acquisition tab watching traffic numbers. The problem is, traffic doesn't tell you whether anything useful is happening on the site. A channel can drive thousands of sessions and bring in zero leads. The good news is there’s a report in the Explore section of GA4 that shows you the difference. Once it's built, it shows you exactly which traffic sources are driving which actions: form submissions, phone calls, chat initiations, and whate

PMAX will spend your budget across every Google network it has access to. Whether that spending is working comes down to two things: whether your conversions are set up correctly, and whether you know how to read where the money is actually going. Channel performance is the report that shows you both. This post covers how to read that report, what healthy spend distribution looks like, and what to do when it doesn't. What Does PMAX Actually Optimize For? Performance Max has

Contrary to what most people think, the difference between a search ad that dominates the search result page and one that barely shows up isn’t often budget. It’s the ad assets. Dealers who fill out every available asset give Google more to work with, take up more real estate, and typically pay less per click than competitors who don't. Google can only show what you give it. The fewer assets you provide, the less it has to work with. This post walks through every core asset t

AI search is already sending traffic to dealer websites. More importantly, it's answering customer questions without sending them to a website. A customer can ask ChatGPT which Honda dealer near them has the best no-haggle pricing, get a specific answer with reasons, and never click a single link. Understanding how that works and what content drives those answers is what makes your dealership show up and stand out. Here, we cover what AI search looks like for dealers, what t

You can't see your own Google Ads when you search for them because Google recognizes you through your IP address, browser history, or account activity, and deliberately hides your ads to avoid wasting your budget on someone who's not going to convert. Keep reading for the step-by-step guide on how to use GS Location Changer to view your ads without Google recognizing you. We have also created a video walkthrough below. How to See Your Ads Using GS Location Changer GS Locatio