ASuave,
Background thoughts that fuel my madness:
- ~20,000 surveys-at-delivery revealed 70% of all sales were on my dealer's site 3x or more prior to purchase. chats/leads/calls are not my KPI (Key Performance Indicator), repeat visits are.
- Divide your monthly sales by monthly unique visitors. You about 1.5%ish? Most stores are. Regardless if it's 0.5% or 3%, a vast majority of your shoppers buy elsewhere.
- Context is important. Is your store a big fish or a little fish?*
I am very pleased with the engagement profiles of the in-market social traffic. Although significantly smaller, the classified referral VDP-to-VDP visitors give me great engagement signals too.
*Big fish is a high volume store, little fish is low volume. Big fish likes to carpet bomb (billboard, radio, OTT & broadcast TV, front page of sunday sports, etc), little fish likes to snipe (retargeting, inmarket socials). Big fish likes everything in VOLUME because they have the scale to leverage it all. Little fish needs to buy traffic that is far more precice.
All of the classified socials are in markets, so they are excellent sniper ads.
I like the direction you're going in with what you shared, so I'll share why I asked.
Ive found that most clients of cars.com are not aware that traffic to their website is primarily social. When comparing that same "referral" traffic to others, it is utilized as a sales tool to say that they
drive more referral traffic than their competitors. Im not a fan of this apples to oranges comparison, as I dont believe that 1000 visitors from social is the same as 1000 visitors from a 3rd party site. They simple arent the same traffic. One is directly shopping, the other is converted over through a display ad.
I do think that repeat visitors is important, but I would not say that its a direct correlation primarily responsible for sales. To me thats similar to saying that "80% of my shoppers listen to x radio station, so x radio station is responsible for helping me sell cars". I think this is where multi-channel attribution is critical and understanding context, exactly as you said. I want to know what they were doing each time before they returned. For example, if that customer googled you each time before they returned, then the keyword is more relevant to me that got them there, or the ad. If they googled your dealership name, and came that way, thats important to me too.
Ive seen a higher correlation of organic search decline in 2022 for many dealerships as vendors have increased their spends on the dealership name as a way to 'pad the numbers' on overall campaign effectiveness.
I can dig into the second question over this week and see where that spread is across a few locations. Im interested in the number as well, if it is around 1.5% and how much that varies.
Beyond that, I would venture to bet that you'd see those same engagement profiles on in market social traffic (or maybe even better), if you ran it yourself. Do you know what % of the media is put into the engine, vs. what % is pocketed by their margins?
$1000 spent on paid social is not spent the same way depending on who you spend it with. Ive seen margins as high as 75% on that spend.
Thats not to say you shouldnt continue to do it. None of this suggests or even implies that. I just continue to be curious about those who know about the social portion of their 'referral' traffic or not.
