Holiday shoppers are more motivated to buy than they were in 2017. This is the key finding of Cars.com research into holiday shopping behavior during Black Friday weekend. For three days – Black Friday, Saturday, and Sunday -- we used a geolocated survey to target shoppers after they visited dealer lots. We included a representative mix of Cars.com and non-Cars.com shoppers. Here’s what we found:

• 1. Holiday shoppers are more motivated to buy than they were in 2017. During Black Friday weekend, 34 percent of shoppers said that the main purpose of their most recent auto dealership visit was to purchase a car – compared to 25 percent who answered the same way in 2017. Twenty six percent were planning on purchasing a car that week versus 21 percent in 2017.

• 2. Holiday shoppers’ motivation to buy resulted in a higher close rate during Black Friday visits. Twenty four percent of Black Friday shoppers purchased or leased a car that weekend versus 18 percent who did so in 2017.

• 3. The number of dealerships visited is leveling out. Sixty percent of Black Friday weekend shoppers visited two-to-three dealerships versus 58 percent in 2017. Twenty-six percent visited only one dealer – the same as in 2017. 

• 4. Car shopping remains a local experience. Fifty one percent of Black Friday weekend shoppers visited dealerships located between 0 and 10 miles of their home – the same level as 2017. The number of shoppers willing to travel more than 25 miles from their home during Black Friday weekend dropped from 15 percent in 2017 to 11 percent in 2018.

• 5. Shoppers are mobile-savvy. Seventy four percent of shoppers conducted mobile research on dealerships’ lots. In addition, the percentage of shoppers using their devices to read car reviews increased (from 39 percent to 45 percent).

For dealers, there are many implications:

• 1. Don’t let up on your marketing and advertising outreach during the holiday season. The notion that holiday shoppers are too busy to look at cars does not hold true. Shoppers are doing their research and stopping by lots – and they are motivated to buy. 

• 2. Have a ratings/reviews system in place to encourage reviews, respond to them, and learn from them, given the popularity of ratings/reviews.

• 3. Manage your identity where local searches occur, such as Google My Business and Facebook Marketplace. Make sure your location data and content are up to date, accurate, and compelling, with clear calls to action and striking visuals of your inventory. And make sure all your content is optimized for mobile viewing.

For more insight into how to win during the holiday season, contact your Cars.com sales representative. 

Customer obsession and identity mapping will take advertising and attribution to the next level in the automotive industry. This was the key takeaway from a presentation that Cars.com CMO Brooke Skinner Ricketts and LiveRamp Chief Evangelist Andrew Kasprzycki delivered at the Automotive Analytics and Attribution Summit November 19. 

Chasing the Holy Grail

Brooke and Andrew asserted that at a time when automotive dealerships are battling disruptive forces such as the rise of digital retailing, the keys to survival are data intelligence and customer obsession. 

“We are all ultimately chasing the holy grail – a perfect understanding of the consumer,” Brooke said. “This insight should deliver the data needed to make our marketing more efficient and effective while giving us a clear understanding of how your marketing dollars are performing on each channel.”

But unfortunately, as an industry, we still have work to do in obtaining a clear understanding of the customer, and “dealers are believing false attribution models and wasting valuable dollars as a result,” she added.

Four Attribution Challenges

Andrew and Brooke noted that understanding consumers is getting even harder as shoppers navigate across a broad tableau of devices and channels. Attribution models are not working because the amount of data associated with each person is atomized across this complex journey.

As Andrew said, “When data is separated from the human we create inefficiencies.”

He said today’s attribution models face specific challenges across four dimensions:

• 1 Devices. The number of devices connected to the internet isexpected to nearly triple to 30 billion by 2020 and then nearly triple again to 80 billion five years later.[i]

• 2 Digital Platforms. There are 3,500+ media and marketing platforms that consumers interact with on devices each using its own identifier for the consumer.[ii]

• 3 Data. The amount of data available continues to grow. Connected devices produce 8 Zettabytes of data per year.[iii]By 2025, 80 billion devices are expected to produce 180 zettabytes of data. The exploding volume and frequency of data produces a massive opportunity for marketers to understand their current and potential consumers in a hyper-focused way. But it also represents a significant risk in that you might be crushed under a 180 zettabyte balloon if you don’t get in front of this now.

• 4 Identity resolution. The underlying challenge in making sense of all this data is what the market talks about as identity resolution. According to Andrew, identity resolution is the ability to connect people, data, and devices, across any channel and at any level of granularity.But doing so iseasier said than done, both because of the quantity of data available and because identifiers for an individual are constantly changing and can quickly become outdated.

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• “Individuals interact with brands through multiple digital devices and channels, and hundreds of different marketing platforms, each with their own identifier for a consumer,” he said. “Just connecting these data points in the digital world is extremely challenging, and tying them back to offline identity and data even more so.”
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People-Based Marketing

Cars.com and LiveRamp are working together to address these challenges in a powerful way: by combining Cars.com’s valuable consumer data with dealers’ DMS data to deliver insights down to the individual and household level. Put another way, “We are helping dealerships embrace people-based marketing -- or synthesizing customer data from multiple sources, building a rich profile of the customer, and more effectively reaching customers on any device,” Andrew said. “People-based marketing It connects brands with real people -- not audience or device groups.” 

According to Brooke and Andrew, the Cars.com/LiveRamp relationship will offer these advantages to dealers: 

1 Reduce waste in spend by serving advertising to the person and not the device -- and therefore reduce any wasted frequency. 

2 Drive more leads by recognizing when customers are back in market for a car even many years later – and send them personalized communication. Dealers will also have the means to customize communication to consumers at different points of life change, such as when they get married. In addition, dealers will have a better way to customize advertising to car shoppers based off their past car purchases as well as their site and on-the-lot behavior on Cars.com. 

3 Trade up and trade in shoppers. Dealers will target people whose leases are almost up to trade them up to the next model; and geo-target people who have engaged with their dealership online but are now visiting competitive dealerships. 

4 Offer real-time notification and activation. Dealers will know the moment someone lands on their lot and all necessary details to be able to create more intelligent connections and close more deals, faster. 

5 Optimize for the future by understanding which messages resonate the best with different customer segments and optimize messaging. 

Working with LiveRamp, Cars.com will be able to understand the totality of the car buying cycle at the individual or household level and be able to help dealers get more qualified leads and sales.

“But we can’t do it alone,” Brooke said. “We need to come together to improve the industry as a whole.”

Sign up here to be a beta partner with us and on the frontlines of moving this industry forward.