Auto Dealers can now turn anonymous website shoppers into named shoppers and lackluster leads into intelligent leads for frictionless engagement

Columbus, OH (October 30, 2018) - Clarivoy today announced the launch of ShoppersON™, a combination of three products: Anonymous Shopper™ Identification, HDLeads™ and CRM Sync, into one revolutionary platform that is a powerful new way for auto dealers to identify and engage with in-market shoppers.

“ShoppersON is a ‘Now Platform.’ Many times dealers can’t wait for a marketing campaign to generate more in-market shoppers, they need more leads now. ShoppersON instantly delivers more low funnel shoppers directly to the CRM so that dealers can connect with shoppers today,” said Clarivoy CEO Steve White. “ShoppersON turns anonymous website shoppers into named shoppers and lackluster leads into intelligent leads, resulting in frictionless engagement. The auto industry has become more transparent to the consumer, but the consumer has become more opaque to the auto industry, which now has a huge challenge converting website traffic into leads. Website conversion rates and lead quality continue downward, driving up the cost of leads and sales. With the patent-pending technology of ShoppersON, we empower dealers to lead differently,” White added.

ShoppersON, X-Ray Vision for Dealer’s Websites

“Our Anonymous Shopper™ Identification, included as part of ShoppersON, is literally X-ray vision for your website,” White stated. “We turn anonymous website visitors into named shoppers who are then segmented by prior customer and conquest shopper. These anonymous shoppers can then be contacted with an old-fashioned phone call or targeted via Facebook or other marketing channels.”

ShoppersON Creates the Perfect Lead

ShoppersON includes HDLeads™, real-time lead enrichment to create the perfect lead, providing dealers with access to full and complete leads that include additional demographic and contact information; no more fake name and email address.

ShoppersON Syncs to the CRM

ShoppersON also delivers in-market shopper data directly into the CRM. The dealer doesn’t have to log into another dashboard to use and benefit from the product. ShoppersON pushes the anonymous shopper and enriched lead data right into the CRM; prioritizing and expediting closes through predictive scoring for new and used vehicles.

“BDC Managers, Marketing Directors, Sales Managers, Internet Managers and more should all turn ‘ON’ this revolutionary new lead source,” said White. “Take advantage of enriched shopper information, unlike anything you’ve seen before, and generate more engaging conversations with shoppers.”

ShoppersON™ was recently selected as a finalist for the 2018 DrivingSales Innovation Cup Award, which annually recognizes the most innovative dealership solutions.

Limited-time market exclusivity options are available. For more information, or to sign up for a product demonstration, visit: https://www.shopperson.com.

 About Clarivoy:

Clarivoy is a marketing technology firm specializing in unified, unbiased business intelligence. Their measurement and identity solutions reveal more about their clients’ customers, their advertising and their path to success so they can drive more sales. Clarivoy’s proprietary technology grants marketers superior visibility into their customers and campaigns – across all channels, all devices – online and offline. Armed with this new information, marketers can have certainty and stop guessing what is working and what is not. https://www.clarivoy.com.

Columbus, OH (October 10, 2018) - Clarivoy, a pioneer and leader in automotive marketing attribution, today announced that its new product, ShoppersON™, has been selected as a finalist for the 2018 DrivingSales Innovation Cup Award, which annually recognizes the most innovative dealership solutions. Many companies applied, but DrivingSales’ panel of dealer judges could choose only five finalists to compete for the award.

Finalists will compete onstage for the Innovation Cup Award at the 2018 DrivingSales Executive Summit (DSES). The event, to be held October 21-23 at The Bellagio in Las Vegas, brings the most progressive automotive dealers in the country together to discuss innovative and effective trends that drive increased sales.

This is the second time in three years Clarivoy has been selected as a finalist and, in 2016, Clarivoy won the DrivingSales Innovation Cup with their proprietary attribution solution.

“I am very proud of our Clarivoy team and delighted we are once again a finalist for the Most Innovative Dealership Solution. Our mission is to provide dealers with the best marketing technology that ensures unified, unbiased business intelligence and superior visibility into their customers and campaigns. ShoppersON takes this one step further,” said Clarivoy CEO Steve White. “In car sales today, the dealership which responds the fastest, in the most relevant way, gains a competitive advantage. Our mantra for the new product is to enable dealers to ‘Lead Different.’ To do this, they need new ways to identify and engage with in-market shoppers and that is what ShoppersON does,” White continued.

For more information, or to sign up for a product demonstration, visit: https://www.shopperson.com.

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About Clarivoy:

Clarivoy is a marketing technology firm specializing in unified, unbiased business intelligence. Their measurement and identity solutions reveal more about their clients’ customers, their advertising and their path to success so they can drive more sales. Clarivoy’s proprietary technology grants marketers superior visibility into their customers and campaigns – across all channels, all devices – online and offline. Armed with this new information, marketers can have certainty and stop guessing what is working and what is not. https://www.clarivoy.com.

I am an avid amateur cyclist and, for those of you that don’t know much about cycling, there are different levels for amateurs. In road racing, all male cyclists begin at Category 5. Without going into exactly what moves a cyclist up the ranks, just understand that the lower the category number, the better the cyclist. Category 1 is the highest level. At this point cyclists have proven their abilities and are even invited to ride with the U.S. Olympic Cycling team, to race against the top pros in the world. Category 1 amateurs are considered some of the top cyclists around the globe. Why am I telling this story? Because one of them was me.

Each year, before and during the DrivingSales Executive Summit, DrivingSales and IM@SWEB organize bike rides and Clarivoy partners up with industry friends including Flick Fusion, Dealer Inspire, Dominion Dealer Solutions and EAutoAppraise to show support. Given my background and love for cycling, I immediately brought Clarivoy in as a sponsor because fitness, exercise and living a healthy lifestyle are vital ingredients to feeling good and performing at your best in real life. These rides provide DSES attendees with an opportunity to do just that.

To achieve Category 1 took a lot of work. I didn’t simply start out racing 120+ miles. It was a process that involved repetition, determination and the desire to improve. It was hard work, but I progressed because I put my mind to it -- determined to succeed. Success took practice. It wasn’t always easy, but I kept pushing myself to get better.

In cycling – and participating in other fitness activities – it’s not just the physical body that needs practice to achieve peak performance. It’s just as important for the mind to get exercise, to push yourself mentally to achieve the highest levels of acuity.

Now, why am I talking about cycling? Well, my story is a great analogy for any business activity. And, tying this over to our automotive industry, especially in marketing (both digital and traditional), there is no way anyone can succeed without pushing themselves to be competitive, constantly learning more to keep up with the trends and new technologies. Failure to do so will simply result in the inability to keep up with the “peloton,” and you will inevitably fall behind.

The DrivingSales Executive Summit is an event held every Fall that allows dealership employees to exercise their minds, stay on top of new technologies and strategies, keep up with the competition and win the race.

Unfortunately, it’s estimated that only 5 percent of dealerships invest in their employees by sending them to these industry events. By simply attending, taking notes, and implementing the strategies learned upon returning to your dealership, you can place yourself at the front of the pack.

At this year’s DrivingSales Executive Summit educational topics include how to hire and retain employees, how to create pay plans and how to build a culture that promotes employee retention, customer engagement and loyalty. Other sessions are focused on fixed operations, including finding talent, retaining service customers and effective marketing for customer acquisition.

The customer experience is extremely important nowadays as a differentiator. There are plenty of sessions where you can learn how to create a better buying experience, make your operations more efficient, increase F&I revenue and dive into the new realm of digital retailing. Of course, branding, mobile, social and video marketing and lead generation are also represented, alongside inventory and pre-owned sessions, search engine optimization and, my favorite, attribution. And let’s not forget the amazing keynotes the DrivingSales team has arranged.

This conference presents a fantastic opportunity for dealership employees to not only learn from industry experts, but also from their peers within the automotive industry. And, just like the title of this blog, which is a quote from the famous American journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, it presents an opportunity to exercise your brain, learn how to improve and how to then continue that forward momentum to keep your dealership both in the race and winning it.

If you’re attending this year’s DrivingSales Executive Summit, I will be presenting a session that teaches six insights into how to sell more, spend less and beat your competition in this very competitive automotive industry.

I invite you to attend my session, Monday, October 22 at 10:00am, at the DrivingSales Executive Summit, October 21-23, 2018.

Buy the ticket, take the ride. You won’t regret it. I’ll see you there!

Many consider Michael Jordan one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, basketball player who ever lived. He also made some thought-provoking statements. One I find really interesting and words from which we can all learn is this:

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

It’s such a revealing commentary about how to win in life and in business. It certainly applies to our auto industry where the game of marketing is lost just as many times, if not more, than it is won.

Proving marketing results is challenging for vendors. The monthly reports they supply to dealers to show their worth are not always good news. But… that isn’t necessarily bad. As long as action is taken to correct the issues creating the problem. The most important thing is having the correct data. So, if the month looks like a loss, but you have good data as to WHY, that can actually be turned into a win.

In my experience, the reason why many dealers get so confused with reports is very simple: they don’t understand them. And, to further confuse matters, there is non-uniform reporting based on variables and models that don’t match. Think of it like a crime scene. A lot of different people witness the same event, yet all have different perspectives and recollections of it. Some don’t even know what happened. While there is truth in everyone’s story… sorting out that truth and figuring out the puzzle pieces is the hard part.

Working with several different vendors means you have several different modes of reporting. It’s like comparing apples to oranges to lemons and bananas. Your marketing director, Internet director, general manager or dealer must quickly and easily compare each marketing expense one-to-one, so as to effectively and knowledgeably judge what is working for your store – and what is causing you to lose the marketing game. The problem is that many don’t have time to decipher the Rubik’s Cube of reports they’ve been given, and most don’t know how to act upon it to make a difference and win the game.

Marketing is like a big (and expensive) game of Jenga. The tower is built, thought to be solid but, as pieces are removed, it gets more and more unstable. A great player knows which pieces to strategically remove while still keeping the tower stable. Poor players watch the tower crumble before them and lament because their opponent won. And the best players take their losses and use the lessons learnt to gain strength and win in the future.

Without a workable solution in place, or a data analytics hero on staff to figure all of this out, the data ends up being pretty meaningless. Today, it’s more important than ever to know and understand how your marketing efforts perform so that you can make accurate decisions and adjust your spend accordingly for the best ROI. You simply cannot let that data slip past you into a black hole. It is vital to have a workable way to capture and decrypt it all in a format you understand and can use to make smart marketing decisions, leading to increased profitability and sales.

Given the right information, in the right format, collectively you can make decisions wisely – based on knowing rather than guessing!

There’s nothing wrong with a vendor having a bad month for your dealership. It’s the opportunity to win that matters. But you only get this opportunity if you have the right data to learn from. Then you can adjust so as to win in the future.

I recently read a great blog about our industry by thought-leader Seth Godin. It explains how manufacturers and dealers do things very differently. Godin shares that manufacturers have worked for hundreds of years to refine and create more efficient ways to produce a quality product; evolving from “stopwatches and spreadsheets” to the robotic-assisted assembly lines that exist today, which have, according to Godin, “turned the process of making a car into a predictable, improvable system.”  However, in Godin’s opinion, dealerships are not faring quite as well.

Throughout the history of auto dealerships, processes have always been an essential part of operations. These processes mostly revolve around retail sales and the most efficient and successful way is to sell a vehicle. They have been added to and refined over the years and now a literal bible exists with advice about how salespeople should guide the consumer when shopping for a vehicle.

But maybe… just maybe… things have changed.

As Godin states in his blog: “Car dealers might try to measure the easy metrics of output (how many sold) but they’ve consistently failed at managing the improvised human interactions that car salespeople engage in.”

Don’t worry. I’m certainly not here to tell you how to run your dealership or to preach about what processes you should use. I’d like to share a useful piece of information about how, in today’s Internet-driven world, the way you run your digital dealership is just as, if not more important than, how you run your physical dealership.

During the time the car shopper remains in the digital universe, they feel have all the time in the world. And, there’s an additional catch here: there’s nothing your dealership can do to influence that online customer if you don’t even know there are there. It’s one thing to know that 50,000 people visited a VDP page, your website, or a third-party site, but that is somewhat meaningless if those customers don’t convert. Sure, some of them may just stroll in. But you’ll never know why, where they came from, or what message influenced them unless you have some way to capture that information. And, that information is the key to successful marketing.

Most dealership spends a ton of money every month marketing to consumers. Far too frequently it’s hard to figure out where those consumers came from, which marketing channel is working, or which message resonates with them.

The problem lies in the fact that marketing is incredibly dynamic. For example, the effective channels which exist today (if you’re measuring) may become obsolete within as little as a year.

Managing your marketing budget and keeping up with processes that make for an effective marketing strategy can be a never-ending task.

The good news is that the information is out there to help you improve results, track customers, manage marketing channels and optimize results. You need to make sure you have a good, trusted method of attribution in place.

I have no doubt that every dealership would like to get the best bang for their marketing dollars. If digital (or even physical) processes are getting in the way, perhaps it is time to rethink how we’re doing things, evolve and create new processes and better ways to measure and adapt to our society. Consumers certainly are!

 New software for auto dealers, vendors and marketing agencies uses “Any-Touch” attribution to ensure correct marketing source receives credit in the customer’s purchase journey

Columbus, OH, March 12, 2018-- Clarivoy, the auto industry’s most trusted source for truth in optimizing the performance of marketing campaigns, today announced the launch of its new software which uses “Any-Touch” attribution to ensure the correct marketing source(s) receive credit during the customer’s purchase journey. Whether first, last, or somewhere in the middle, Any-Touch attribution makes sure proper credit is attributed to those marketing sources which influenced the customer’s vehicle purchase.

According to Steve White, Clarivoy CEO, dealers and third-party auto vendors receive millions of unique web visitors per month and yet less than five percent identify themselves.  “Who are the other 95 percent, and did they purchase a vehicle?” said White. “In the eyes of a dealer, the value of a third-party auto vendor, marketing agency or website provider is reduced to one thing: Leads. Since most visitors to a dealer’s website or third-party site are unidentifiable, 95 percent of the value of that vendor or marketing partner is lost.”

Clarivoy’s software gives dealers, vendors and marketing agencies visibility into the total number of vehicles each vendor and marketing source are responsible for influencing monthly. It provides continuous confidence in the value of the vendor’s offering to the dealer through an independent, trusted voice.

“Unless you are the first or last touch in the CRM, you probably aren’t getting credit from the dealer. Even if you do get credit, it’s only for leads you delivered and NOT for anonymous shoppers that result in sales. What if you could show performance according to the amount of sold vehicles that had, say, Cars.com or Autotrader in the buyer’s purchase journey, instead of just being reliant on leads? Now you can with our new product: Attribution API. It encourages the optimal product mix while simultaneously mitigating churn. This allows vendors to consult with their dealers and continually prove their value,” said White.

Clarivoy’s identity graph fuels the new API technology and is created using proprietary technology that can match a person to multiple devices across multiple channels.

The new software delivers monthly attributable sales to dealers’ dashboards and is very simple to set up. All that is required is the installation of Clarivoy’s tracking code on all relevant website properties. Clarivoy then works with dealers to obtain sales data and deterministically matches the sales file with leads and vendor website traffic to show the vendors’ true impact on vehicle sales

For more information, or to sign up for a product demonstration, visit: http://www.clarivoy.com, or drop by booth #763N at the 2018 NADA Show in Las Vegas, NV, March 23-25. Or pre-schedule a meeting by clicking here:

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About Clarivoy:

Clarivoy is the auto industry’s most trusted source of truth for optimizing the performance of marketing campaigns. Their measurement and identity solutions reveal more about their clients’ customers, their advertising and their path to success so they can drive more sales. The company’s proprietary TV Analytics solution was named the winner of the 2016 DrivingSales Innovation Cup Award for the Most Innovative Dealership Solution of 2016. Clarivoy’s proprietary technology grants marketers incomparable visibility into their customers and campaigns – across all channels, all devices – online and offline. Armed with this new information, marketers can stop guessing and start knowing what is working and what is not. http://www.clarivoy.com.

Columbus, OH, March 6, 2018-- Clarivoy, the auto industry’s most trusted source for optimizing the performance of marketing campaigns, today announced that it has hired Jessica Ruth, formerly Digital Program Manager at Dominion Dealer Solutions, as VP of Product.

Commenting on the new hire, Steve White, Clarivoy CEO, stated, “Jessica is a vital addition to our leadership team where she will lead product creation and management for all current and new products. These responsibilities are critical to achieving Clarivoy's strategic goal: to provide dealers with a single complete view of how people buy cars and where to get their next sale. Her experience and background make her a perfect fit as VP of Product, where she will pioneer new product development, resulting in demonstrative revenue growth, increased market share and customer adoption.”

Jessica brings more than ten years of auto industry experience to Clarivoy, successfully managing, launching and leading large software development projects. Previously she served as Digital Program Manager at Dominion Dealer Solutions, where she created new processes, products and efficiencies that led to improved customer product delivery.

Prior to that she served as Brand Manager with DealerFire, a responsive website and Digital Marketing Company that was later acquired by DealerSocket. Jessica managed brand presence across all digital platforms and secured multiple company awards each year. Earlier in her career she served as Brand Manager for DealerRefresh, a leading online community for the auto industry.

Jessica graduated from the University of Wisconsin- Oshkosh with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism - News/Editorial.

“As I considered my next opportunity, it was important for me to join an organization that is trustworthy, progressive and rooted in their industry objectives. Clarivoy’s mission of helping dealers as an unbiased third-party provider aligned with my personal beliefs and professional goals. They are truly a dealer partner whose only interest is helping dealers succeed. I’m extremely excited to join such a great team,” Jessica stated.

Clarivoy is the automotive industry’s recognized leader at helping auto dealers discover what is really driving sales. Clarivoy provides dealers with a single, complete view of how people buy cars and where to get their next sale. Their ability to identify more customer touchpoints through Anonymous Attribution and unbiased Multi-Touch Attribution measurement solutions gives their clients an unfair competitive advantage when making marketing decisions.

For more information, or to sign up for a product demonstration, visit: http://www.clarivoy.com, drop by booth #763N at the 2018 NADA Show in Las Vegas, NV, March 23-25, or pre-schedule a meeting by clicking here:

About Clarivoy:

Clarivoy is the auto industry’s most trusted source of truth for optimizing the performance of marketing campaigns. Their measurement and identity solutions reveal more about their clients’ customers, their advertising and their path to success so they can drive more sales. The company’s proprietary TV Analytics solution was named the winner of the 2016 DrivingSales Innovation Cup Award for the Most Innovative Dealership Solution of 2016. Clarivoy’s proprietary technology grants marketers incomparable visibility into their customers and campaigns – across all channels, all devices – online and offline. Armed with this new information, marketers can stop guessing and start knowing what is working and what is not. http://www.clarivoy.com.

By Steve White  

First, let me be clear in saying that Multi-Touch Sales Attribution is still the Holy Grail of marketing measurement for auto dealers. But for many dealers, no matter how attractive the benefits of Multi-Touch Attribution might be, using it might be like using a nail gun to hang a picture. Overkill. 

If you think about it on a spectrum, you’ve got last-click or first click on one end as the most basic type of attribution, and data-driven multi-touch attribution that fractionalizes credit across all of the touchpoints contributing to a sale on the other. While most dealer’s analytics efforts fall at the beginning of the spectrum with last and first-click attribution, they are beginning to recognize the value of multi-touch attribution at the other end. 

Based on my conversations with hundreds of dealers, I’d say that only about 20% of them have the budget, resources, and sophistication to really make good use of Multi-Touch Sales Attribution. The remaining 80% just want someone to tell them what channels are contributing to sales, especially in an environment where their leads are declining. Dealers, for the most part, don’t care about how credit is fractionalized across channels. Because, at the end of the day, they don’t have the resources or time to use that information. They just want to know “Is Vendor X contributing to our sales?” 

So, as an industry, maybe we should stop (at least for now) pushing the idea that every dealer should adopt what we feel is the Holy Grail (data-driven Multi-Touch Sales Attribution), and instead give them something that’s useable in the here and now. A tool that simply tells dealers if a vendor has contributed to a sale. 

I’m calling this new attribution model “Any Click.” It allows dealers to see all of the clicks and ad exposures that influenced a sale without the complexity of fractionalizing credit across influencing touchpoints - even if that customer never submitted a lead (something we call “Anonymous Attribution”). The fractionalization of credit is typically theoretical anyway, unless a data-driven approach is used. And believe me - if you want to see someone’s eyes glaze over - start discussing the intricacies behind the creation and use of data-driven attribution models. 

It’s my belief that once dealers start seeing which vendors are contributing to sales, they will then want to know “how much.” And that will lead them straight to Multi-Touch Sales Attribution - at a time that’s right for them! 

I’d really like to hear what you think! Email me with your thoughts at steve@clarivoy.com.

Part 1 of a 2-part blog discussing the value and pros and cons of Traffic vs. Sales Attribution 

Historically, there have been few ways for dealers to accurately measure if their marketing spend is providing ROI – and really, truly trust the data.  Traffic Attribution has been, and remains, the primary KPI dealers use to measure the success of their marketing campaigns; and Google Analytics the primary tool.  

Relying on traffic as your primary measurement is troublesome if you use the results to help reallocate your marketing spend. If Google Analytics tells you that your display ads drive the most traffic at the lowest cost, while your Third Party Vendor drives the least - it stands to reason that you’d use this data from GA and spend more of your marketing budget on display ads and less with your Third Party Vendors. 

Web traffic alone only shows data indicating how many people visit the dealer’s website. What about accurately tracking all the referral sources for sales? It’s what web traffic doesn’t show that is most important, and that is missing if you use this as your primary KPI.  

Luckily, Sales Attribution techniques are becoming more common in the automotive industry and we’re seeing more dealers adopting new measurement approaches. In my next blog I’ll outline some of the surprising results dealers are seeing using Sales vs. Traffic Attribution. But in this blog I’d like to focus on Traffic Attribution because, while Sales Attribution is the Holy Grail, you can still extract valuable information from free out-of-the box web traffic measurement tools like Google Analytics.  

Let’s face it, Google, in itself, is a vendor in our industry. And, while claiming to be unbiased, its long-time attribution model is flawed. Not only is it flawed, but most dealers have it set up poorly, so have trouble getting accurate data. 

We recently conducted some in-depth research with a number of dealerships who rely on Google Analytics for web traffic measurement and found that many have it set up incorrectly. This makes it almost impossible to understand what’s going on, even from a last-click perspective -- let alone a multi-channel approach!  

Even those a little more technologically-inclined were forced to spend way too much time manually adding data to spreadsheets, attempting to decipher what’s working, and what is not. 

We were also shocked to discover that many dealers didn’t have the proper goals set up in their accounts. This is extremely important as the data will be flawed and inaccurate if Google Analytics is not set up properly. In fact, you will not be able to gain any valuable information. 

Before all the data in Google Analytics makes any real sense, no matter which attribution model, vendor, or method your dealership uses to calculate results, you need to ensure you properly set up a complete set of goals in Google Analytics itself. What I suggest as a minimum is as follows 

• New SRP Views 
• New VDP Views 
• Used SRP Views 
• Used VDP Views 
• Certified SRP Views 
• Certified VDP Views 
• Finance Form Submissions 
• Lead Form Submissions 
• Service Form Submissions 
• Trade-In Form Submissions 
• Print Coupons 
• Visits to Hours and Directions Page 
• Views of Dealership Review Page 

In studying several dealers, when they correctly organized the data in Google Analytics, ensuring that each traffic source was assigned to the appropriate channel, while also assigning referral sources that were falling through the cracks (such as third-party ads), the data provide information that was much more valid. These dealers could finally trust this data to make better informed decisions. 

Relying solely on Google Analytics out of the box set up has some other pitfalls, including the fact that it does not allow you to see performance between brand and non-brand search and display. If you cannot break this out, you can only view the performance of paid search and display as a group. In addition, you cannot break out Tier 1 and Tier 2 marketing campaigns, or your own email campaigns. The inability to see granular level results such as these (and more), can easily lead to poor marketing decisions. 

In part two of this blog series, I will discuss the holy grail of attribution – Sales Attribution. I’ll explain the different types and why it’s so difficult to measure. So, stay tuned for more……….

I’m sure many of you have heard about Google’s new attribution offering as there has been much buzz about it lately – but don’t be fooled as this is not a silver bullet for auto dealers – in fact, FAR from it. Let me explain:

Last Tuesday, Google announced an integrated reporting feature named Google Attribution. According to Google, this feature will integrate Google Analytics, AdWords and DoubleClick reporting, shifting from their past attribution model of last-click, to a multi-touch attribution model called, “data-driven attribution.”

The announcement stated that this feature will be free. As Google Attribution is still in beta, and not yet rolled out to all users, it’s difficult to say exactly what features and data will be available. However, there is one thing I can say – this feature is not designed to bring better transparency, but rather to reinforce that advertisers should be spending more with Google!

While I applaud Google’s desire to improve, and to report using a multi-touch attribution model, it appears to be another walled garden move that will over-attribute results to them. It’s also a massive stiff arm to third-party auto sites. And, it’s of little benefit to those dealers who realize the value of data which a truly unbiased multi-touch attribution brings.

Why do I say that?

First, Google’s attribution channels still won't organize traffic in a way that's actionable for auto dealers. The data will still be organized in a way that highlights conversions made by Google properties. Second, they will still only include spend data for Google properties. This means you won't be able to assess the efficiencies of advertising made through third party auto. And lastly, it won’t include view-through data, which is vital for dealers in understanding if their marketing efforts are working.

These days, many consumers simply don’t click or convert, they just go into the dealership. Without view-through data, you wouldn’t know that the customer visited a third-party auto site, discovered the vehicle and then came into your dealership. You could then draw the conclusion that the third-party solution isn’t producing and cut a marketing partner that, in fact, has substantial influence in the buyer’s journey.

Please realize that Google is just another vendor in the auto industry. That’s why they have an entire automotive team, speak at automotive conferences and cater to other automotive vendors. It all boils down to the fact that the automotive industry is very lucrative to them.

I believe the reason most dealers don’t consider Google a vendor is a simple one: many of them don’t write checks to Google! In essence, however, dealers are writing those checks to Google - albeit through their ad agency, SEM provider, or other automotive vendor.

When you look at it this way, Google Attribution is simply a vendor reporting to a dealer (or agency) how well their ads performed, while slipping in other touchpoints along the buyer’s journey so as to bring the illusion of transparency.

Google Attribution doesn’t solve any problems for dealers. It’s simply a mirage meant to enhance a false sense of security with their marketing dollars. Once again, dealers lose as they rely on the digital blind spot that Google’s tempting them with.

Google Attribution was not made for the automotive industry. It’s a step backwards in transparency and will essentially return third-party automotive sites to a click-based attribution model which, in the end, hurts dealers and denies them accurate data with which to make decisions.

At the end of the day, Google’s message to dealers is: “Trust Us!”

But, Google Attribution is simply Google grading their own homework and, even though we don’t have all the specifics as of yet, I’m willing to bet that at the end of the day Google will give themselves straight “A’s.”