Digital media measurement has been eluding us since it started, and for the most part, it is simply due to the various metrics that are available to help us make decisions. Consider, you've got plans to head to a new city for the weekend (Chicago for example). You tell people that you're on your way and suddenly you have 25 different recommendations on where to stay, eat, and play. What do you do with your time and how do you choose who to listen to? The first thing that I typically do is consider whose interests are similar to my own. But who do I trust to steer me in the right direction? Do I take the recommendation of the friendly flight attendant who, while focused on my best interests, doesn't know me from Adam? Or do I listen to a close friend who I went to school with and who knows my preferences for food and music alike, but more importantly he has been to Chicago often and is a foodie and a music lover? Well, the same goes for making your decisions on who to trust to manage and assess your digital media choices. 

What is your role? Are you a Principal, a General Manager, a Sales Manager, or a Marketing Manager? Interestingly, the typical move is to ask your peer group what you should be looking at and who you should be trusting with your budget. For example, if you are the GM of a Dealership, you would ask a friend of yours who is also the GM of a Dealership. Pause for a moment, if you hold one of the first three roles, you may want to rethink that norm. Does your peer group know the ins and outs of the topic you are looking to solve? Your peer group will know what metrics they get and what metrics they like, but is that enough? 

In the last ten years, the media landscape has changed tremendously. Today we are at a point where the typical dealership is likely active in a minimum of 10 marketing communications channels. What does it take to effectively communicate your brand and your messaging across all of those channels? Consider the days of the original three. We've been forced to make a significant change to the depth and breadth of the skills and expertise required to make great marketing decisions. 

More than 10?

1. TV

2. Print

3. Radio 

4. Outdoor 

5. Email

6. SEO

7. SEM

8. Display

9. Facebook 

10. Twitter

11. Third Party Listings 

12. And you're likely using more... Instagram or Snapchat anyone? 

Let's consider some of the metrics that we can look at for these marketing communications tools. One would hope that they would have some apparent similarities that would help us to deliver a clear view of success. The first choice, and everyone's favorite,  are leads and calls. Sadly, the goal posts have moved, and there are now only 24% of consumers who are putting up their hands (in the way of an online form or chat) to say that they are coming to your store. The other 76% (the overwhelming majority) are showing up unannounced. Conundrum. 

How can we keep track of all these people coming from different sources and somehow decide what is working and what isn't? Do your colleagues know? Does he of she have a firm handle on all of the mediums and all of the metrics? Likely not. Well, it's time to find that trusted resource to help you. Is it the team member you hired last month that is eager to learn and that can DIY all the learning they need from forums, YouTube, and the Google machine? Is it the new savvy hire that took you months of tireless effort to find in the local market? Or do you ask one of your fellow GMs or Sales Managers for an introduction to their trusted team member - the person that they have on staff that they go to for the stats they need to make the right decisions. WARNING: don't go poaching the staffers from your industry colleagues. It may be tempting, but what goes around comes around. 

As you chat with your new trusted source, be sure that they can answer your questions clearly and in simple business language. No jargon, no smoke and mirrors. Once you find that person, keep them, treat them right, and if you employ them - pay them very very well. They hold the keys to your marketing communications success.

“There is no bad press!” has been attributed to a multitude of famous, and pseudo-famous, people that were usually getting bad press at the time but none-the-less were still profiting from the exposure.

Is the same true in automotive advertising? Can you effectively throw money at any form of advertising and still sell cars? Yes, you probably could, but how much of that spending is useful to the dealership and how much is just not bringing value at all? Let’s break down the main forms of advertising that automotive dealerships generally and historically have engaged in and why they may be among the best places to trim your advertising dollars.

Disclaimer for Full Disclosure

I am the VP of Sales and Marketing for Speed Shift Media and we work with customers in these fields of advertising. We also have many friends in companies I may be relating to. So in all fairness, many of these advertising products hold value at the dealership level and can be used effectively to advertise their business.

Typical or Traditional Display

I’ve written at length about the inherent difference between typical display and inventory display advertising, so I’m not going down that rabbit hole again. Instead, I want to go into this by demonstrating where traditional display works and why it just doesn’t deliver for your dealership if you’re trying to sell specific cars.

I often refer to traditional display advertising as the McDonald’s or Coca~Cola style advertisements. Simply put, these types of ads are great at building brand recognition or announcing events. You’ll often see the banner or billboard ads online, and they’ll read “Ford Family Pricing Event®” or “Mercedes-Benz S-Class: Benchmark in Sophistication®” or “Hummer: Everyone should get one.” Not one of these banners told you where to buy one, how much or if your favorite trim package was in stock. This is not the intention, the point of these ads is to evoke a response, a feeling or emotional connection with the brand.

This should help you understand why this type of advertising doesn’t help you sell individual cars on your lot. If you are one of three dealerships in your city that sell Mercedes-Benz cars, then the S-Class banner would inspire an enthusiastic shopper to visit the first dealership they could find, not necessarily yours.

A piece of advice, as banner ads are usually just part of the marketing mix, use them. Just don’t count on them to sell more cars. Use them to do what they do best, build your brand recognition or showcase a make & model specific sale your dealership has going on. To target in-market buyers on a very granular level traditional display advertising just falls short, and you could spend your advertising budget more wisely elsewhere.

Print Advertising? Do people still read print?

This is one of those industries that falls under the full disclosure above. I worked with a print media company to help them transition to a more digital world. I have a soft spot for print whether it’s newsprint or magazines. Print transcends generations when it comes to delivering information to the masses but let’s be clear, like traditional display advertising, it too has a time and place.

First, let’s address what and who print advertising works well for. If you live in Austin, TX, then taking out a full page in each of your local weekly papers is probably quite expensive and likely goes (for the most part) unnoticed.  If you live in Lexington, TX, on the other hand, taking out a full page in your local weekly may be a good spend. Why is that, do you think? Let’s talk about demographics and population size for starters. Austin is very plugged in, metropolitan and modern so it can be assumed that most people in Austin don’t read the printed newspaper and would be more aware of advertising in the digital world. Whereas, Lexington is a good distance away from the big city, has a smaller geographic footprint, and it stands to reason that its’ population likely relies more heavily on their local weekly newspaper to deliver the events and coupons the residents need.

Print is not dead; it’s simply aging. Not as many people read the newspaper in print form anymore. For this reason, your advertisements here simply won’t carry the same impact as they did before. National dailies like our Globe & Mail deliver a vetted collation of the information you should know. The local dailies  like our Vancouver Sun carry the information of local interest in the same way. Both of these publications though are much like typical display advertising, the amount you would spend advertising on their pages cannot be justified by the few people the ads would reach.

In the long run, if you have a special event and a little money left over in your ad budget, why not take out a print ad. It can’t hurt and may serve to reinforce your digital messaging.

Premium Listings: To List or Not to List?

Listing sites fall under that umbrella of the most recent additions to Traditional media. They have been around for a long, long time, and now it’s become a question of the value you get vs. what you can get from your site. True, but listing sites were and still are the best place to put your inventory in a safe, unbiased environment for customers to search and discover. A lot of consumers still discover their local dealership from a listing site first. For this reason, alone, I would keep advertising on listing pages.

The question is whether premium listings (or other upgrades) provide you with the best bang for your advertising dollar.

To answer that let’s look at why listing sites became popular in the first place. Let’s look to the stereotype of the pushy car salesman trying to get you to buy the car with his best margins, not necessarily the one you need or want. With listing sites, buyers can browse, unfettered, with no pressure and find just what they want. When you look at it this way it’s no wonder that listing sites and their predecessor, the listing catalog magazines, became so popular. Of course, the savvy dealership always wants to be the top of the list to sell the most inventory, and this ushered in the premium listing.

This was a great add-on until the online consumer became savvier as well and realized that these so-called “premium listings” were becoming no different than the pushy sales guy. As a result, now, even the consumers you were capturing previously with a flashier car listing are now ignoring these advertisements and moving deeper into the listing pages to find the vehicle they want.

Listing pages are a valuable spend. No question. Paying for premium is likely not something you need to do as aggressively as once thought.

The Best of the Rest?

TV commercials. Billboards on the interstates. The inflatable flappy arm guy. Paying your niece or nephew to dress up as the mascot to wave at motorists. There is no shortage of places to throw money to sell just one more car. Let’s consider what is a good practice if you’re having a difficult time sorting where the spend should go.

As the dealership marketing manager or team or even GM, you know what has worked for you in the past but let me give you a fairly simple template to follow.

1. Your priority in advertising is to get as many people as possible to view your inventory, your Vehicle Detail Pages (VDPs). As the marketing person or team, this is your priority and likely where you are going to spend the bulk of your ad dollars. Once you’ve exhausted all these avenues and you have budget remaining;
2. The next focus should then fall into getting people to your Search Results Pages (SRPs). This is the equivalent of bringing people to the dealership door and having them cruise the lot. Once you’ve exhausted this avenue, then;
3. Focus on driving as much quality traffic as possible to your website through SEM, SEO, and other promotional methods;
4. If you still have some extra money in your advertising budget, then and only after all other higher converting avenues are exhausted, look into direct mail, TV, billboards and other forms of marketing that you feel are giving you a positive return.

Follow this funnel and you will always be able to justify your advertising spend to your leadership. Obviously, success is measured differently at different dealerships but following these basic premises will at least ensure you are spending your advertising budget appropriately.

The big wrap up

I don’t like to say this is the right way, or this is the only way because it assumes that I know your market better than you. This isn’t the case. In my experience, though, certain types of advertising have historically been successful regardless of geographic market. As technology has evolved and delivery mediums have changed, these historically successful means of delivering advertisements have improved and only gotten stronger which is why I take certain stances.

Over the course of an advertising year, there will always be a place for some, if not all, of the technology discussed in this overview in some form. My goal is to use my experience to help you determine where the best use of your ad dollars are. It is up to you to determine what will bring the buyers to your door, ready to drive away in the vehicle of their dreams.

Please visit here to Download a Free Resource to help with everything I've talked about here. 

The Good, The Bad & The Fugly.

Even as a digital marketer I find myself (at times) yelling at the browser window because I’m flooded with retargeted ads. I do one batch of searches for our family vacation, and suddenly I’m retargeted by every destination site that I had visited. You’d think I was the best visitor they had ever seen!  

In the marketing world, there is no hard and fast rules for what is and isn’t good retargeting practice. What works for some, may not be the best for others. It seems the game changes from one locale to another, so inevitably there is a lot of trial and error on our parts to get the formula just right. If you look to the old days of radio and TV advertising, it seemed the ratio of 3:7 was the golden mean, 3 times per day and 7 days a week was the standard for buying ad time. In the digital world, this ratio would likely mean you were missing a large percentage of your potential customers, and you probably wouldn’t keep your job for long.

So let’s talk about your retargeting and see if we can help you get the most out of your online ad spends.

Who doesn't love pie? Especially a nice big segment.

There was a time when retargeting meant getting your message in front of everyone that even remotely showed some interest in your product. Keep serving tens of thousands of ads every day and the hope was a few viewers would click through and become buyers.

Sure, you can get your ads in front of thousands daily - for pennies. Impressions are cheap to buy, and you can generate some incredible numbers to wow the non-savvy listener. Tell me, of those 1.5M unique impressions, how many people were interested in these ads? It’s well known today that people eventually develop banner blindness for ads they don’t care about, and this is causing many to use ad blockers to block the noise out.

If you want to maximize your ad budget and get your banner ads in front of interested buyers, what can you do? Well, it may seem a little labor intensive to some but let’s look at segmentation and inventory based retargeting as a solution. By doing this, you are serving ads to consumers that have already expressed an interest in your inventory beyond just going to your website.

Your dealership has different departments, and your customers aren’t always looking to purchase a vehicle. They may have been looking at booking a service appointment, purchasing upgrades and add-ons for their car or even just looking for the phone extension for their buddy Bill in sales. These different consumers will not engage with the same advertisements. What your digital marketing team needs to do now is establish a system where each of these customers are segmented differently, with a unique tracker for their shopping experience.

It’s a foregone conclusion that taking the time today to set up a retargeting system based on usage will inevitably close more sales be it in service, autos, and aftermarket. Easy as pie, isn’t it?

Are we there yet? How about now? Now? Now?!

What’s worse with retargeting, seeing your ads everywhere or seeing nothing at all?

Two major issues in ad serving are: 1) Seeing your ad so much that a viewer tunes you out or worse, they add your business to their blocked ads list.  2) Retargeting with the last vehicle (or product) seen?

Retargeting isn’t like typical banner ads. Having your ads follow a person incessantly throughout their day is not only annoying but leads to terminal cases of banner-blindness. Yes, you don’t want the prospective buyer to forget your product, however, you don’t want to serve your ads so much that you annoy them either. Here’s the big question, how much is too much? Do you retarget a user for 15 days or 30? What about 45 days? How about a buyer that went through the entire process and just abandoned everything on the last step, how long do you follow them on their web journey? It’s really not that tough to figure out. Ask yourself: How long is a typical user in-market for? How long does it take a typical buyer to purchase once they have been on your site? If an average consumer is on your site for the first time 10 days before they transact, then a 10 to 15 day retargeting window with a high frequency is likely a good idea. But if your average is more like 30 days from the first visit to purchase, then a 30 to 45 day window with a lower frequency may be better. You can find your averages in Google Analytics - feel free to ask me how.

What about the “last vehicle seen” retargeting conundrum? We totally understand, after 2 hours of looking at minivan and SUV specs, that badass muscle car catches your eye and next thing you know, that’s all you see for ad targeting. Like segmentation, there needs to be a system in place that prioritizes what ads are sent to people once they leave your site. If a consumer spends an hour looking at hybrid electric CUVs and on a whim clicks on the Challenger SRT® 392 before leaving the site, you should be sending the ads for the hybrid electric CUV rather than the Challenger. If you’re really skillful - show a bunch of crossovers and one Challenger to catch their eye.

Just like with segmentation, a marketer has to focus on what a consumer wants based on their usage/behavior. If 95% of a customer’s time is spent looking at one particular type of vehicle, then that is likely the product they want to see future ads for. Assigning a grading system to Time-on-VDP or VDP-Focus and translating that into ads they're fed, will inevitably boost the interest of the viewer. Better yet, this will keep the right vehicles in mind when making the final purchasing decisions.

What do you mean our ads are on FindADate.com!?!

No press is bad press, right? I mean it could be worse, at least your ads are being seen!

If you haven’t already, you should filter on which types of websites your ads are shown. Now I’m sure there are websites that your dealership just does not want to be associated with, be it for political, moral or personal reasons. In this case, you have two choices: embrace the publicity on a potentially high traffic site even though their content is something you may find objectionable or take the time to filter specific sites so your ads don’t display there.

Some things to consider before you filter:

• How much could this ad placement be affecting the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole?
• Are you prepared to go through every site online that may offend a customer or two and manually blacklist them? Also, are you prepared to continually maintain that list?
• Are you reacting to a single complaint or a multitude of objections from a wide variety of potential consumers?
• Lastly, look through your analytics and see just how much VDP traffic is being generated by the offending website. If it’s substantial, you may want to turn a blind eye and keep the potential revenue coming to your doorstep.

Realistically, if your customers see the ad on this site in the first place, it means they are a user of the site. Also, this can present your team with a humorous way to inject a laugh into a sales conversation, “Oh, you saw our ads on FindaDate.com? So you’re looking for a car to impress your date this weekend?”

Obviously, if the material on the site displaying your advertisements is morally objectionable or promotes a message that is just not in line with your business, then you can and should filter that site. But I think that the most important thing to consider is what frame of mind users are in when they are on particular sites and are they more or less likely to want to leave the site they are currently on. We find that dating and gaming sites don’t perform as well as news and information sites.

Retargeting rules in under a minute!

Here is the quick recap:

• DO segment your targeting according to historical usage.
• DO invest in both dynamic inventory and demographic advertising so as not to rely too heavily on just impressions.
• DO limit the time your retargeting follows people; no one likes a stalker.
• DO NOT retarget without considering what sites are in your mix.
• DO NOT run your ads so frequently that your targets get banner blindness.

Lastly, stay on top of what your customers are interested in. You just never know where they may be on their journey and if your advertisements happen to be there, all the better for you. Also, think of the creativity you can have when you know exactly where your buyers spend their free time when they’re not researching their new vehicle.

Why is direct-to-VDP advertising better than landing a buyer on a typical landing page? The adage is true, "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” I’ve referenced the Punchline Effect in previous webinars wherein, the more clicks a customer has to navigate through on your site, the more search abandonment your analytics will record. So if the goal is to sell more cars then the more buyers you lose, the fewer cars you can count on selling.

Get from search to sell … faster.

Consider this, if your website is the online version of your dealership, is there any logic in having a buyer arrive at your lot and then wander around until they find the car they wanted? Of course not, so why would that be okay online?

Let’s examine this more closely with our poor, wandering buyer on the car lot. If they are left to their own devices to wander the car lot looking for the car they came to find, there is a pretty good chance they will leave without making a purchase. If they arrive at the dealership and are escorted by a salesperson directly to the car(s) they are interested in and receive a personalized product recommendation; they are very likely to (at least)  take a test drive.

This is a simplified example of why Direct-to-VDP works much better than ads leading to typical landing pages or your home page. Buyers want to feel that the dealership understands their needs and curates a personal experience for them, whether this happens online or on-site. In this digital age we can show the in-market shopper the car(s) they are most interested in - the clearest path is to show them that car and click to that car’s VDP. 

So, what is a high-value ad? We like to define it as - A relevant advertisement that takes a buyer directly to the vehicle they’re searching for and prompts that consumer to visit the showroom or connect with the dealership.

How will you know if your advertisement is working to achieve these results? One clear way would be to measure VDP Efficiency (The number of VDP views / number of sessions for a traffic source).  I’ve discussed this very topic in a webinar to help set up your Google Analytics to measure that statistic.

Ads designed to go directly to VDP typically have an efficiency rating of between 65 and 75%, in other words, for every 1000 people looking at the ads, roughly 650-750 click through to view a VDP. The last 25% - 35% are typically a buyer clicking on the company’s logo. In our world - this clicks go to the SRP that is relevant. Example: a sedan intender will get an SRP with sedans.

Whether clicking directly on the VDP or going to a relevant SRP, that is high-value advertising. This type of curated advertising experience will drive in-market buyers to your site more effectively and efficiently.

Direct to VDP is King.

In today’s world of thin margins and ultra-competitive sales, it’s important to not waste advertising dollars on “maybes”. There is no reason to forget SEM, Adwords, and typical landing pages entirely because they obviously have their merits. When you look at the cost per click of Adwords, it’s pretty normal to think you’re getting a great deal. When you dig deeper, you’ll likely realize that you probably need to spend $12 or more per VDP view, that’s likely not as cost effective as you may have thought.

Direct-to-VDP advertising is more effective at driving people to see your inventory and each click is going directly to a VDP rather than a list page. Instead of paying for clicks that may (or may not) result in the buyer seeing the car they want to buy, you’re paying for clicks directly to the car they DO want.

I’ll go back to the analogy that your website (as well as your advertising) is an extension of your dealership. Think of a buyer coming into your showroom, asking for the blue Camry they’re interested in. Your salesperson tells him that the Camry line is in the back near the fence and to call him when they have found the right one. This is not unlike the typical landing page experience.

Direct to VPD Ads are the equivalent of having the salesperson walk the buyer directly to the car they asked for. Isn’t that what you train your staff to do anyway? More importantly, this is the experience (as a buyer) you would want to have. As an extension of your business, your advertising should be as good as your best salespeople.

A final truth about today’s consumers: 54% would consider ending their relationship with a retailer if they are not given tailor-made, relevant content and offers. This will be the most important fact when determining when to turn to Direct-to-VDP advertising. The simple truth is, today’s buyers want to feel they are the most important customer you have. They want to feel that from your dealership team, your website and your advertising.

Be sure to subscribe and we’ll talk about personalization and relevancy in the coming weeks.

I’m a car guy at heart, and it’s my 5-year old son who reminded me. We all love cars – that’s why we do what we do. Their lines, their smell, the rush you get when you climb inside a car with more horses than you could fit on a football field. I love how old cars have so much character and meaning. As a tech nerd, I love how new cars are beginning to push the boundaries of technology and connectivity. I’m an analytical guy and at the same time, I’m a feelings guy, so I choose my cars with fairly equal parts heart and head.

Like many of you, this is why I initially had so much trouble understanding VDP analytics – they were nothing but numbers!

As a leader in your dealership, you need to understand the significance of these numbers to make informed decisions about the performance of your website, and to evaluate your marketing spend. In brass tacks, you need to choose how you drive traffic to your website and your Vehicle Detail Pages based on numbers, instead of which vendor rep is more fun (I’m not saying you think that way… I’m just saying…).

I’ll let you in on a little secret: It starts making sense when you equate website numbers to numbers you would normally find on your dealership’s lot.

Think about it, a dealer’s website is the virtual representation of a brick and mortar lot. The unfiltered Search Results Page (SRP) is the representation of every car on your lot, and, if someone searches for all the SUV’s, that’s the equivalent to the big row of SUV’s at the back of your lot. The Vehicle Detail Page (VDP) is the representation of a specific car on your lot – like when a customer is effectively saying I like that Black XLT.

Once you start thinking about it this way, your dealership's web analytics start making much more sense. Instead of focusing on the technical metrics themselves, focus on the numbers that you would otherwise ask your sales manager.

Here are some of the basic (less useful) metrics.

What are some of the "more" useful metrics?

See? It isn’t so bad once you translate these virtual metrics into plain English and think about them in terms of real life scenarios. With this method, you can make sense of all the technical mumbo jumbo, discuss VDP quality in a language that’s easy to understand and make the right decisions surrounding the performance of your website.

I’m a car guy at heart, and it’s my 5-year old son who reminded me. We all love cars – that’s why we do what we do. Their lines, their smell, the rush you get when you climb inside a car with more horses than you could fit on a football field. I love how old cars have so much character and meaning. As a tech nerd, I love how new cars are beginning to push the boundaries of technology and connectivity. I’m an analytical guy and at the same time, I’m a feelings guy, so I choose my cars with fairly equal parts heart and head.

Like many of you, this is why I initially had so much trouble understanding VDP analytics – they were nothing but numbers!

As a leader in your dealership, you need to understand the significance of these numbers to make informed decisions about the performance of your website, and to evaluate your marketing spend. In brass tacks, you need to choose how you drive traffic to your website and your Vehicle Detail Pages based on numbers, instead of which vendor rep is more fun (I’m not saying you think that way… I’m just saying…).

I’ll let you in on a little secret: It starts making sense when you equate website numbers to numbers you would normally find on your dealership’s lot.

Think about it, a dealer’s website is the virtual representation of a brick and mortar lot. The unfiltered Search Results Page (SRP) is the representation of every car on your lot, and, if someone searches for all the SUV’s, that’s the equivalent to the big row of SUV’s at the back of your lot. The Vehicle Detail Page (VDP) is the representation of a specific car on your lot – like when a customer is effectively saying I like that Black XLT.

Once you start thinking about it this way, your dealership's web analytics start making much more sense. Instead of focusing on the technical metrics themselves, focus on the numbers that you would otherwise ask your sales manager.

Here are some of the basic (less useful) metrics.

What are some of the "more" useful metrics?

See? It isn’t so bad once you translate these virtual metrics into plain English and think about them in terms of real life scenarios. With this method, you can make sense of all the technical mumbo jumbo, discuss VDP quality in a language that’s easy to understand and make the right decisions surrounding the performance of your website.