Dealer.com acts as your dealership’s very own automotive advertising agency, making it possible to influence consumer demand at every stage of today’s digitally-driven shopping process. Integrated ad campaigns use advanced data-targeting capability to reach likely in-market buyers across paid search, display, social and video channels. It’s an advertising solution that is innovative, efficient and effective.
Stop us if this sounds like you:
“Overhead is up 40 percent this year, and now you’re telling me shoppers are going to buy three percent fewer cars in my local market next year? Something’s got to give here if we want to retain gross and have a shot at earning OEM performance award bonuses!”
We hear you. Margin compression is challenging, especially these days. Which is why it’s critical to engage an automotive advertising agency like Dealer.com to develop efficient advertising campaigns – messages that use data gleaned from billions of shopper behaviors in real-time and deliver ads that result in high-quality sales opportunities for your team – to maintain profitability in a challenging market.
Here’s what you must consider about advertising efficiently.
Mobile shoppers are far more likely to ‘click to call you’ from the search ad they see (and/or get directions to visit) if your ads address their individual desires (What’s my payment on a 2018 truck lease? How many are in stock?) especially if shoppers visited your website before. You need to consider how your ad content will adjust to gain interest from the most likely shoppers, both the message they see and level of aggressiveness needed to place it above competitors. For example, are you bidding more to deliver a specific new vehicle ad to the person who visited that car on your website last week? If you’re not, you need to be (The technology is called Retargeting Lists for Search Ads, or RLSA). Make it easy for shoppers, especially high-income, high-spending shoppers, to do business with you. Don’t limit your ad delivery to shoppers browsing Google search engine results pages.
The good news is that dealers using effective marketing practices online receive as much as four times more traffic to their online listings, an increase that drives a 15 percent improvement to their new car turn, according to vAuto, a Cox Automotive brand.
Here are three tips to make sure you run efficient ad campaigns that bring in more high-quality prospects for a lower average cost, using the most compelling content.
Highlight the unique features of your inventory with equally unique messages delivered based on each shopper’s profile. Update your most current deals, then take advantage of intelligent software to match them to the right shoppers at scale.
Match the advertising message (payment/vehicle features/comparable offers) from TV and digital advertising to the message greeting shoppers who visit your digital showroom. Don’t forget to draft off Tier 1 and 2 national/regional event ads. Say one of your manufacturers is aggressively promoting one of its compact SUV offers. Ensure your ads deliver more specific content than the brand-awareness focus, and target net-new shoppers who are still cross-shopping the competition. Once you saturate local search demand, it’s time to use first-party shopper data from cross-shoppers to generate more interest using social networks and audience targeting.
We get pretty obsessed with metrics, sometimes to the point of “analysis paralysis”. VDP views by model, however, is a report worthy of your attention. Having trouble selling a particular vehicle, and yet the VDP traffic volume is unexpectedly high? Check to make sure your price and pictures are sharp, then dedicate a realistic budget to advertising that vehicle so you can goose sales. Do you know which zip codes are generating the most sales of this vehicle? How aggressively are you positioning the specific vehicle in these areas versus spreading your investment evenly across a larger geographic.
Sales may plateau or decrease, but that doesn’t mean you can’t grow your sales and market share using a more efficient digital advertising solution as part of your holistic media and content platforms.
Got an advertising plan for 2018, or need help getting started? Drop us a line or comment below. We’d love to know what’s been working, and what the challenges are, for your dealership.
Joe Mescher is on the Enterprise Media Solutions team at Cox Automotive
Simply put, if you aren’t advertising on Facebook you’re missing out.
Let’s start with some staggering numbers. There are approximately 1.71 billion monthly active users on Facebook1. That’s almost one out of every four people on the planet. Americans, specifically, spend 22 percent of their mobile internet usage time on Facebook. The sheer number of mobile users who visit Facebook on a daily basis is reason enough to advertise on the world’s most popular website.
But adverting on Facebook is far more specific than simply taking advantage of its enormous user base. Because of the intelligence the social network has of its users – from necessary personal data needed to have an account to the information found in the interactions and experiences each person has with the site – Facebook advertising’s targeting capabilities are one of the most sophisticated of any digital ad platforms out there.
That’s why a Facebook advertising strategy combined with an existing diversified advertising plan is key to producing the greatest return on your digital marketing investments.
For inventory or fixed ops promotions, you can use Facebook advertising for remarketing or to target the shoppers that have already showed interest in your inventory by reaching them with your most compelling marketing message.
Lookalike Audiences further expand your reach by using demographic and interest data to identify Facebook users who show significant similarities to your business’s existing shopper audience. Attracting Lookalike Audiences to your website also grows your retargeting audience over time.
While you can use Facebook holistically to promote inventory and fixed operations services, you can also use it to achieve specific goals. For example, you can:
– Showcase your entire inventory. Dynamic Product Ads are the best way for you to promote your inventory on Facebook. The carousel ad unit prominently displays your inventory in users’ News Feed, and links them directly to vehicle details pages on your website.
– Boost specific models. If you have a certain model you’re looking to move, consider using video ads and dynamic vehicle ads to boost visibility and generate demand for that particular vehicle.
– Increase competitive conquest efforts. If your market share within your brand and region is strong, consider using Lookalike Audience targeting capabilities to expand your reach and bring your marketing message to shoppers who have shown similarities to those who have visited your site already and may be shopping competing brands.
– Target fixed operations offers. Many dealerships have great service and parts offers that rival independent shops. To ensure your local community is aware of your most attractive fixed operations offers and incentives, you can promote them using carousel or image ads.
– Craft a custom Facebook strategy. From seasonal sales to custom events at your dealership, Facebook advertising boosts visibility and generates interest.
In early 2017, an automaker partnered with Dealer.com to run a pilot with their dealerships. Their goal was to focus on three core models within their lineup and boost engagement and leads for those vehicles.
In partnership with Dealer.com, the automaker used a Facebook advertising strategy that included remarketing, Lookalike Audiences, video, and dynamic vehicle ads. At the end of the four-month long pilot, dealers who participated reported 11.8 percent more leads, 32 percent more vehicle details page views, and 21 percent more visits than dealers in the same region who didn’t participate2.
As you craft your year-end marketing plan, make sure you’ve allocated additional funds for Facebook advertising. Combined with paid search, retargeting, and other forms of demand-generating display advertising, Facebook advertising can be the added boost you need to reach and exceed your sales goals.
Are you seeing results from advertising on Facebook? Comments, thoughts, tips, and questions all welcome in the comments section below.
Doug Freeman is the Senior Product Manager of Dealer.com Advertising
Sources
1 Brandwatch, 2016, Marketing: 47 Facebook Statistics for 2016, https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/47-facebook-statistics-2016/
2 Dealer.com, 2017, Internal Data
It’s not that Dealer.com Display Advertising was lacking intelligence. It’s just that now Display has grown even smarter.
Let us explain.
In early 2017, we launched nGauge, a Dealer.com Analytics product that examines various shopper engagement behaviors with a Dealer.com Website and assigns a quality score to each website visit. The higher the website visit “score”, the more likely it is to result in a vehicle purchase. This provides dealers with the necessary data to make a more informed sales investment, targeting shoppers more likely to buy a vehicle, and adjusting marketing goals to align with shopping intent.
So far, dealers’ response to nGauge has been very positive. In fact, many dealerships have been asking if this technology is available in any of our other products.
*Cue lightbulb turning on.
In continuing our pursuit to deliver the highest quality (not quantity) shoppers to our clients, we asked ourselves: What would happen if we used nGauge quality score technology to inform the machine learning algorithm that powers Dealer.com Display Advertising?
To make sense of what we discovered, let’s review the inner workings of Dealer.com Display:
Comprising network, remarketing, and audience targeting, Dealer.com Display uses proprietary real-time bidding (RTB) powered by a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning. Simply put, this involves teaching computers to learn in a similar manner as humans do: analyze data, store it, and learn from its successes and failures.
In the advertising world, this translates to consuming information about an impression, examining the outcome, and then realizing either a success or failure. If deemed successful, the algorithm treats the impression (and its unique characteristics) as a positive signal, which is then used to drive performance.
Dealer.com Display, which purchases impressions on behalf of our dealer partners, integrates with numerous advertising exchanges that act as the technology platform responsible for facilitating the “handshake” between advertising buyers and sellers. These ad exchanges are suppliers of inventory, where publishers (websites) generate revenue by permitting impressions (ads) housed in those exchanges on their properties. It’s an enormous digital advertising ecosystem, communicating, transacting, and serving ads in 800 milliseconds, millions of times a day. (For a neat visual representation of the programmatic advertising ecosystem, click here.)
Dealer.com’s real-time bidding receives hundreds of thousands of display advertising requests every second from ad exchanges. The system needs to evaluate each of these requests to determine if it wants to bid at the auction and at what price. For this, Dealer.com machine learning decides what it wants to buy, and at what price, for each live display campaign in our system. Using a proprietary algorithm, each display campaign operates within its own model, and draws from data to assess multiple variables like dealership characteristics, geography, ad placement, and information about the end user, to name a few.
Although each campaign – and automotive advertising agency – has its own unique model, the primary goal of the algorithm is to optimize for clicks back to a website, thus using any impression that resulted in a click as a positive learning experience for the algorithm, no matter what had happened after the click.
In spring 2017, and using nGauge’s quality score framework, we experimented with a change to our machine learning algorithm so that it used only quality clicks (clicks from shoppers more likely to purchase) as positive training examples. We hypothesized that this would train display ad campaigns on the traits of shoppers who are most likely to buy a car, and thus make a stronger case to pay a little bit more for impressions that are likely to lead to a quality visit.
To prove or disprove this hypothesis, we took a handful of campaigns (the experimental group) and had them “train” on the new model. We then compared our results to a different set of campaigns that had not changed (the control group).
This test showed that experimental campaigns had significantly (statistically speaking) higher quality scores than control campaigns.
Overall, we concluded that training our machine learning algorithms on quality clicks resulted in at least a three percent increase in average campaign quality score. The rate at which display advertising campaign clicks resulted in a website visit also increased by 13 percent* (as opposed to immediately bouncing after clicking the ad). This might not seem like a big lift, but when this is applied to all of our display advertising partners, it can result in a significant improvement in ROI and advertising efficiency.
As a result of this experiment, the Dealer.com Advertising engineering teams will officially change our display advertising algorithm to impact all campaigns in Q3 2017.
Analytics are growing ever more sophisticated. As nGauge demonstrates, the industry should no longer consider them an accessory, but instead make them the backbone of every digital marketing effort. Our dealers were first privy to this data in the form of quality website visits. As of this summer, they’ll be able to take advantage of a more effective advertising strategy with Dealer.com Display, which is now using quality traffic signals as a key variable when deciding how to purchase ad impressions.
Display just got a whole lot smarter.
If you have any questions or want any further detail, please feel free to reach out to comment below.
Brent Towne is the senior manager, product management – analytics, and Scott Blodgett is the product manager – advertising at Dealer.com
*There are a few factors at play here, including better avoidance of bidding on bot traffic and accidental clicks, to name a few. For more information on advertising fraud, click here.
Summer and car shopping go together like the Fourth of July and fireworks. It’s practically tradition.
Our data shows that over the past three years, shopper visits to our network of dealer websites between May-August have increased on average 14 percent compared to the months between January-April. In 2014, there was a 36 percent shopper visit increase during those summer months alone.
In other words, people are shopping for cars more in the summer than they are during any other season of the year.
There are a variety of reasons for the bump in interest during the summer: attractive deals from summer holiday sales events that feature model-year crossovers or year-end clearances; and, great weather, which gets people taking time off from work for vacation and leads to more vehicle selling activity, particularly in the used market.
Typically, dealers inspect their advertising budgets and look to increase spend full scale to capitalize on this increased demand,.
But are blanket spend increases really the best summer ad strategy? Maybe not. It all depends on what makes the most sense for your particular dealership. If you’re looking to generate demand, then you might consider a targeted display advertising spend increase. If the demand is already there, it may make more sense to boost paid search budgets to capture in-market shoppers that are further along their path to vehicle purchase.
Let’s take a look at some of the top considerations every dealer should make before increasing advertising budgets this summer.
Stay in close contact with your OEM business centers and representatives to understand what promotional efforts they’ll pursue. Ensure your digital advertising partner is strategically aligned with your OEM as well. A complete mix comprising Tier I messaging and local-level advertising ensures shoppers are receiving consistent information wherever they’re exposed to ads.
Before increasing your budget or making changes to your advertising strategy, take a good look at your cars and trucks. By analyzing inventory count and average time on lot at the model and body style level as well as other key facets of your inventory mix you can identify focus models to incorporate into your advertising strategy.
This allows you to tailor your strategy to spend primarily on your focus models and provides the added boost needed to generate and capture more demand for models you may have a tougher time moving. Partner with an advertising provider who has the ability to assist with your inventory evaluation and can provide additional insight regarding the current demand for inventory in your market area.
Consider past campaign performance. What combination of channels has provided you with the most combined ROI? Are you allocating funds that allow you to reach shoppers at all of the key micro-moments during their automotive purchase journey? Examining what has worked in the past and what opportunities were left on the table can help you create a more informed strategy this summer.
Also, consider partnering with an advertising provider who has access to data beyond your own. Anonymize data and evaluate dealerships and dealer groups with similar characteristics to your own to determine strategies with proven performance.
As both temperatures and automotive search volume rise this summer, make the most of your invested digital advertising funds. While budget increases are typical for this period of the year – increases that are lockstep with greater shopper volume – your digital advertising performance largely depends on how informed your strategy is. Adhere to the three tips listed above, and get ready for a scorcher of a summer.
Jessica Lunau is the advertising & Managed Services product marketing manager at Dealer.com.
Add Bing’s 2017 Channel Partner of the Year North America award to our trophy case.
The award is recognition of our long-standing collaboration with Bing – a relationship we are very proud of, as we are with all of our partnerships with major search engines.
Yes. We know we’re patting ourselves on our backs here. But earning the search engines’ trust isn’t easy, and it isn’t an overnight exercise, of course. It takes years of technical and engineering collaboration as well as sound business strategy and alignment to forge this trust.
Okay, great, you say. Why should these kinds of awards matter to your dealership? Because this kind of recognition is acknowledgement that we’re building the best possible digital marketing products for your dealership.
The partner of the year award specifically recognizes the partnership’s profound impact on both Dealer.com Paid Search performance and Bing Ads’ relevance for auto dealers that are looking to target a specific consumer demographic.
Different types of shoppers use different types of media to help find the vehicles and services they need. Though Google is the most commonly used search engine, many shoppers still turn to others like Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and AOL.
For example, a recent study found that in-market shoppers who use Bing tend to skew older (45+) in age but also have average incomes of over $100,000. Therefore, they’re more likely to shop for higher priced vehicles or potentially, a more comprehensive service package.
It’s close partnerships with search engines that allow your provider to understand the best way to optimize your overall media investment. Make sure you’re partnering with a provider that uses search engine data as well as your inventory’s demand data to help steer marketing strategy.
Close partnerships between digital marketing providers and search engines can result in improved technology. For example, in February 2017, Dealer.com hosted Bing engineers in-house at our Burlington location, teaming up with our engineers to brainstorm new ways to improve and advance our technology.
This shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration solidified business relationships and resulted in technical innovations which now benefit all Dealer.com Advertising clients.
Partnering with a digital marketing provider that has close relationships with all major search engines simply makes sense. It ensures that your media campaigns, driven by technology and informed by strategy, will reach your target audience.
If you want to give your dealership access to the most sophisticated advertising opportunities, tools, and data, be sure to work with a trusted digital provider – one with close relationships with all major search engines – to ensure the best results for your business.
Chris Vessey is the director of digital media solutions at Dealer.com
It’s that time of year again: awards season. There’s speculation everywhere about which entertainers will walk away with the top prize, and for good reason. Awards — or even nominations — have a powerful effect on public perception. It’s a lesson Hollywood knows better than anyone … but one the auto industry still needs to learn.
Third-party awards dramatically influence how consumers perceive the vehicles on your lot. According to recent market research, three out of four consumers said awards from companies like Kelley Blue Book or Consumer Reports strongly or somewhat influence their opinion of a vehicle. The positive press from an award makes consumers confident that your vehicle is a smart purchase — and can convince them to choose your vehicle over the competition.
So if awards can deliver a boost this big, why aren’t more OEMs and dealers shouting theirs from the rooftops? To take advantage of the benefits and differentiation these awards offer, you need to take a tip from Hollywood and put your awards front and center. These four tips will help you leverage your inventory’s award-winning status to drive more value and increase sales.
No matter what your vehicles win, consumers won’t remember you’ve won it unless you remind them. We receive so many advertising messages every day that unless information is repeated, we’re likely to forget it. Conventional marketing wisdom suggests repeating an idea seven times for it to stick, but the exact number is less important than repetition in general.
For consumers to remember and value your awards, you need to promote them repeatedly, and in all the places your consumers are looking. And for the vast majority of consumers, those places are online.
According to Autotrader’s 2016 Car Buyer Journey study, the average consumer spends 59% of their purchase process online, logging about 5.2 hours on third-party sites, 1.4 hours on dealership sites and 45 minutes on OEM sites. While you might keep those proportions in mind as you allocate your coverage, all three types are big parts of the online shopping experience. Your awards should be prominently displayed on all of them.
One of the biggest benefits your dealership gets from awards is a credibility boost. It’s one thing for you to say your vehicle is the best in its class. But when an impartial company says it, that claim holds more weight. However, unless you promote your vehicle awards effectively, you can lose some of that trust.
If you present conflicting messages about your awards across different sites — even if it’s a mistake — consumers will start feeling skeptical about your claims. And if you don’t back everything up with links to third-party sites, you’ll start sending up red flags.
But the reverse is true, too. “Consistently promoting your awards will build consumers’ trust in your messaging, and increases your value proposition,” said Rob Lange, director of industry insights and education at Cox Automotive Media Solutions. “It’s a powerful way to convince consumers that your vehicle’s the one for them.” To preserve your credibility, evaluate your messaging from the consumer’s perspective. Are you using consistent language? Do you back up your claims?
Some companies are working to make consistency easier. For example, Kelley Blue Book Syndicated Editorial Content generates tiles that promote vehicle awards for specific makes, models or VINs. If you’re part of Kelley Blue Book’s Price Advisor Participating Dealer program and your OEM has signed up, Syndicated Editorial Content will generate identical tiles to advertise awards on OEM sites, dealer sites, Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book. Plus, the tiles link to a vehicle awards page on KBB.com, building credibility into your listings.
You’ve probably noticed that once an actor receives an award, their public persona changes. Suddenly they’re not Joe Smith — they’re Oscar-winning Actor Joe Smith. This is another smart marketing lesson dealers can learn from Hollywood. Just like an Oscar boosts an actor’s overall reputation, an award doesn’t just raise the value of the specific vehicle that wins. It raises the value of your entire dealership.
Along with promoting awards on vehicle listings, you should make them part of your overall messaging. There are plenty of ways to do this, from including awards in your email or print advertising to promoting them in your service department. Autotrader even offers a special Dealer Differentiation space on its dealership description pages. There, dealers can highlight all the awards and accolades that make their dealership special.
“By promoting awards in your messaging, both in person and online, you’re not just selling the car,” said Howard Polirer, director of industry relations for Cox Automotive. “You’re also selling your dealership. You’re selling the experience.” Giving your awards the airtime they deserve will prove that besides selling award-winning vehicles, you’re an award-worthy dealership.
Promoting awards online is a big piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the only piece. Consumers perform the bulk of their research online, but the actual purchase still happens in person. And when they get to your dealership, it’s your job to keep your awards top-of-mind.
Feel free to go low-tech at this point. Clings, toppers, hanging tags or stand-up signs are all great ways to emphasize awards within the dealership. They give consumers clear visual reminders of the awards they’ve already seen advertised online. Remember, consistency is key!
Don’t rely on clings or signs to tell the whole story, though — your sales team also has a big role to play. “Awards are a powerful sales tool,” Lange explained. “They give salespeople great talking points, but the credibility of a third-party award also raises consumers’ trust in the salesperson. An award-winning vehicle basically sells itself.” Educate your sales team on your inventory’s awards, and make sure they’re ready to promote them during walk-arounds. Then watch the sales roll in!
Everyone loves a winner, and automotive consumers are no different. So why hide your awards where no one will hear about them? By following these four tips, you can put the spotlight on your award-winning vehicles where it belongs, getting more consumers into high-quality vehicles and earning more profit. How’s that for a win-win?
Howard Polirer is Director of Industry Relations and Rob Lange is Industry Insights and Education Director, both for Cox Automotive. The two automotive retail education veterans have 40+ years of experience between them.
Digital advertising fraud has gained some attention recently, and rightfully so. A 2014 study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and WhiteOps estimated that advertisers were expected to lose $7.2 billion globally in 2016 as a result of fraudulent impressions or bots1.
More recently, WhiteOps (an industry leader combating digital advertising fraud) reports that they have uncovered a new high-tech fraud enterprise called MethBot. WhiteOps states that this highly sophisticated fraud network, originated from Russia and is capable of siphoning up to $3 million per day in video ad revenue from the digital online ad industry. This is considered to be one of the most advanced cyber operations to date as the criminals were able to impersonate a real-life web user, driving up video advertising views (a metric used to calculate cost) on what appeared to be legitimate domains. WhiteOps estimates that more than 6,000 premium domains were targeted and spoofed, enabling the operation to attract millions in real advertising dollars.
It’s clear that fraud is a significant issue impacting digital advertising. Automotive retail is no exception. With that, let’s dive in to better understand how it works and what it means to your digital advertising investments.
Thematically, ad fraud is mostly the same: a user, website or ad impression appearing to be something that it isn’t. A few examples include:
– Spoofing/Laundering: the perpetrator imitates a legitimate website with a fraudulent website (fraudwebsite.com appears to the advertiser as espn.com).
– Hidden ads: ads are rendered in invisible windows on your computer that a human will never see.
– Clickjacking: an invisible layer is placed “on top” of web content. When the user clicks a link to see a basket of cute kittens, he or she is redirected to a different website.
– Fake websites: sites that do not have original content and are a collection of ads. These sites generally do not sell high volumes of ads, which is why they usually go undetected.
Perpetrators have focused on digital advertising because it’s so profitable. As consumers spend more time on mobile devices, advertisers are shifting their spend from traditional media to digital. The environment of buyers and sellers is complex, and this complexity leads to many layers of obfuscation between the publisher (i.e. the entity selling the content) and the buyer (i.e. the agency advertising on a website). Rarely do publishers and buyers deal directly with one another, generally because of scalability and management issues.
In early 2016, Dealer.com registered with the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) to start taking steps to combat advertising fraud. Alongside Google, Facebook, and Yahoo to name a few, Dealer.com was one of the first hundred companies approved for the TAG Registry to support TAG’s mission2. This collection of marquee digital brands provide a framework for digital advertising, and intends to create a protected system of supply chain participants and other advertising technology companies that demonstrate their commitment to higher standards of transparency and disclosure to their partners3.
Take a look: https://tagtoday.net/tagregistry/ (Search for ‘Dealercom’)
Dealer.com is working to stay one step ahead of new fraudulent activity by participating in this unique partnership. Take MethBot for example: we participated in an emergency meeting with TAG and other members of TAG’s Anti-Fraud Working Group to review the situation and identify signals to look for within our platform to gauge severity. Based on this, we were able to identify and block a significant number of dedicated IP addresses associated with MethBot. This partnership with TAG helps us deliver on our commitment to provide cost-efficient and effective ads for our dealer clients while taking steps to limit and prevent display fraud.
As we work toward our official TAG Certification in 2017, here are just a few things we do on a regular basis:
1. We perform reviews of the domains where we are buying ad inventory and blacklist any domains that we identify as participating in fraud or click-bait activities.
2. We interact with TAG’s anti-fraud community where we exchange information on fraudulent domains and the “domain threat list”.
3. We participate in a “data center IP list” with TAG to block fraudulent IP addresses from our system.
Solving the problem of digital advertising fraud is an ongoing cat-and-mouse game. Dealer.com is committed to taking appropriate steps to maintain our standards for quality advertising to help ensure your digital advertising dollars are spent as efficiently as possible.
Eric Mayhew is the Senior Director of Product Management Advertising, Jeremy Irwin is the Senior Product Owner for Display Advertising, and Scott Blodgett is the Product Manager for Display Advertising, all at Dealer.com
You can bet on the Big Game for big viewership. Of the top-10 most watched broadcasts in the United States, all but one are national football championships. (The M*A*S*H* finale was the eighth most-viewed TV broadcast.) Nearly 112 million people tuned in for the Big Game last year, making it the third highest-viewed event in TV history (The 49th football championship, played in 2015, was the most watched at over 115 million viewers).
But if you think 115 million people are tuning in to watch the glory of the game, think again. Whether their teams make it to the championship or not, many people watch the event for its commercials. In fact, one survey found that more millennials tune in to watch the ads than they do to see the actual game.
To reach such a gargantuan consumer audience advertisers – including several auto manufacturers – will pay over $5 million for one 30-second ad spot between the coin toss and the ticker tape. Regardless of which car brands will advertise, it’s the captive, advertising-interested consumer audience that car dealers of any size can get excited about. Since cars will immediately be on the minds of millions after seeing the ads, there’s opportunity to leverage that momentum. Here’s how:
Per AdWeek, several car brands will advertise during the game. Determine if your OEM is one of them and, if so, what its model focus will be. Anticipate the commercial’s viewer engagement by reinforcing interest in that model with your own display ads. Further, capture that interest by using paid search to drive shoppers who might be searching for the car they just saw during game to your showroom. And lastly, consider reinforcing that model with a blog post on your website for shopper research and SEO value, and share it on social media during the game.
If your OEM isn’t advertising during the game, you still have the opportunity to gain a competitive edge. Check out what other competitive OEMs are doing and plan to boost your advertising for models that directly compete with the cars scheduled to be advertised during the event.
For example, when a viewer goes to research the SUV promoted by your competitor, make sure you have strategically placed your own brand’s SUV display ads on in-market automotive research sites to sway shopper interest your way. You could then draft a blog post that compares your model to your competitor’s model and share that on social media around game time.
Consider fixed operations as well. Weathertech, for example, has a spot planned for the game. If your dealership offers Weathertech products or something similar, plan an advertising campaign using the tactics mentioned above for your parts team.
Don’t ruin your great game plan with anything less than optimally-relevant ads. Make sure your messaging is as attractive as possible by linking your vehicles with their best OEM and dealership offers. We’ve historically seen enormous spikes in web traffic across the Dealer.com network immediately following a manufacturer’s ad spot during the game. Take advantage of this opportunity.
If your OEM is advertising during the game, ensure your ads reflect the models they’re advertising and the most attractive and current offers.
If your OEM isn’t advertising, make sure your ads still contain strong calls to action and your best offers, and are ready to display on sites where shoppers might compare inventory.
Imagine this: you’ve been thinking about a new economically-priced SUV for a while but haven’t done any shopping yet. You just saw an ad for the new Honda CR-V while watching the game. You want to know how that CR-V measures up to the competition so you pull out your phone to do a quick search and find a CR-V vs RAV4 comparison on Autotrader.com.
Autotrader reported that 64 percent of car buyers compare different models. These cross-shopping moments are critical opportunities for dealers as they are the greatest chance to influence shoppers while they’re in the “comparison” stage of their car-buying journey.
Shoppers don’t always convert on their first visit to a site. A study by Google showed that one shopper had 69 dealer interactions in the three-month time period she was shopping for a vehicle. Keep shoppers interested by using retargeting ads that integrate with your inventory. Consider retargeting shoppers on Facebook as well.
Don’t forget to retarget based on shopper behavior outside of your site. By engaging audience targeting technology you can effectively retarget shoppers who have been to in-market sites like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book to encourage them to visit your site and your dealership.
There are events throughout each year which present dealerships with increased advertising opportunity. The Big Game is the first of such events. Be poised with an advertising strategy that works to capture car shopper interest generated by OEMs’ game time ads.
Jessica Lunau is the advertising product marketing manager at Dealer.com
