My point was that from an OEM perspective, getting the 55% of dealers not effectively marketing into the game is a benefit to the brand overall.
According to the Datium Cars.com study, dealerships are spending too much on SEM, now.
Cars.com Study
On the other point: I really do like Dataium and think they do a great job presenting real data for auto dealers.
However, in this case, the data is flawed and conclusions are inaccurate.
With 6000 digital campaigns and dealer websites in our portfolio, we have access to the pre-click data, post-click data, website analytics and conversion data. Dataium doesn't have that width of data. With our view into the entire process, we have more insightful data. On top of this, we have quite a bit of breadth and depth of research coming from our sister ATG companies.
Here's some of the misses in that study:
"$2,000 and $20,000 in paid SEM monthly"
While we have dealers that spend much less and much more than those figures, our average dealer spends $2431 on search engine marketing. In addition to that, Google provides us very detailed information on industry averages. While we can't publish that data, I would say that our SEM customers have stronger than normal search spends. The language in the Dataium study insinuates that the mean or median spend is much higher. The industry average search spend is actually below the bottom end of the range they state.
'Investment in automotive marketplaces, while also experiencing variation, averages 25%'
While we don't always have access to a dealer's overall digital budget, this study states that dealers spend 55% of their digital budget on SEM and 25% on automotive marketplaces. Given the real SEM spend statistics from the prior paragraph, for this to be true, the average dealer would have to spend $1215 on average on automotive marketplaces (between both AutoTrader.com and Cars.com). I think everyone on this thread would agree that dealers spend much more on the portals than that. Dealers are not spending more on SEM than marketplaces / portals. In fact, it is the other way around.
"Based on the firm’s analysis of the search terms that led users to dealership websites, 78.6% of search engine referral traffic resulted from search terms that were a variation of the dealership name, which theoretically causes the dealership URL to appear among the top organic search results for websites that follow best practices for search engine optimization."
This statement is confusing at best, but seems to insinuate that nearly 80% of search traffic comes from the dealership name. While the statement is ambiguous, clearly it's intent is to illustrate the impact of brand name searches on traffic. First, that statistic is incorrect; the average amount of traffic from brand terms from search campaigns is 39%. What Dataium (and most people) don't truly understand, is that SEM traffic volume and cost aren't directly correlated. While 39% of SEM traffic comes from brand terms, only 11% of spend goes towards those terms.
There are quite a few other inaccuracies, but I don't know that we need to go through all of them here.
The difficulty in this industry is that Cars.com took a sampling of research, didn't understand it and then presents it as fact. I think you suggested this in another thread - a lot of this research is just a big ad - and dealers read the research and can't tell fact from fiction and it results in a dealer body that is less-educated or misinformed and subsequently make less than perfect buying decisions.
This also pits digital marketing channel versus digital marketing channel. That shouldn't be the case. The real imbalance in marketing budgets is traditional versus digital. Today, digital only makes up 25% of the average dealer's marketing budget. Dealers still spend nearly as much on newspaper as they do on ALL digital marketing channels combined.
