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Under the Hood

Rockauto.com used Google Print Ads to increase new customer orders by as much as 16%.


Business

To say that brothers Jim and Tom Taylor love cars would be an understatement. Representing the third generation in a family of auto engineers, both brothers consider a weekend tinkering under the hood to be a weekend well spent. And when they discussed starting a new company together, they didn't think twice about its focus.

"It had to be cars," says Tom. "We just needed to find the right opportunity. Jim and I talked about our best and worst experiences with cars, and visiting parts stores was definitely one of the worst. For the average consumer they're intimidating, difficult to navigate, and service is usually sub-par. We thought we could do better, so in 1999 we started RockAuto."

Shifting into gear

With Jim as CEO and Tom as vice president of sales and marketing, the brothers Taylor intended to leverage technology in order to improve the auto parts shopping experience. "We wanted it to be simple to search for and find not only the correct parts," explains Tom,Campaign "but instructions on how to install them." In addition to featuring thousands of auto parts and body parts, the website Rockauto.com provides service manuals to help customers learn how to perform a repair.

To increase website traffic and sales, Tom began testing different marketing approaches. "First we tried classified ads," recalls Tom, "because we knew that over 50 percent of adults in the US read newspapers. I think we tried 30 different papers, small and large, but sales ended up decreasing. Then we tried placing our own display ads. Sales went up, but the amount of work and the price negotiations made it a nightmare. ‘You're not local,' was the phrase we constantly heard from the newspapers. We decided it just wasn't worth the hassle."

In the meantime, Tom looked into online advertising and opened a Google AdWords™ account. "AdWords was a completely different animal – it's what advertising should be. We could test which keywords worked best for us and target specific geographic areas. Best of all we could see how our campaigns were doing, so we knew what kind of return we were getting." Soon, Tom was relying exclusively on online advertising for new customer acquisition.

Read all about it

Despite his disenchantment with newspaper advertising, Tom still thought it could be a valuable advertising channel, provided it wasn't so resource intensive. So when he heard about Google Print Ads™, a new extension of Google AdWords that enables advertisers to run ads in newspapers across the U.S., he decided to give it a try.

"With Print Ads, it looked like Google had taken much of the pain out of print advertising," says Tom. "I could do everything through a single interface, deal with one organization instead of several newspapers, and get a single invoice." But Tom was still cautious. "I wanted to avoid the ‘name a budget and spend it' approach."

"With Print Ads, it looked like Google had taken much of the pain out of print advertising. I could do everything through a single interface, deal with one organization instead of several newspapers, and get a single invoice."

Tom set up his print campaigns in a single morning and uploaded his ad. "The interface was easy to navigate," he says. "Ad requirements were pretty simple and negotiations much easier." He then launched his campaigns, targeting both small and large newspapers in different areas of the country, and worked to track his ads' success. "Using zip codes, city names, and a custom code in our ad, I compared the number of orders placed by new customers in the 30 days before and after newspaper ads started running in the region," Tom explains. "I then compared that region to a similar population and geographic region nearby – the control city. All of our non-newspaper marketing was unchanged during the two time periods or was changed equally in both the target ad city and the control city."

Rockauto.com was very pleased with the results. "Overall, we've seen a 13 percent increase in new customers from the large city newspapers we've targeted, with an increase in some markets of up to 16 percent." he says. "And electronic tearsheets have been a pleasant surprise," Tom adds with a smile. "We usually can view them through our account within a day, so we can see exactly how the ad ran without having to get hold of the paper."

Going to print

Tom is now rolling out newspaper campaigns in new markets, and is able to tap into print advertising without sacrificing resources. "We've been conditioned by AdWords to think about managing campaigns in this way – through an online interface – and we apply our learnings from what works in AdWords to our print ads."

The Taylors now run a successful business with an international customer base, and their interest in cars hasn't waned. Jim has even installed a lift in his garage so he can easily work on the underside of his '77 Lincoln. They continue to leverage technology to improve how customers find and buy parts through Rockauto.com. "Google Print Ads is a wonderful example of using new media and technology to improve old media," says Tom. "I expect it to be the main way we buy print advertising from now on."