Online, car shoppers need to look no farther than a quarter-inch away from your listings to see what your competition has to offer. What are you doing to make your store stand out? How do you differentiate your listings from the competition? Learn how online display advertising can help set your store apart.

To catch the attention of car shoppers driving past your store — and to avoid blending in with nearby businesses — many of you have probably developed special signage or leveraged the help of a giant inflatable. If you have, you know it is important to stand out and to catch the eye of those driving by your lot. Well, it’s no different online.

Online, well-designed banner and dynamic display ads help your store to stand out from adjacent listings and encourage car shoppers to stop and have a look around.

Using Online Display Ads to Brand Your Store
While the majority of online car shoppers are, first and foremost, deciding what to buy, the next decision will be where to buy. Give car shoppers a reason to choose your dealership with online display advertising. An effective ad will tell car shoppers about your business philosophy and what they can expect when they do business with you. Decide your competitive strengths in your market and build messaging around that criteria. Maybe your store is the Chevy volume leader; perhaps your store has won Nissan's Owners First award for the past five years. Whatever the case, these messages define your store with car shoppers and help to make your inventory more attractive to them.

What Online Display Options Are Available?
Third-party websites typically offer two types of banner ads (e.g., “leaderboards” that run horizontally at the top of the page and “skyscrapers” that run vertically along the side) and dynamic display ads that can be custom-configured for your store. Many dealers use animation in these ads to feature marketing messages and photos of the vehicle makes and models they carry. Other dealers utilize dynamic ads that feature actual vehicles from their inventory. Customers clicking on the individual cars can then be directed to a page containing details about the listing and additional pictures.

A recent, innovative addition to third-party websites are dynamic display ads that scan your inventory and present the customer with relevant options to consider. These ads use rich-media technology that dynamically updates ads based on a variety of factors determined by the dealership. A dealer can choose to highlight, for example, vehicles that have been on the lot the longest, vehicles that were built by a specific manufacturer or cars offered for sale within a certain price range. Dealers also can align the featured vehicles with a car shopper’s search requests, including similar models by different manufacturers.

Design an Effective Display Ad
An effective display ad should show your inventory and your store in their best light. You're promoting your dealership itself as much as the cars themselves, so you want to be sure you give customers a convincing reason to do business with you.

A display ad should include bright colors and bold text, your store's logo and contact information, a clear call to action and vehicle pictures. If you use pictures of several vehicles — especially with dynamic display ads — you’ll want to make sure the photos are evenly exposed and taken from the same angle. This attention to detail reflects well on your store and the quality of the cars you sell. Finally, include animation in the ad, if possible, to better catch shoppers' attention.

What’s Your Call to Action?
Now that you have shoppers’ attention with your ad, you want them to take action. Whether you want potential buyers to look at more of your inventory, land at your website or visit special listings, a clear call to action will help turn views into visits. By asking shoppers to take the next step, you increase the likelihood that they will reach out to you for more information. Once you’re in direct communication with car shoppers, it's easier to move them toward the next steps: scheduling a test drive and making a purchase.

Measuring the Impact of Your Online Display Advertising
Online display ads include your location and contact information and, like a good listing, drive traffic to your store in four ways: walk-ins, phone-ups, emails and clicks to your website. Keep in mind, though, that the visual impression your ad makes on the car shopper usually proves more critical to your success than how many car shoppers click on the ad. So while display advertising is measurable, be sure to account for the less measurable branding effects.

Consider, for example, customers who see your store’s display ad on the search results page for the car they are researching. The buyer is more likely to seek out your listings and click on them for more information vs. the display ad itself. That said, dealers report success with display ads that appear on individual listings. If the car shopper doesn’t care for that particular vehicle, offered by another dealer, he or she can click on your ad to see what you have available.

More Information
Are you looking to get more out of your online display advertising? Learn more from Cars.com trainer Don Schmidt, who recently hosted “ Your Online Gorilla — Putting Display Advertising to Work,” part of Cars.com’s free Webinar series, DealerADvantage LIVE. Click here to listen to a recording of the training session.