Bing Ads Alternative for Car Dealerships

Search ads sell you clicks. LeadLocate delivers the people behind them: exclusive local leads from a zone you draw, campaigns our team runs for you, and one CRM that works every lead.

Bing Ads is the name most dealers still use for Microsoft Advertising, the platform that sells pay per click search ads on the Bing search engine and across Microsoft's partner network. An advertiser picks keywords, writes the ads, sets a daily budget and a bid, and pays each time someone clicks. The audience is whoever is searching on that network, which includes a large number of desktop users on work computers and Windows devices.

For a car store the appeal is familiar. It works like the search advertising you may already run elsewhere, an account can be built from an import of an existing search account, and clicks on automotive terms are often reported as cheaper than on the larger engine because fewer stores are bidding. It gives a marketing manager direct control over keywords, geography, schedule and spend.

Features, packaging and pricing change over time, so confirm current capability, pricing and terms with the vendor directly before you plan around any of it.

A search account is a tool, and the work of the tool sits with whoever owns it. Someone has to build campaigns around brand, model and finance intent, maintain negative keyword lists so the budget stays on buyers, read the search term report every week, adjust bids when a competitor moves, and keep the ad copy matched to what is actually on the lot. That is a real job, and at most stores it belongs to a manager who already has three others.

Then there is the page after the click. A click is a visit, and a visit only becomes an opportunity when the shopper fills out a form or picks up the phone. That puts the landing page, the form, the call handling and the follow up on the store's side of the ledger. The ad invoice counts clicks, the showroom counts appointments and deliveries, and the distance between those two numbers is where search budgets get argued about in the Monday meeting.

None of that is a knock on search advertising. It is simply what the product is: access to an auction for attention. Stores look for an alternative when they would rather buy the result of all that work, a person with a name, a phone number and a vehicle in mind, delivered to them and worked in one system.

Leave your number and a lead specialist calls you back to answer your questions about pricing, coverage, and setup. Mon - Sat, 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM Pacific.

Prefer to talk right now? Call or text 844-376-2274.

Features change on both sides. Verify anything that will drive your decision with each vendor directly.

The first gain is buying people instead of clicks. With LeadLocate, the unit you pay for is a lead: a shopper in your zone who answered your prescreening questions and asked to hear from a dealership. Every lead in your zone is delivered to you and only you, prescreened at capture, and backed by a replacement review through Quality Control Requests, so a bad lead costs you nothing. Inbound buyer leads arrive as a mix of VIN specific interest and open shoppers describing what they want, and the guide to what to expect from car sales leads explains how to work each kind.

The second gain is the campaign work leaving your desk. In Leads Manager you make the decisions a dealer should make: the zone, the campaign type, the prescreening questions and any Custom Offers, with See Samples showing you sample ads before anything runs. Our team builds and runs the campaigns from those selections on the webXintel Ads Network, which is included with every plan. Nobody at your store has to live in a search term report again.

The third gain is that every lead lands somewhere built to work it. The platform subscription is part of every plan with leads, so a new shopper arrives in a CRM with texting, calling, email, automations, desking and reporting already attached to the lead record, instead of an email notification waiting for someone to notice it.

Keyword bidding asks you to predict what a buyer will type. Leads Manager starts from where your buyers live. You draw a territory around your store in the zone editor, use zip stats and a market scan to see what the area looks like, and pick the campaign type that fits the month: buyer leads, seller leads from local owners, or both together on the Buyers and Sellers Hybrid plan.

Prescreening questions are the part search marketers find most useful. Instead of hoping a landing page form sorts serious shoppers from casual ones, you choose the questions a shopper answers before the lead reaches you, such as timeframe, trade in or how they plan to pay. The answers ride on the lead record, so the salesperson opening it knows exactly how to start the conversation.

Financing campaigns run under fair lending rules that forbid narrowing an audience by age, gender, income, marital status, household size, education, language or ZIP, and the campaigns our team runs follow those rules, which takes one more compliance question off your marketing manager's plate. When a second rooftop or a busy season calls for more, extra 20 mile sales zones and extra lead sets are added to an active subscription from My LeadLocate, the account portal.

Speed decides most internet deals, and it is where a lead platform with the CRM built in pulls ahead of any ad account. When a lead arrives, round robin assignment or your distribution rules put it in front of a named salesperson, Manager Lead Copies put the same lead in front of a manager, and the Automated Templates for that feed can send the first text within moments of arrival.

From there the salesperson works it with real tools. RCS messaging with automatic SMS fallback carries photos and branded messages, and the inventory insert button drops a unit with its photos and price into any text or email. Click to call runs through the browser softphone or the LeadLocate app, the call is recorded and transcribed, and Call Alerts flag every call where words you choose, such as trade in or payment, come up. The phone validator and email validator show validity right on the lead, so nobody spends a morning dialing a mistyped number.

When the shopper is weeks away, Follow Up Processes run multi step drips per lead type, and scheduled sends let a rep write the next message now and have it go out on the day it matters. The calendar booking link puts the appointment on the shared calendar with reminders attached, and every call, text, email and voicemail sits on one timeline on the lead record.

Some stores keep a search account running for brand terms or a specific model push, and that fits cleanly. Point the ads at lead pages, the landing page builder inside the CRM with its own per page URL settings, and every submission arrives as a lead with the source attached. If the ads send traffic to your dealer website, connect your website forms so every form fill lands in the same inbox with the fields mapped, and the first text can fire automatically.

Calls get the same treatment. A tracking phone number per source means a call from a search ad is counted as a search call, routed through the IVR and business hours rules you set, and logged on the customer's timeline with the recording and the transcript. Website visitor analytics inside the CRM show sessions, sources and top pages, and the activity, company and management reports read results by source, so search, zone leads and walk ins are measured on the same yardstick.

The attribution guide walks through measuring every channel that way, and the Microsoft Ads for car dealerships page covers running that channel well for as long as you keep it.

The move is short. In the first week, the account is set up for you, usually the same day: contacts import in one pass, your zone, campaign type and prescreening questions go into Leads Manager, and training is included through the video library, Live Training and Schedule Training on the top bar. In the second week, connect your website forms, turn on Follow Up Processes for each lead type, and set Call Alerts for the words your managers care about.

Inbound buyer leads start at $799 a month, Marketplace Acquisitions for seller leads at $999, and the Buyers and Sellers Hybrid plan at $1,599. CRM Only starts at $199 for stores that bring their own traffic. Every plan is month to month with no long term contract, and the full detail is on the pricing page.

Measure it the way the showroom does: cost per appointment set, appointments shown and units delivered, read by source in the reports. We cannot guarantee lead counts, close rates or results, and no vendor can, because those depend on your market and how fast your team responds. LeadLocate gives you the supply, the tools and the tracking to see the difference in your own numbers. Call 844-376-2274 and we will map a zone around your store.

Is LeadLocate an ad platform like Bing Ads?

LeadLocate delivers leads rather than clicks. You choose a zone, a campaign type and prescreening questions in Leads Manager, our team runs the campaigns on the webXintel Ads Network included with every plan, and every lead arrives in the CRM with the tools to work it.

Do we manage keywords or bids?

Your decisions are the zone, the campaign type, the prescreening questions and any Custom Offers, and See Samples previews the ads. Our team builds and runs the campaigns from those selections, so keyword lists and bid changes stay off your desk.

Are the leads exclusive to our store?

Yes. Every lead in your zone is delivered to you and only you, prescreened at capture with the questions you choose, and backed by a replacement review through Quality Control Requests, so a bad lead costs you nothing.

Can we keep running search ads alongside LeadLocate?

Yes. Point the ads at lead pages or connect your website forms, give search its own tracking phone number, and every form fill and call lands in the same CRM with the source attached, so every channel is compared in the same reports.

Do we need an inventory feed or a DMS connection?

Neither is required. If you have a feed, Inventory Link ingests it or imports inventory from your website, and your salespeople can drop any unit with photos and price into a text or email with the inventory insert button.

What does LeadLocate cost?

Inbound buyer leads start at $799 a month, Marketplace Acquisitions at $999, the Buyers and Sellers Hybrid plan at $1,599 and CRM Only at $199. Every plan with leads includes the CRM, month to month with no long term contract.

We will map a zone around your store, set your prescreening questions and show you the CRM working real lead flow. Month to month, no long term contract.

Prefer to talk right now? Call or text 844-376-2274.