Tech Talks.
Practical notes on automotive retail demand: inventory merchandising, vehicle detail pages, trade-in and lead quality, service bookings, parts and accessory attach, and getting quoted by answer engines — written for the teams who have to ship the change.
6 published
Search & Shopping
- Published
- 43
- Desks
- 5
- Format
- field notes
- Read time
- 4–9 min
6 published
Search & Shopping
The perimeter problem: how to draw a geo-fence that pays, and why Performance Max is the only campaign type that can hold it
A radius around the store is a guess with a media budget attached. Here is the three-layer method for drawing a demand-based drive-time perimeter, the marginal arithmetic that ends it, and why Performance Max is the only Google campaign type that can operate inside a fence this precise.
One direction, no frames: the inventory photography standard nobody enforces
Forty individually acceptable photographs can make a useless catalog. Consistent hero angles and overlay-free images are what turn a search results row into a comparison a shopper can actually perform, and it costs paint on the floor and a printed checklist.
Paid social for parts: where it works, where it quietly burns margin
Meta and TikTok can sell vehicles, lighting, accessories and service bookings. They cannot fix a catalog that fails to say what fits a truck. A working model for paid social in automotive retail, with the benchmarks that decide it.
Google Ads, schema and the AI competition in automotive retail
What structured product, vehicle and fitment data actually changes inside the auction, where AI genuinely outcompetes a national chain, and the order in which the gains arrive.
Six stores, one auction: how regional marketing makes same-brand dealers cannibalize each other
A regional office is judged on participation and share of voice. A store is judged on cost per unit sold. Give six same-brand rooftops in one metro the same approved campaigns, the same co-op funds and the same keywords, and both scorecards turn green while the market buys the same demand six times. Why the cannibalization is structural rather than malicious, and the one split that stops it.
AI Max, AI Brief and the Google SEM stack you are about to be migrated onto
Google quietly turned Search campaigns into an AI layer, then made the migration mandatory. What actually changed, and which free classes teach it.
The brief
One email when a platform actually changes the rules.
New analysis, plus the moments Google or an assistant quietly changes how inventory, service or parts get found. No newsletters about newsletters.