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

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#91
IMO, last click or not, until consumers can actually purchase cars online, it's simply going to be too difficult and convoluted to assign a dollar value to specific digital campaigns touch points. There's your major difference between e-commerce's ability to more easily justify digital spend...you can click and buy. I think a wise metric to look at is total site/VDP traffic and total in-market buyers in PMA + radius. If that ratio is low, it's going to be tough to expand car sales. It's a good measure to see if you should increase spend digital or re-focus efforts.
 
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#93
Tallcool1 said:
We try to ask customers which websites they visited. Most of the time, customers can tell me which site led them to the dealership. They can also tell me other sites that they may have visited. What they CAN'T tell me is that they saw my car on all 3 sites that they visited. Many times, they tell me about visiting sites that my cars are not listed on.

I believe that this is the reason so many dealerships give a great deal of credit to the last touch point. I realize that this may not be the right way to assign responsibility, but often times it is the only way that I can justify.
Click to expand...

ahh, IDK if you can trust that at least fully! Sometimes we hear the shopper say they saw a dealers commercial or on the radio when the dealership never ran TV or Radio. It's almost like the Nielsen diaries! I think it's useful information...another question we like to pose is "how many times did you visit my site before coming in". And that is pretty interesting where most visited the site 7x or more. Honestly, my belief is they do so much research when buying a car, that it becomes one big blur!
 
#94
MTA... while it cannot accurately answer all the many questions that marketer would like answers to regarding ad performance, it does do one thing EXCEEDINGLY well...it provides ongoing signal of relative performance that says "this seems to be working better than that"...and that is valuable for digital marketers who want to continuously improve their campaigns. Without it, you are truly flying blind...or worse, trusting Google to drive while you remain blindfolded.

However, for independent attribution groups it still has no shelf life.
 
#95
Great article - with a ton of valid points.

Clicks Are Not the Only Online Marketing Metric and They May Not Even Be the Best -- https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/318078

I have been saying for years... your floor traffic is what matters, your website traffic can help gauge what your floor traffic is going to be. You can track LIFT! If you increase your site traffic by XX% and your floor traffic goes up by XX% -- that additional spend is valid.
 
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#97
Oh yeah... another thing worth mentioning. Most of the independent attribution providers have a huge roadblock. That roadblock is the inability to deliver monthly reports on time, which is a HUGE letdown for dealers. Vendors end up manually downloading data for import into their dashes (ugly, slow process) or using warped / poorly functioning APIs from 3rd parties that truly aren't worried about supporting it. IOW, getting the data takes them forever / difficult to scale data grabs. If you're not worried about that OK, otherwise hold them accountable. Don't get me going on the referrals that are unmatchable and that manual process.
 
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#98
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-attribution-falls-short-automotive-dealers-brian-pasch/
https://www.digitaldealer.com/dont-fooled-new-google-attribution-announcement-not-silver-bullet/
Smells like a sign of desperation to me.

Google Attribution is coming and everyone knows dealers will be all over it (can you say free?). Meanwhile, the same guys (Pasch, etc.) that are banging the drum for Google Analytics and Google Ads (making tons off of it), etc. (which will streamline their marketing efforts and seamlessly / natively connect to Google Attribution) are against it because they are scared shitless for the life of their wares (tools and conferences) and the dead pool.

But we know now the truth. @jon.berna @Alex Snyder
 
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#99
And...
attributionjenga.jpg
 
#100
https://www.digitaldealer.com/disconnect-marketing-attribution/

But Dan said something in that quote that stands out to me and I consider it a bit of a disconnect, “I have a little more insight into what helps sell cars.” Everything I have read (by folks in our industry) on marketing attribution focuses on marketing sources, first touch to the last touch in the funnel until they reach the dealership. To me, that doesn’t provide any insight on what sells the car. Marketing attribution tells me what messages/product and which channels provide the most INTEREST. While I know, this will be contested by some of my peers, prospective customers walking in the doors of your dealership haven’t bought anything… yet. The customer’s journey is only at the half-way point.

So, Marketing Attribution Doesn’t Measure Everything?
No, I don’t believe it does if you are of the belief that marketing attribution is covering all the bases of the customer journey from the start of their research through purchase. Let me make my case. We all know shoppers are spending serious amounts of time doing their research online, but did you know many show up at the dealership without ever contacting the dealer through a lead form, phone call, or chat? So, if marketing attribution is based on measuring actions or events, you may only be looking at clicks and ad impressions. That’s not really closing the loop to a sale.

54% of shoppers will show up at the dealership without any contact prior to their arrival. (Google ThinkDealer stats 2017)
 
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