As we look to tell the stories about people and the products that support auto dealerships, Digital Dealer is shining the spotlight on companies that help dealers do their job more effectively.
We recently interviewed Search Engines MD’s Cody Jerry to hear about his experiences, how to develop a digital strategy, and his views on the industry.
DIGITAL DEALER: What was your first job in the industry, and what did it teach you?
CODY JERRY: My first job in the auto industry was in Bozeman, MT, and I think the dealership really demonstrated how competitive the market can be. The goal was to always push for a higher percentage of cars sold in the market, and that heavily influenced the decisions made in the marketing department.
DIGITAL DEALER: What is your proudest accomplishments in the industry?
JERRY: The first time the dealership I worked at sold over 50% of the cars in the market. That was a really big goal for the strategies we were developing, and hitting that initial goal was huge. We did it on a $0 Google Ad Budget, which was also unheard of at the time. I wouldn’t do that today, but in 2010 you could really dominate the Organic Search Results in very unique ways.
DIGITAL DEALER: What are you most excited for in 2024?
JERRY Our focus is moving from Chat Starts, Click to Calls, and Form Submission to car sales and ROs. We spent much of the last three plus years on performance indicators within Google Analytics as a measurement of success. However, marketing strategies shifted in ways that can almost game some of these metrics. We have majorly devalued metrics like Chat Starts and Click to Calls in the last 18 months as they were correlated to potential business. They often meant less as a conversion in Google Analytics compared to a form completion.
DIGITAL DEALER: What trends do you think will have a significant impact on the automotive industry in the coming years?
JERRY: Third party cookies going away is going to be the largest influencer on the last part of 2024. Many data points that we utilize are either going to go away or be completely changed by the end of this year. This includes many of the data points used in Meta Pixels, such as viewContent events, TikTok Pixels, and even some third-party tools. There are a great deal of 3rd party cookies at play within reporting that will see their information transformed.
DIGITAL DEALER: What do you enjoy most about your role, company, and/or the automotive industry?
JERRY: As the Director of Digital Strategy at Search Engines MD, I get to do a great deal of innovation and training. We don’t disclose much of anything that we are actually doing in our development and design, but the majority of my time is spent working with the team to innovate on current and future strategies. Very little time is spent high-fiving about past accomplishments because the marketing world is always shifting.
DIGITAL DEALER: Please tell us about your core offerings, any new products or features, and how automotive dealerships are best leveraging those.
JERRY: Search Engines MD offers Search Engine Optimization, Local SEO, Content Creation, Facebook and Instagram Paid Advertising, and Google Ads Management. Each of these platforms can feed the rest through various optimization strategies, and our best dealer partners typically have all of our services. Our focus is commerce-driven, so almost all of our advertising is pushing toward mid to low-funnel shoppers. A great dealership partner would be someone with a similar mindset—advertising is meant to generate more high-quality leads and ROs.
DIGITAL DEALER: Can you highlight any recent innovations or strategies that set your company apart in the market?
JERRY: This is hardly an innovation in our eyes, but the newest analytic tools function much differently than Universal Analytics. Both GA4 and Facebook pixels are loaded on websites and listen for any new events to fire. That means if another vendor fires a Facebook event without specifying their Pixel ID, you will pick up events that you don’t want. Now, that may not seem like a big deal, but just by removing additional pixel events we have decreased cost-per-clicks on our Facebook campaigns by as much as 70%. We have even helped some OEMs redo their pixel implementation to allow for better performance at our tier level.
DIGITAL DEALER: What values and principles drive your organization, and how do you ensure they are reflected in the day-to-day operations and interactions within the company?
JERRY: Customer service is the most important aspect of our company, and we try to be extremely responsive to requests. We spent Labor Day last year rebuilding someone’s CRM after an unfortunate internal error, and we handle any request as urgently as possible. That doesn’t mean everything gets handled instantly, but we do our best to resolve requests in under 1 hour.
DIGITAL DEALER: Looking ahead, what exciting developments or initiatives can dealerships expect from your company in the near future? Are there specific goals or milestones that your team is working towards?
JERRY: Shifting the focus of our advertising towards real money coming through the door and working to increase revenue instead of KPIs in Google Analytics. Those KPIs are highly correlated with results, but they are just the start of the marketing narrative. Finding more ways to say “What did my ads actually do for me?” is going to be more and more important as we lose 3rd party cookies and other data with more privacy laws being released.
DIGITAL DEALER: What advice would you give to someone entering the field?
JERRY: Really focus on the basics of marketing analytics and reporting. One skill that constantly shocks people is our ability to build Google Analytics reports on the fly to pull out various data points. Many reports we use today were developed to fulfill the wishful thinking of a dealership partner.
