Given how more and more demographics rely on online information for car research and buying, how much money should a dealer invest in tracking the effectiveness of their non-digital spend? It's not a rhetorical or leading question; I'm honestly just curious myself.
Tracking last-click attribution with sites has become pretty basic and most dealers have the skills to do that themselves. Multi-channel attribution is a bit trickier for some, but still, many dealers can sit down in front of GA and understand it. Tying in CRM, call tracking and DMS data is certainly more complicated and time consuming, but that level of attribution is reasonably straightforward and cost-effective, either with the dealers themselves or having a vendor help them.
I have no idea of the cost of the companies like the ones that Ed mentioned, but I'm going to guess it's reasonably expensive. A quick Google about the buying habits of car shoppers turns up a PDF from Cars.com (not sure of the date) titled "Auto Marketing Digital Influence Study" that suggest that TV, mailers and radio are in the "Shoppers don't find advertising very helpful or trustworthy". It also says that 68% of all in-market shoppers and purchasers relied on digital sources, compared to 9% for outdoor ads and 8% for radio.
I know how effective digital is depends heavily on location and target market. But for major metro areas that target the 25-44 demo, I'd be curious to know what impact being able to attribute to non-digital sources have had on their business. Anyone have any data on that?
I believe both Transparency.ai and Clarivoy.com have products they sell directly to dealers. In fact, Clarivoy won the 2016 Driving Sales Innovation Cup with their
TV Analytics solution.
There are substantial limitations to Google Analytics as Steve White points out in "
The True Cost of Google Analytics," a post that I HIGHLY recommend every automotive marketer read.
"There are real costs, in dollars, to managing Google Analytics in a way that gives true and valuable insights to marketing. This includes the huge hidden cost of incorrectly allocating marketing spend to the WRONG channels and losing out on the lift that the RIGHT channels would give you."
The third party listing site I work for has partnered with Transparency.ai to produce analyses on hundreds of individual dealerships looking at months of data and hundreds of thousands of transactions.
Clarivoy seems to concentrate more on working with individual dealerships and dealer groups (that's just my impression), and you may be pleasantly surprised by their affordability.
Ugh. And, as usual, you took my point and fit it into your own context.
I am very familiar with both of those companies and how they are helping classified sites (like your current employer) make every other attribution model seem embarrassingly dated.
There is a place for SEM and there is a place for Cars.com at most dealers.
But, to throw out the direct attribution models (ROI and Calls and Leads) because they don't make Cars.com look influential enough is misleading to dealers. There is a place for all valid models in every dealership.
Ugh (it's my turn to say it)
I'm not throwing out calls and leads at all. They do play a role, but as
@Jeff Kershner has said,
"Only 3% to 7% of shoppers fill out and submit websites’ form leads. It’s not that they aren’t important, but we’re so fixated on that 3%, we can forget the 97%". Long before I moved to my current business home, I've been looking for ways to quantify and qualify who and what influences the 97%.
And note, as important as Calls and Leads are, they are not attribution models. Neither is ROI. It is a metric you can derive
after you apply an attribution model. The more advanced and accurate the attribution model, the more accurate the ROI that is derived.
I would like to hear those opinions as well, but based on the conversation within this thread, it sounds like surveying every sale becomes a probable necessity to be included as a weighted variable in the overall decision-making for marketing mixes.
Both the advanced analytics platforms I discussed in the post analyze every sale, but they don't do it with customer surveys. From Clarivoy's website, "Multi-Touch Sales Attribution allows our clients to transparently view a consumer’s full path, sorting and ranking the true influence of each channel’s contribution - paid search, display ads, email, third party websites, organic search, social, brand website."
