A question I often get asked is, “When is the right time to cut a marketing source if it does not seem to be working?”

Almost every vendor and/or marketing source requires time to perform – whether that’s PPC, SEM, SEO, TV, radio, newspaper, email, lead providers or third-party listing sites – it’s all the same. Give any source a mere 30-day judgement call before cutting them and you’ll never know whether they are performing. You could easily cut a vendor or marketing source from your budget that is actually driving sales.

Everything takes time to work. For example, lead providers. The majority of consumers don’t buy a car in the same month they submit a lead. In fact, at the point they chose to remove their anonymity and request information, many are still in the research stage of their buying journey.

My advice is to allow 3-4 months and sometimes up to 6 months to adequately and accurately measure whether that particular source is performing. Of course, to do that properly, your need to have proper measurement tools in place to judge that marketing source’s influence on a buyer.

Just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither is an effective marketing strategy. Give your marketing sources time to perform. Have measurement tools in place. Only after time, with these things in place, will you be able to effectively and confidently make decisions that are in the best interest of your marketing budget and, more importantly, your dealership. 

Dealers have leveraged paid search for years – and some spend significant budgets on it. However, whether they do it by themselves, or work with a vendor, I find many misunderstand some of the strategies, analytics and the method to the madness that is paid search.

I’d like to explain a few things and share some best practices I have learned over the years about how to really maximize your ROI in paid search:

Branded Search:

Let’s start with branded search. Historically, branded search has been the highest performing search type because marketers spent more on branding activities such as TV, radio and newspaper. These mediums provided customers with a familiarity as to where begin their online search. Then along came Google, which began, in essence, as a glorified phone book. Now consumers rely on Google to tell them what to buy and where to go.  

I am pretty sure that when setting up Google AdWords, like most dealers, you bid on your dealership’s name. There are several reasons for this. First, organic results keep getting pushed further down in search results, so this helps with visibility.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, if you do not bid on your dealership’s name you risk having competitors, third-party listing sites, manufacturers and lead providers jumping in and gaining exposure to a customer searching YOUR dealership’s name. If their ad text is compelling enough, this customer could easily be lured away from your website to a competitor’s. As a result, if you wish to be “in the game,” so to speak, and never lose a click to a competitor, you are pretty much forced to bid on your dealership’s name. This is what I like to refer to as the “Google tax.”

Non-Branded Search:

Non-branded search is what should be front and center when analyzing the effectiveness of your paid search campaigns. When bidding on multiple keywords, the results are typically analyzed utilizing the paid search campaigns as a whole – branded and non-branded – and this is where the true effectiveness of your paid search campaigns gets skewed.

Often, due to necessity, branded search performance is a large part of the overall paid search budget. Those searches are going to happen. However, when looking at the overall outcome, paid search results can look rosier than they are actually are if branded search results are included.

Yes, bidding on branded search should be part of your overall paid search strategy. However, to truly evaluate the effectiveness and performance of your paid search campaigns you would be wise to stop including branded search campaigns from your ROI analysis. Instead, isolate branded search from your overall results and optimize for non-branded terms.

How can you effectively do that analysis yourself? Ask your vendors to run a report that shows attributed leads and engagements isolated by brand and non-brand. You can also look at VDP’s. But, that will not give you the full picture. For example, a customer looks at VDP’s from a non-branded search, they are retargeted and then come back with a branded search. What gets the credit? You would need to adopt a Multi-Touch Attribution model to tell you this.

Paid search campaigns are not as efficient as everyone thinks they are. When you truly do the analysis and segment it in AdWords, or Google Analytics, our data shows that branded search over-compensates for the lack of results that non-branded search terms generate. It’s become more expensive and is less productive.

And that’s why the party is over...at least for those that rely on branded search to mask the true ROI of their paid search campaigns.

Columbus, OH (April 5, 2017) – Clarivoy, the auto industry’s leading provider of Multi-Touch Attribution, today announced it has hired Benjamin M. Hadley, formerly Senior Sales Director at Dealer.com, as Vice President of Strategy. In his new role Hadley will be responsible for account growth and extension sales, facilitating customer satisfaction measurement, product feedback and new business development.

“Ben was the youngest person ever to reach the level of Sales Director at Dealer.com and also made it into their Presidents Club for 2016. His drive and passion for the automotive industry make him a perfect fit for our Clarivoy team,” said Clarivoy CEO Steve White. “We needed a senior-level professional with a proven track record of selling technology to dealerships to pioneer the sale of our disruptive marketing technology. He will head up the challenge of making the complex notion of Multi-Touch Attribution something easy for dealers to understand and apply in their businesses.”

Previously Hadley was at Dealer.com for six years, where he worked his way up from Inside Sales Representative to Sales Director, consistently selling over $8 million in revenue. An avid skier, Hadley lives in Burlington, VT, with his wife Em.

Commenting on his new position Hadley stated, “I have a strong desire to be part of this budding startup company where I will have the opportunity to build something special and change the automotive industry. I look forward to helping dealers better understand the true meaning of Multi-Touch Attribution so that they can leverage their marketing data, know more about their customers, make marketing more efficient and effective, and generate more sales.”

Clarivoy’s Multi-Touch Sales Attribution platform uses proprietary attribution algorithms that help marketers discover what’s really driving sales. It is uniquely focused on user-level attribution, allowing clients to transparently view a consumer’s full purchase path, sorting and ranking the influence of each channel’s contribution – paid search, display ads, TV, email, third party websites, organic search, social, and brand website. Designed for ease of use, all dealers need to do is install Clarivoy’s simple tracking code and provide DMS access to sales.

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

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About Clarivoy

Clarivoy is the auto industry’s leading provider of Multi-Touch Sales Attribution. Their 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

Study results will be used to help auto dealers better understand which marketing investments actually lead to vehicle sales

Columbus, OH (March 23, 2017) – Clarivoy, the auto industry’s leading provider of Multi-Touch Attribution, today announced the launch of an industry-wide study to better understand the current state and usage of attribution in the retail automotive industry.

“While Multi-Touch Attribution has been a big ‘buzzword’ lately, we think there is still a long way for us to go in educating dealers on its importance. The results of this study will help us gauge dealers’ baseline understanding of attribution, and their use of it, so that we as an industry can better help dealers understand and appreciate the dynamic and ever-changing customer journey that is not always accurately measured. Our end goal is that the results will help more dealers gain the knowledge to answer the question they have been asking themselves forever, ‘Is my investment helping me sell more vehicles?’” said Clarivoy CEO Steve White.

Auto dealers who wish to participate in the study can visit www.clarivoy.com/survey. Participants who complete the survey can register to receive an advanced copy of the study results and the chance to win one of several $100 Amazon Gift Cards.

There are several different types of attribution, all of which have their own logic. When
it comes to digital, up until now most dealers have relied on first or last-click attribution provided by Google Analytics which only measures engagements - not sales. However, as consumers are now influenced by multiple offline and online touchpoints, this type of attribution cannot provide the full picture of what – and how much – influence each marketing partner had in bringing a customer into the dealership and producing an actual sale.

Rather than rely on first or last click attribution to determine what’s effective, dealers can get a better picture of how their offline and online marketing works together to bring buyers to their doorstep by using Multi-Touch-Attribution.

With Multi-Touch-Attribution it is possible to more accurately track and measure the multiple (and growing) influencing factors that contribute to an auto buyer’s journey from start to finish -- even connect the dots between offline and online touchpoints. It enables a true picture of how marketing dollars actually influence customers.

According to Steve White, in today’s digital culture, consumers are influenced by multiple sources. “They read reviews of vehicle models and dealerships, search prices and bounce around from site to site like never before. As a result, the average number of dealerships visited before purchasing a vehicle is dwindling. It is more important than ever before that dealers know how effective their marketing dollars are at bringing those prospects from the anonymous browser into their showroom. This study will provide valuable information about the state of attribution we can share with the industry” White stated.

For more information visit: http://www.clarivoy.com, or to take the survey visit: www.clarivoy.com/survey.

# # # # #

About Clarivoy

Clarivoy is the auto industry’s leading provider of Multi-Touch Sales Attribution. Their 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

Per Wikipedia, a black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing – not even light – can escape from inside it. For many dealers, trying to make sense of the data provided by a vendor’s dashboard can be like trying to escape from a black hole. Most don’t understand what the data means and have to access ten or more portals to get a true holistic view of what’s going on in their digital marketing – ending up with what is essentially a black hole of data.

As a dealer, you are probably already overwhelmed with data. Even if you understand the metrics and analytics you see in your reports, my bet is that you would be hard-pressed to take all that information, combine it and create a report that makes sense and is accurate. Because the data is siloed, without a staff of individuals working on it full-time, it is almost impossible to then take that data and fractionalize it so that you can properly attribute credit across the multiple touch points and see the complete buyer’s journey.

Why is this? Every vendor report uses different metrics and attribution models. How can you compare apples to apples if one vendor uses last-click attribution, while another uses first-click? You can’t. The sad fact is that it will always be in a vendor’s best interest to choose the attribution model that best illustrates their solution’s performance -- not what is best for your dealership.

How many times have you argued with multiple vendors claiming credit for a sale? Or been charged multiple times by different vendors for the same customer conversion? I’m betting it has happened a lot. Perhaps the customer converted via one vendor 45 days ago, but no sale occurred. Then, they convert again via a PPC campaign, end up on your website where they fill out a trade-appraisal form. Who gets credited for the sale?

If you ask the first company, they captured the customer first (first-click). The second company would say their efforts brought the customer to your website. The trade appraisal tool would say that, ultimately, their widget converted the customer (last-click). Then there is the possibility that the customer was exposed to retargeting, billboards, radio and even television ads -- not to mention the multiple other sites they may have visited, but didn’t convert or click on (view-through).

The fact is that ALL these various sources are probably accurate and contributed to the customer ending up at the dealership. However, you will more than likely get data from each of these vendors stating, “Hey, look what a great job we did!” – And they’re all talking about the same customer. Most reporting is basic and is also not specific to the customer. On the surface, you may simply give full credit to all the vendors, not realizing that your reports all reference the same customer.

Without a workable solution in place, or a data analytics superman on staff to figure all of this out, the data might as well go straight into that black hole because, in the end, it is 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.

There are many ways to prevent that data from being unintelligible and non-actionable. The first step is to truly understand the value that proper attribution offers. Once you do, you can finally escape from the black hole.

Consumers have gravitated to the Internet for – well – just about everything. So, when it comes to digital marketing, it’s more important than ever for marketers to know what’s working and what’s not. Everything from SEO, to content, to social media and display ads contributes to the lure which brings consumers into dealership showrooms.

Currently, the single biggest asset digital marketers use to determine marketing effectiveness is Google Analytics. Many look at Google as an independent, unbiased third-party where they can get accurate measurements of what is actually driving activity to their websites and converting into sales. Sadly, they are wrong. Here’s why:

Google slowly and indirectly crept into the auto industry, similar to how it dominated every other industry -- through pay-per-click advertising. Google then developed a department specifically dedicated to the automotive industry, which has been around for about the past five years. This is because between auto manufacturers, third-party listing sites, lead providers and dealers, the auto industry is very lucrative for them, which naturally drives their motivation to favor attribution that makes them look good. It also justifies the huge budgets some dealers put into pay-per-click.

In my opinion, Google Analytics is the #1 competitor to third party sites and digital vendors. The reason is that Google Analytics’ settings, by default, are configured for last-click attribution. And where do most clicks come from? Either organic or paid search results. It doesn’t matter if the customer saw your vehicle on a third-party site, then later did a search for the dealer’s name and clicked on the link (organic or paid), guess who gets credit for that click? You got it, Google.

One of the biggest issues for most dealers is that they simply do not have the time or available resources to pay attention and measure attribution properly. Therefore, they take the easy route and use the default Google Analytics setting for their marketing decisions. It is imperative that you upgrade your Google Analytics configuration so that you can get a more accurate picture of all your marketing investments. I promise you any time spent is a wise investment.

It takes quite a bit of knowledge, and time, to properly setup Google Analytics with every touchpoint, conversion form and social media ad to register and attribute properly within Google Analytics. Frankly, most dealerships just don’t have those resources. Perhaps they have an Internet department filled with Internet managers. But what I see across the industry is that 99% of those positions have pay plans that revolve around sales – not digital marketing. This forces Internet managers to choose between doing the activities that make them money (sales), and those that don’t. In the end, the only attribution source with data that shows if that dealer’s marketing is working or not is Google Analytics and the CRM. Thus dealers end up making poor decisions regarding their marketing tactics and spend.

Therein lies the crux of the problem. Pay-per-click and SEO efforts are certainly vital and can certainly perform well if properly executed. However, accepting everything that Google’s reporting platform tells you as fact is like accepting ANY vendor’s reports as fact.

In the end, Google is simply one of your vendors and, like most vendors, the reporting is configured to benefit them so as to justify your investment in their services.

You would be wise to stop taking Google Analytics reporting purely on face value as a 100% accurate measurement of online marketing results. Google isn’t an independent, third-party. They’re a vendor selling a service just like any other… and their reporting should be viewed with the same micro-inspection that you give any other vendor’s reports.

When talking to dealers about measuring marketing results from their various vendors, I often hear them bemoaning the fact that they have to log into multiple dashboards, I refer to this as “ADD.” Perhaps not the ADD you’re thinking of – here it stands for “Another Damn Dashboard!” What dealer isn’t fed up with too many dashboards making it impossible to focus on the data? Honestly, ADD has grown to epidemic levels in dealerships!

Think about the day in the life of the average dealer and just how many dashboards they are required to log into to see the results of all their marketing campaigns. Anyone would be confused by this lack of data unification. Also, stop and think for a minute about the self–serving nature of vendor dashboards, and why they were created in the first place – to make the vendor look good! The biggest offender being Google Analytics. Dealers are sure as heck not getting an accurate, 360 degree view of their data. These vendors should take a more attribution-friendly approach and make their data more accessible to companies that are trying to pull this data together to help dealers make sense of it all.

Let’s put it into perspective. Remember the days of the desk log? Every time a customer came in, the salesperson wrote down the customer’s name and recorded what the outcome of that visit was – was there a demo; a write-up; a sale? If a sales manager walked away and went to lunch, he could immediately come back and catch up with what was going on in the store. In addition, that desk log gave the manager actionable data that he could then use to identify and handle any problem areas.

Up until now, there hasn’t been a digital marketing “desk log” if you will. All dealers had were multiple vendor dashboards. In some cases they had to rely on e-mailed PDF reports, or wait for a vendor visit to learn if their investment was selling cars. This is a key reason why last-click attribution was adopted by dealers – it was easy to understand and connect dots. The problem is that it does not provide true attribution data.

With today’s technology, multi-touch attribution is the only way for a marketer to really know whether their marketing influences their customers and ultimately leads them into the dealership, resulting in a sale or repair order. However, without a way for dealers to see an integrated, holistic view of how all their marketing is performing and being interacted with, multi-touch attribution is an arduous and time-consuming process.

I reached out to VistaDash President, Dan Moore, for his thoughts on vendor dashboards and the challenges that dealers have faced over the years.

Dan shared the following: “Today, a dealer has several different providers and has to go into each one of these individual dashboards and then try and make sense of the data. If they are lucky, they can decipher the Morse code. If they happen to be an overachiever, they export that data into a master excel spreadsheet and try to get a single view of how all their campaigns are performing. The problem is that, as dealers, they know one thing – and that is how to sell cars. The aspect of digital marketing to many dealers is still foreign. It’s the ‘I don’t know what I don’t know’ dilemma. Even if they tried to figure it out, oftentimes they don’t know what they should be doing or acting upon.”

Dan continued, “An integrated, single dashboard gives them a clear view on what is causing engagement. Generic data like pageviews and impressions don’t mean anything – those seven pageviews could mean their marketing is working, or it could mean their website sucks, because one visitor had to click through seven pages to find what they were looking for. What dealers need to know is if people are engaging with their website in ways that matter – are they clicking on vehicle images on a VDP? Are they filling out trade-in value forms? Credit application forms? And, of course, the bottom line that any dealer wants to know – Is that marketing selling me more cars.”

Before you take on yet “Another Damn Dashboard” - make sure you know the following:

1. What questions are you trying to answer?
2. Does the dashboard provide a holistic view of all your marketing activities? Don’t let perfect get in the way of good. BUT there are some critical pieces that must be included.
3. Does the dashboard include basic attribution or advanced attribution reporting?

Here are some key points that your dashboard should provide on both a basic and advanced level:

Vendors should take a more attribution-friendly approach and make their data more accessible to attribution companies. Then dealers can actually focus on the data and make more informed decisions on budget allocation based on a multi-touch attribution model, rather than relying on data they can’t comprehend. It’s goodbye “Another Damn Dashboard” and hello true actionable data that gets results!

Clarivoy CEO & Founder Steve White discusses the importance of view-through attribution in this short video blog.

The Importance of View-Through Attribution from Clarivoy on Vimeo.

If you utilize paid search, you’re probably paying “Google Tax” without even realizing it.
So what is “Google Tax?”

Four years ago a writer penned a piece on “Google Tax” that explained how businesses are essentially forced to run paid search campaigns on their brand names which, of course, lines Google’s pockets. Since then, with all the changes to the format and display real estate that Google has made, the value of organic listings has declined. This creates a dilemma.

The basic mechanics of paid search revolve around finding and paying for ads that either convert at the lowest cost, or return the highest return on your investment. There are a lot of tricks and tips involved to optimize any paid search campaign. However, pretty much every dealership’s campaign includes a similarity – their own brand name.

In general, any consumer search for a dealership’s name should return a result with the dealership’s website high in organic rankings – most likely the first result on page one. At that point you have two decisions: run paid search ads on your brand name to block competitors from doing conquest ads, or choose not to run brand name keyword campaigns and hope and pray that your competitor is not bidding on your name and fishing for your customers. You become an easy target and most dealers do bid on their competitors.

In the automotive industry, dealers are surrounded by many entities competing to drive that online traffic away from the dealership including their OEM, a competing OEM, competing dealerships, third party lead providers, used car listing sites… the list goes on.  In choosing not to bid on your dealership’s name, you open the door to these competitors running paid search ads that effectively conquest your business. In fact, I know of a dealer who spent a large amount on TV ads but their competition reaped all the benefit as the dealer chose to cease running paid search ads for his brand name. His competitor bid on that dealership’s keywords and had a record sales month. After all the money and energy invested into your dealership it makes no sense to go cheap and not pay for branded keywords.

A long time ago (in a galaxy pretty close by), this was a legitimate choice because paid ads took up significantly less space on the search results page, and more real estate was given to organic results. However, Google has made dramatic changes, little by little, that have effectively reduced the number of organic search results above the fold, while increasing paid search ads – some of which are in prominent places, such as map listings.

“Google Tax” pretty much boils down to the cost of doing business. You never want to open the door for a competitor to hijack valuable search keywords such as your dealership’s name.

So, your choice is to pay the tax or put your head in the sand and not pay for branded keywords and let your competitors merrily steal away your customers. You may save some money on the surface by reducing your paid search ad budget  -- but will that reduction in budget be overshadowed by the sales you may lose to competitors?

If you’re going to play in the paid search sandbox, be ready to pay “Google Tax”. As organic listings continue to get pushed below the fold, and as mobile search results continue to evolve, expect the tax to just keep going up.