Category: Article

Marketing in a Cookie-less Future

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Automotive internet marketing is changing. Third-party cookies—data used to display personalized ads and track internet users between websites—are going away for good. Advertisers will no longer be able to track and target shoppers the way they always have. They will have to rely on their own first-party data to deliver the personalized shopping experiences customers expect. So, what does that mean for your dealership?  

Data and Marketing Basics  

The more you know about your customers, the better you can serve them. If you know that a particular customer keeps looking at a particular vehicle online, you can take action to advertise specific makes and models to that customer. You may also be able to identify that customer’s current vehicle, price range for a new vehicle, propensity to buy, and more. All this data makes automotive digital marketing more effective. But as third-party cookies go away, you’ll know less about your customers, and your advertising has the potential to be less personalized and less effective.  

The Importance of First-Party Data 

If your dealership doesn’t have a way to track consumers outside of third-party cookies, your advertising audience is about to get smaller. Dealerships that have access to first-party data have a better chance of coming out on top in this new landscape. But what is first-party data exactly? First-party data—data that you have the right to collect and access—includes the following:  

  • – Data stored under your website
  • – Data stored in your CRM  
  • – Data stored in your DMS  
  • – Tier one data, including some OEM data  

Your Dealership’s Auto Advertising Plan  

Your dealership can approach auto advertising and take advantage of first-party data in one of three ways. You can: 1) manually provide advertisers with your first-party data, 2) purchase first-party data to create audiences, or 3) partner with an advertising provider that already has access to large amounts of first-party data.  

  • Manually Provide Data: This approach involves providing transaction records from your DMS, for example, to your automotive advertising agency to create specific audiences. You may also be able to provide this data to cable television companies to show ads tailored to your audience. 
  • Purchase First-Party Data: The approach involves purchasing consumer data from companies that aggregate different pools of first-party data so dealerships can target and personalize auto advertising.  
  • Partner with an Advertiser with Access to First-Party Data: If an advertiser is already part of an ecosystem of companies that collect data about consumers, your dealership automatically has access to more first-party data and can advertise more effectively to a wider audience. 

Advertising with Dealer.com   

When your dealership advertises with Dealer.com, you get access to exclusive first-party Cox Automotive data throughout the entire buyer’s journey. That includes first-party signals from three out of every four car shoppers. That is the biggest basket of first-party data available to dealerships today. This data allows you to track customers and households based on their browsing data from Kelley Blue Book, Autotrader, and Dealer.com websites to create targetable profiles that make your dealership’s advertising more effective. 

As third-party cookies go away, it’s time to meet with your advertising team to reevaluate your advertising approach. Whether leveraging your DMS and CRM data, purchasing data, or partnering with Dealer.com to leverage the largest pool of first-party data in the industry, create an action plan now that can help you personalize your customers’ experience and keep them coming to your dealership. 

To learn more about the importance of first-party data and how your dealership can gain an advertising advantage in the coming months, watch our detailed video all about marketing in the cookie-less future. 

You Say You Want A Revolution…

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You-Say-You-Want-a-Revolution-Blog_Bob-George

By: Bob George, AVP of Products at Dealer.com

If dealers have learned anything over the last few years, it’s to stay on their toes. Whether they have leaned into digital retailing or overhauled their consumer privacy protocols, dealerships have seen more innovation in the last two years than many have seen in their whole careers.  The marketing game has also fundamentally changed. It’s no longer about being everywhere all the time. With the right data, dealers can market more efficiently and reach the right consumer, with the right message, at just the right time.

An industry-wide movement is taking place and dealerships who resist or don’t get onboard risk seeing their lots get left in the dust. The million-dollar question is: How do dealers embrace this revolution and make the RIGHT marketing changes to support the current landscape and set them up for success in the future? 

Get Personal 

As consumer behavior changes and digital competition continues to increase, dealerships must figure out how to cut through the noise and get personal with consumers. That starts with figuring out how to make your best offerings discoverable. But it’s not enough to focus on new customers; you also need to tie these acquisition efforts to retention, which drives long-term, sustainable growth. 

Remember, a seamless experience isn’t just cross-channel marketing, it’s about moving customers along the buyer journey with traditional marketing tactics, while instilling a long-term sense of loyalty and value. Find the balance between what the consumer wants to get out of any given interaction with your brand and what your business needs to get out of it, then make sure to keep the barrier to entry for consumers as low as possible. 

Data is Gold 

Dealers decrease the leads they generate by 164% if they fail to use a data-driven, multichannel strategy. However, marketers need to do more than just gather data—the data needs to be meaningful to improve marketing campaigns. 

To future proof your marketing, intent data is key. Intent data is information specifically about a person or company’s activities. It can be gathered from a company website by looking at which pages a customer visited, how long they stayed on those pages, and which links they clicked or procured from a third party. Intent data can be used to prioritize the best customer prospects and create more personalized campaigns to drive better conversion.  

A version of this article originally appeared on DrivingSales. 

4 Data Informed SRP Best Practices

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Your website’s search results page (SRP) is your digital lot. It’s where shoppers narrow down results to find their perfect car. Think of it as a self-guided tour—a place where customers can do research, look at cars, and form opinions about potential purchases.  

If your shoppers have a good experience on your SRP, it can be the key to your customers progressing down the path to purchase. Here are a few data-informed ways you can optimize your SRP to ensure a positive experience for each website visitor.  

1. Feature Custom Photos Prominently  

Make sure that your SRP includes custom vehicle photos and that they appear prominently on the page. That doesn’t mean photos have to take up the entire screen. Just make sure that they stand out and appear larger than a little thumbnail—that’s especially important on mobile.  

Also, the impact of recent photos of the actual vehicle you’re selling cannot be overstated. When customers visit websites with more than 65% of inventory using actual photos, they stay about 5% longer, view approximately 20% more VDPs, and see approximately 5% more VLP/SRPs. * Plus, new vehicles with actual photos were 30% more likely to receive at least one lead in a seven-day period and used and certified vehicles were 40% more likely.   

2. Cut Down the Calls to Action  

You want your SRP to be simple and easy to use. Crowding it with multiple calls to action distracts from the purpose of the SRP: to conveniently filter cars as part of the research process. Competing calls to action add unnecessary clutter and confuse the customer.  

If you think of the SRP as a self-guided tour, excessive calls to action can feel like an aggressive, overbearing salesperson constantly interrupting the customer, pressuring them to take the next step. Commit to keeping calls to action to one or two per SRP.  

3. Simplify Pricing 

Customers like to see pricing on the SRP, but too many pricing details can feel like information overload when they are browsing. Detailed disclosures of discounts and incentives are especially problematic on mobile devices, where even a small amount of information can feel cluttered and unprofessional.  

Instead, show the customer the vehicle MSRP, the total discount (including incentives and other discounts, but not including conditional offers), and the final price. This strikes a nice balance between full disclosure and optimal user experience.   

4. Use Free-Text Search Together with AutoComplete 

Many SRP visitors gravitate towards free-text search for simple filtering. Making sure this feature includes autocomplete suggestions can speed up the search process, avoid typos, and guide the user to the right vehicle filters. As long as your facets (drop downs) are organized correctly, free-text search adds to the overall user experience.  

With the right user experience, your SRP can give your customers a self-guided shopping experience and a dealership-directed focus on displaying the right information at the right stage in the shopping journey. Start implementing these changes to beef up your user experience and increase your car buyer leads.  

* Dealer.com’s New Search Results Page: Performance Analysis, Dec. 2020 

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