Anyone using iHeart's XVin solution - looking for feedback

[ASuave]

I have seen instances where certain "eye-candy" vehicles capture a lion's share of the clicks when dealers run a single AIA campaign for their entire catalog and are optimizing for content views or clicks, so it is certainly something to be cognizant of.

We run a variety of AIA campaigns - some for the entire catalog, others for segmented vehicle sets. This ensures we still have a level of control over where our AIA budget goes.

For new cars, we typically create sets for each model and then the body style category. For used cars, we will create sets for different price ranges, body styles, inventory age, CPO, etc. This strategy also allows us to tailor the ad copy and creative to each set's typical buyer persona, all while being able to direct the budget according to our objectives.

And it doesn't hurt to create catalog filters to exclude specific vehicle models (high ends sports cars) or vehicle years (classic cars) that don't need the traffic yet tend to receive a lot of it.

Ryan just gave away gold…in how to segment and optimize your AIA campaigns, to not rely on 3rd parties who promote questionable quality traffic to your website…I wonder how many missed this post.

You’d have to hire and fire quite a few social media companies or agencies before you found one who knew the above approach specifically for auto..

I saw some mention of Target not limiting clicks on SKU…that’s actually not valid at all.

A lot of those campaigns are optimized specifically towards ROAS and similar bidding models, and frequency caps are one of the most commonly implemented optimization methods in display, since WAY before Facebook catalogue ads were even a pipe dream for mark Zuckerberg.

 

[Arinehart]

I tried xVin last year. Did not have a positive experience with it, actually very similar experiences as Chris and @Ryan Everson had. But I do partner with iHM on other products. So they've reached out again, telling me I should look at their xVin 2.0, because it's "new and improved". From what I can tell, they are showing sales attribution and something called, "InAudience", as a new feature. Anyone see a pitch of the "new and improved" xVin 2.0?

 

[gobrien]

I kept pressing for where they were getting the data from the "3rd party anonymous sites". It appeared to just be retargeting. Curious is someone us using it and looking closely at the behavior on their website (with goals and conversions) as it clicks through. If it is just retargeting, you already paid once to generate the VDP (eg. they looked at that specific car on AutoTrader) and then XVin is just retargeting that specific car wherever the shopper goes. Am I incorrect?

XVIN is just a run-of-the-mill VDP retargeting tactic. We used to call it dynamic inventory ads...the industry now calls it DCO (dynamic creative optimization). DCO is actually a bit of a broader term that includes all manner of dynamic personalization product not just product-level retargeting.

How it works...

Someone goes to your website, gets to a VDP (where xvin has a retargeting pixel) and the retargeting pixel captures which VDP they looked at.

XVIN (or whomever) connects the dots between the viewer and the VDP they looked at and then targets them with an ad that has that same vehicle in the ad in an effort to get the user to re-engage. There's nothing exclusive about it...most auto ad vendors can do the same thing.

From a tech standpoint it's not terribly difficult to do. XVIN has to manage a product catalog with all the info from all the VIN's in it and then the ad tag tells them which vehicle should be displayed in the ad to any given user (past visitor). Could be they built their own product catalog software (it's not hard) or could be they are licensing it from one of scores of DCO tech companies (Smartly, Innovid, Bannerflow, etc.)

From a "how cool is it?" standpoint it's no big deal. My old company was one of the first out with it and that was 2009. The tech hasn't progressed since then. The real issue though is that XVIN (and all DCO vendors) require cookies to track your site visitors and cookies just aren't as prevalent as they used to be. All browsers other than Google's Chrome no longer allow cookies by default and I don't think many people go to the trouble of changing their browser settings so that folks like us can track them across the Internet. Between mobile and desktop that's about 40% of users that cannot be tracked. Then you've increased usage of VPN's and Proxy servers which disallow tracking. And most recently nearly every dealer website has pop-up "Consent Banners" that allow the visitor to be able to allow or disallow tracking. If they "reject cookies" or fall into any of the other groups mentioned, they cannot be tracked and ad vendors cannot do retargeting of any kind.

So...meh. It's still a good thing to do but the ad budgets (if being done properly) associated with this kind of thing should be very, very low.