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Attribution: Do you give the last touchpoint all of the credit for a sale?

Alex, I would expect a more professionally worded post from DealerRefresh. I don't see how Driven Data's platform (which seems interesting) negates the need for most dealers to improve their attribution efforts or renders attribution "dead". Without proper attribution (beyond trends) they are simply connecting the wrong advertising sources with the wrong spends into the DD platform.

The first rule of dealer refresh is refrain from blatant self promotion. That being said no one is saying (especially me) that, "Driven Data's platform negates the need for most dealers to improve their attribution efforts or renders attribution "dead"."

Alex asked me to share some insights on what we learned in our journey in building DD, specifically on attribution. Since this is the most over hyped shiny object we've ever seen, I feel our story of discovery would serve the community well. Not to mention, everything happens to be in a state of flux with Google's new service and EU GDPR.

I am a seeker of truth myself and we have paid both in blood and money solving for attribution. During that time we learning a few things, which I will share honestly next Friday.

Find out if it's dead or not yourself :)
 
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The first rule of dealer refresh is refrain from blatant self promotion. That being said no one is saying (especially me) that, "Driven Data's platform negates the need for most dealers to improve their attribution efforts or renders attribution "dead"."

Alex asked me to share some insights on what we learned in our journey in building DD, specifically on attribution. Since this is the most over hyped shiny object we've sever seen I feel our story of discovery would serve the community well. Not to mention, everything happens to be in a state of flux with Google's new service and EU GDPR.

I am a seeker of truth myself and we have paid both in blood and money solving for attribution. During that time we learning a few things, which I will share honestly next Friday.

Find out if it's dead or not yourself :)

Alex's classy clickbait post literally said attribution is dead and the upcoming discussion with you will reveal why. At any rate, I will look forward to learning more about your product. I appreciate the forum and everyone's desire to speak truth it just can be uncomfortable to some with the language. But I'll put on my big boy (plaid) pants and deal with it.
 
Let me ask you all a question..

How will we know when this is solved?

Hmmm I have a wrench and I'd like to throw it in. This is certainly a tough thing to answer and to me has no real end, the best we can hope for is a more complete data set then just one touch, but even that will fall short (a bit). Below is some raw data I pulled from our system. This is a real person I know who recently bought a car in the St. Louis market...let's call him Shawn. To be clear, this isn't just his browser history, this is the data our (Clarivoy) tag is able to pick up about Shawn without the need for a lead. IN fact prior to buying this car I told him to try and remain as anonymous as possible and he never once filled in a lead or identified himself. This is important so I'll say it again, that means he sent no leads to the dealer during the filming of this click trail.

So what happened before Shawn was marked as a 'Walk-in' in the crm? We ended up detecting 80 different things that he did before he bought a used Infiniti Q40. Notice that of the 80 different things we detected a lot of it is dealership website visits, but there is also interaction with Facebook and Paid Search in there as well. In fact right before he was marked a 'walk-in' he was actually interacting with the dealerships paid search campaigns. The problem is that even though we detected 80 different touch points there is a likelihood we missed some, he may have seen a bus ad, he might have heard a radio spot that caused the first organic google search. Ultimately I'd still take the visibility of 80 different interaction points to the one found in a crm.


Shawn's Event Trail from Clarivoy's raw data:

Organic Search (Google) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Organic Search (Google) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Cross Family Visit > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Facebook Campaign Visit > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Paid Search (Google) > Website Visit (Direct) > Paid Search (Google) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Paid Search (Google) > Purchased: 2015 Infiniti Q40
 
I am sure most GM's and marketers would agree with Ben's statement. As a prior GM, I would rather have the ability to see all 80 interaction points rather than the one found in their CRM in order to see what helped influence the buyer.
And if I were a dealer I'm going to do what with 80 touchpoints exactly?! Actionable recommendations are what? Of course you two are going to agree, you're pimping the same product. LOL!
 
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This is also reliant on identity resolution working which is an issue I am going to discuss next Friday.
Great, because currently it's a clusterfuck along with lack of viable benchmark data and timely delivery of reports (*see months behind due to lack of efficient 3rd party data injections, spans across multiple products). What about growing privacy demands?
 
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Shawn's Event Trail from Clarivoy's raw data:

Organic Search (Google) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Organic Search (Google) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Cross Family Visit > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Facebook Campaign Visit > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Paid Search (Google) > Website Visit (Direct) > Paid Search (Google) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Website Visit (Direct) > Paid Search (Google) > Purchased: 2015 Infiniti Q40


Man I sure would be pissed if I was paying cars and autotrader a bunch of money...



Ben, thanks for taking the time to post this. It leads me to my second set of questions.

1. We already know that almost 100% of people coming into the dealership visit websites first. What is this telling us we didnt already know?

2. What decisions large or small do you think you can make with this?