Sunnyvale, Calif. -

Automotive marketing company Digital Air Strike recently revealed it has developed a program to help dealers adapt to the latest shifts in Google’s business advertising landscape.

In an effort to help dealers adapt to the migration from Google Places business pages to the new Google+ Local pages, the company will be holding Webinars on the topic, as well as making steps to educate its customers on how best to navigate the change through a social media and reputation management program that works to leverage the new features.

“Changes like this often occur suddenly, and without prior notice, but the merging of Places with Google+ is not surprising,” said Tom Mohr, co‐founder, president and chief executive officer of Digital Air Strike.

“Google has been taking incremental steps to integrate local search with social media since Google+ was rolled out last year and these changes are consistent with Google’s strategy to date,” he continued, commenting on the search site’s reasoning behind the recent movement.

The company contends that as these comprehensive changes were rolled out by Google on May 30, they “have been accompanied by general user confusion and page inconsistencies.”

In light of this, soon after the changes were implemented, “Digital Air Strike had analyzed the changes, audited the impact on their clients, fixed any issues the new Google+ Local Pages caused for clients and created a training webinar to help educate the automotive industry,” officials stressed.

So, how exactly will these changes on the search engine giant affect dealerships?

Digital Air Strike listed the following shifts when explaining what dealerships will need to keep an eye on:

—Moving from rating businesses on an aggregate five star scale to a 30-point Zagat Ratings system.

—Changing individual review ratings from a five star scale to new 0–3 numerical rating system, requiring consumers to be Google+ users in order to write new reviews.

—Adjustments to features with Google Maps and mobile devices and significantly increasing the integration of social data overall, including in search results.

“Google+ Local pages elevate certain features of their review functionality which will likely lead more consumers to become regular users of Google+,” said Alexi Venneri, Digital Air Strike cofounder, chief marketing officer and chief operating officer‐social media, further explaining the potential effects of recent changes.

“In light of these changes, dealers who have already invested in building a Google+ presence now have a significant advantage and dealers that have
not focused on Google+ need to quickly adapt to ensure their lead traffic is not negatively impacted,” he added.

The company held a Webinar detailing the changes to Places and Google+ and how this impacts both social media and reputation management programs just this Monday.

For more information or to keep track of upcoming Webinars, see here.