Carwale.com Signed Up With Google Adwords To Increase 20-35% Visitors Per Month

About Carwale.com

Carwale.com was launched in 2005 and has now become India’s leading automobile web portals. It is owned by Automotive Exchange Pvt. Ltd, and is funded by one of India’s leading venture capital firm, Seedfund, and US venture fund, Sierra Ventures. It has four corporate offices located in India, Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai and Bhopal.

It believes in investing a large portion of its marketing budget on online advertising. It allocates around 80% of its marketing budget to online advertising, out of which a big chunk is spent on Google Adwords. After making successful online campaigns, it was able to achieve the position of number one web portal in India for automobiles, within a matter of five years from its launch. It has also been successful in maintaining this position since 2010. Last year, it was successful in selling around 15 lakh cars which amounted to over 10% of the total number of cars sold in the country. They also see over 30,000 users per month making inquiries on the website and a very significant portion of these users show sales conversions.

Carwale.com’s Business Objectives

Carwale.com, since its inception, aimed to be the number one automobile web portal in India. Its focus was to offer car buyers and sellers in India well researched content, to support them to make informed choices.

Carwale.com also intended to feature as a platform wherein users could connect with car manufacturers like GM, Mahindra, Skoda, etc.

In addition to the above, they helped to connect consumers to various leading finance and insurance companies.

Approach /Strategy Adopted By Carwale.com

Based on its prior experience of digital online marketing, Carwale.com realized that running their advertising campaign with the help of Google Adwords should be able to do the needful in bringing about higher visibility of the brand and traffic. Initially, they started by running a few campaigns and after seeing the response of the same, decided to go for it on full scale. They believed in initially limiting the advertising budget to a minimum in order to get a proper understanding of the entire process and its outcome. In the initial couple of months, the Adwords campaign could drive a sufficient traffic to their website. They decided to invest 80% of their advertising budget on online advertising. Out of this a big chunk was spent on Google Adwords. Carwale.com made a number of campaigns and started seeing good results. In the process, they found that one simple way of ensuring profit is by getting high quality conversions. They help to substantially improve the ROI thereby reducing the CPC. With the help of these measures, last year it was successful in selling around 15 lakh cars which amounted to over 10% of the total number of cars sold in the country. They also saw over 30,000 users per month making inquiries on the website, and a very significant portion these users showed sales conversions.

Carwale.com used various tools like ‘Google Analytics’ and ‘Keyword Tool’ to better ROI. With the help of these tools they could analyze the behaviour of the customers who on reaching the website, clicked on an ad. Keeping this data as a basis to understand the behavioural pattern of the potential consumers, they made relevant modifications to the advertisements and the website content, thereby significantly improving the ROI and conversion rate. Using this data, they not only got sufficient help with the Adwords campaign, but also for PPC ads. The Keyword Tool was used extensively by their in-house team to evaluate search traffic and cost estimates, before adding any new keyword. They also made use of the conversion tracking tool to track the ROI achieved and make future predictions accordingly.

With the help of these measures, last year it was successful in selling around 15 lakh cars which amounted to over 10% of the total number of cars sold in the country. They also saw over 30,000 users per month making inquiries on the website, and a very significant portion these users showed sales conversions.

How does Google Adwords help in ensuring successful campaigns?

It is an online advertising platform which uses its advertising algorithm which is performance based to support several kinds of businesses to advertise and also use its partner sites to achieve additional benefits. Quite a large number of businesses across the world use this platform to gain growth in their business. The most commonly used models are Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Impression (CPM). Although expensive, this advertising platform is highly efficient and is used by marketers to reach out to their potential customers.

Results

• Carwale.com saw 20-35% new visitors per month as an outcome of running campaign using Google Adwords.
• There was a huge improvement in the number of users inquiries on the website per month which went to 30,000 users.
• The rate of conversion rate rose.
• Carwale.com was successful in selling around 15 lakh cars last year which amounted to 10% of the total number of cars sold in the country.
• The campaign helped in attracting the targeted audiences.

Learning

Any marketer should determine the main reason for creating and running any marketing campaign and based on this reason, determine the future steps that need to be taken to achieve the same. The tools and manpower resources which are provided by Google, helps any marketer successfully run the campaigns and evaluate the results. Regular monitoring of the campaign is another important activity one must remember to perform on a regular basis to keep check on the outcome of the campaign. Regular updation of the keyword list is also important to be done for running a successful campaign. The keywords giving good results should be retained and the ones which are under performing should be removed. One must create at least 2 to 3 campaigns instead of relying on just one.

Image Credit: Carwale.com