Keith, it's good to see you on DealerRefresh.
I totally agree with Keith, Big Data is going to be huge. It is going to dispell many common beliefs within our industry. Trust me, a lot of vendors, really don't want to hear some of the information that Big Data is providing.
Here are some excerps from a couple of articles from Dataium:
[h=1]Dataium Evaluates Efficiency of Digital Advertising Efforts[/h]First up, the company provided some data that might convince dealers to reconsider funds spent on search engine marketing.
Despite an average of 55 percent of dealerships’ online advertising budgets being devoted to paid search engine marketing, Dataium shared that just 6 percent of dealership website traffic on average is referred by paid search keywords, according to the study.
And, that’s not all: Less than 1 percent of this traffic resulted in email form leads submitted on dealership websites.
So what is driving customers to dealership sites through the big search engines?
The study found that nearly 80 percent of direct referrals from search engines during the study were driven by keywords that were a variation on the dealership name, “representing traffic a dealership would theoretically receive via high rankings in organic search results regardless of the level of paid SEM spend,” company officials reported.
[h=1]Dealers get in your Facebook[/h]The knock on Facebook, from a marketer's standpoint, is that although the huge social media site has been useful for automakers to promote brand awareness, it has been nearly irrelevant in the shopping process.
As recently as May, Dataium, a consulting company that monitors online vehicle shopping behavior, found that of 20 million visitors to dealership Web sites, just 120 arrived there directly from a Facebook link. Of that microscopic number, only a handful left contact information to become sales leads, Dataium found.
This article does talk about how Facebook would "allow dealerships to take their customer lists, with names and email addresses, and find those people on Facebook. The "custom audience" feature alows dealerships to push ads directly to Facebook users' new feeds".
This is a rather unique way of using Facebook and not convential wisdom. Based on using Facebook as a lead provider, you would be better off spending the time passing out business cards at the mall.
Dataium did a study for Cars.com that brought out a lot of the same information but I didn't see any of this on ADM or dElite. With so many pitching social media (not including review sites) and paid search, this isn't welcome information.
