Automotive Micro Sites - Amazing Stuff
By Paul • Mar 16th, 2008 • Category: Featured, Miscellaneous, News and Commentary, Top Story
Many are not aware that I returned to the car business running and Internet sales department. As an Internet Marketer I am always looking for ways to expand my reach and it is no exception as an Internet Marketing Manager for a car dealership. Knowing what I know about online marketing I started researching vendors in the Micro Site Market place and found some interesting things that are accepted in the industry.
For those those that don’t know a Micro Site is a landing page used by car dealers as an extension of their main website to capture leads. It can be completley generic, model specific or even very niche targeted, but it is a separate branding message and lead generation source for the dealer. If used properly it can provide huges SEO benefit or used in PPC marketing.
What I am finding from the Micro Site providers is that they charge exorbitant fees for dealers to use a landing page that they do not own. At prices ranging from $200 to $600 a month for the vendor to maintain control of the property. At those kinds of fees you would expect to own the property outright at the cost of a one month payment for design work alone and minimal hosting cost should be less than $10 per month.
It is amazing that dealers do not understand that they are basically renting a property that these vendors try to tie them into a contract for a year or longer pushing the real cost up to at a minimum of $2400 to a more realistic industry norm of around $3600 a year. As someone who markets many different products online using small 3 page landers (Micro Sites) it is amazing that dealers do not see through this.
While some of the technology that these providers do use meets the industry norm such as XML form captures and inventory integration it is amazing that dealers willing pay the fees for these properties, that they do not own, just for these reasons alone. Inventory integration on a micro site is really not needed to capture leads for specific models and even then if the page is designed properly the inventory could be framed in or linked out to the dealers main site. The XML form integration is used by the Internet Lead Management software to process leads in an automated fashion which still could be accomplished by a person responsible for managing Internet leads at the dealership if a suitable alternative can not be found to push the leads in an XML format.
Let’s face it an Internet Lead for a car dealer is worth considerable more than one for a small ticket item and deserves human interaction immediately and not placed in some automated system to handle the whole process if the dealership is serious about using the net to sell more cars. That does not mean that you do not use automated follow up on unsold leads, to think differently than that would be insane. However actually having a human place that lead in the follow up system, the ILM, would encourage that individual to consider the lead as a valuable asset to the business and take the necessary steps to convert them to income for the business and the individual.
Don’t get me wrong, micro sites are the future for online automotive marketing but to tie yourself into a contract for thousands of dollars per year for a property you do not own is a poor investment of your advertising dollars…
Paul is Is a full time affiliate marketer and father of 5 children, who owns, manages and publishes on various mediums via the World Wide Web.
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[...] Dealer Micro Sites seem to be a hot topic inside of a social network set up by Ralph Paglia. This seems to be a self serving topic as most of the participation is by the vendors trying to hawk their wares to the limited number of dealer employee participants. This marketing tools time has passed in it’s current form. (more on this later) [...]
Paul
I can’t agree with you more. Our company builds automotive microsites but the dealer owns the domain and the hosting account. If they no longer want to use our services, they can change the passwords. Automotive microsites are great tools for specific “model” search phrases. For example I built a microsite at http://www.bmw128i.com and it’s the #1 website in Google for that search phrase “BMW 128i”
Dealers need to get off their “leasing” mentality and start taking ownership of their digital assets. Automotive web platform providers love long term lease arrangements. For digital marketing strategies, there is also a potential conflict when competing dealers are using the same microsite provider and same SEO services.
My belief has always been that clients should want to be with you and not held on at gun point. So, I create these microsites with a onetime creative budget and then the clients decide if they want to maintain the websites or if they want us to maintain the sites.
We are now also exploring using skinned Wordpress websites to allow dealers to easily make updates to their microsites. We have been using skinned Wordpress sites for our clients outside of the auto industry with great success.
Brian Pasch, CEO
Pasch Consulting Group
Microsites can work for as many reasons as they can fail. A good website will not need a microsite, assuming the site allows the dealer to create an attractive offer (or offers) that have a high visit to conversion ratio.
However, where this fails is that so many dealers have lame offers or do not update their site frequently and therefore their website is nothing more than a virtual brochure. For example, a client like this http://www.mainlinehonda.com has a homepage fillled with great deals on new and certified Honda’s and coverts well. I have no problem sending any PPC or SEO traffic to this site, knowing it will convert.
A microsite done properly can give the dealer an additional doorway into the dealership and some of them can provide SEO benefit that they could not get without their webhost or developer completely revamping everything.
Microsites should not be used as a crutch, but as one tool in the arsenal.
For example, we have a sister site to Mainline Honda http://honda-certified.com which consists of a blog about certified Honda’s for sale. We are using this as just another tool to drive mostly local and regional customers to their stores by dominating the first page of Google, thus pushing out many other competitors.
-Michael
[...] them being designed to use as an alternate dealer marketing site. Not to be confused with auto dealer micro sites. The philosophy behind micro sites as a search marketing tool with one or two page landers [...]
great stuff, it always amazes me how many dealerships overlook a focus on organic search engine optimization. Microsites are great, but in my opinion just for ppc, and one shouldn’t depend too heavily on them for traffic, it’s best to seek out the best evergreen topics for that.
[...] Dealer Micro Sites seem to be a hot topic inside of a social network set up by Ralph Paglia. This seems to be a self serving topic as most of the participation is by the vendors trying to hawk their wares to the limited number of dealer employee participants. This marketing tools time has passed in it’s current form. (more on this later) [...]
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