By Brian Kroll, VP Sales & Strategic Accounts, Adtaxi

Digital marketing has grown immensely from its early days, revolutionizing the automotive industry and transforming dealers’ relationships to their customers. Still, despite these many changes, one question has remained the same – how do you prove that your marketing efforts are leading to increased sales?

The truth is that attribution isn’t one size fits all. It is a complex formula with many variables depending on your industry, audience, strategy, and goals.

When it comes to automotive dealers, it’s particularly important to understand what strategies influenced a sale and what can be optimized to improve results.

Foundations: Set Up for Success

Meaningful attribution relies on solid foundation work. First, define your audience. Begin by asking yourself the three big questions: who do you want to reach, what do you want to tell them, and what do you want them to do? The answers to these questions form the baseline of effective campaign targeting – not only helping to optimize your campaign for your specific goals and budget, but also enabling you to gauge and fine-tune attribution.

Second, understand which marketing methods your dealership is utilizing, and consider the differences in how users interact with each one along their path to purchase.

Third, decide what success means for you. A vehicle sale is the ultimate goal, but there are “micro-conversions” along the way that may also be useful – Site Visits, Search Results Page Visits, Vehicle Display Page views, and Hours and Directions page views are all good candidates here.

Choose your Attribution Model

An attribution model will organize your campaign data into a clear path to the sale, giving appropriate credit to various touchpoints along the way. The question is, which attribution model best fits your needs?

There are five main models to choose from: last interaction, first interaction, linear attribution, position-based, and time decay. Each model awards different amounts of credit based on where the touchpoint lies along the path to purchase, and the best choice will depend on your goals.

Vehicle purchases are a longer buying cycle that features over 24 touchpoints before purchase, with the majority of those touchpoints occurring on digital platforms. Due to the longer and more complex path to purchase seen with automotive purchases, dealers will likely find success in linear or position-based models. A linear model is a straightforward way to award equal credit for all touchpoints by crediting each one equally from beginning to end. Position-based models are similar, but grant extra credit to specific touchpoints along the purchase path that you may decide are the most important – such as the first interaction and the one that immediately precedes the sale.

Prove the Value of Top of Funnel Campaigns

Digital marketers know the value of branding, but quantifying that value can be challenging. Effectively evaluating the effectiveness of awareness and branding campaigns requires three key considerations; valuing clicks and impressions, accounting in reporting differences across various platforms, and patience.

First, make sure that your analysis is yes, accounting for clicks, but not ignoring valuable data on impressions. Not all digital advertising is meant to generate a direct click on an advertisement. Many platforms allow for tracking when impressions are shown to a customer and produce a buying action later on after viewing that impression. Tracking and analyzing both, along with how impressions and clicks interact, is paramount.

Second, understand the differences in how each digital platform treats attribution. For example, Google has a maximum 90-day window and a solely last interaction attribution model, whereas Facebook has a maximum 28-day window and allows for either last click or impression-based attribution. If your buying cycle length does not easily match platforms’ reporting parameters, you may not be getting the full story on your top of funnel efforts. Working to reconcile the multiple marketing platforms that your dealership uses and accounting for the quirks of each can be daunting but essential.

Lastly, wait it out. Gather a full purchase cycle’s worth of data, plus an analysis of impressions and not just clicks, and you have everything you need to piece together a clear picture of how your upper funnel efforts are impacting the funnel further down.

Optimize your Budget Based on Attribution

Once collected, the data on the touchpoints along your customer’s path to purchase can also help further optimize your campaign and budget. With numerous touch points playing key roles in an auto shopper’s journey, be patient, and value the assist from each step. As your campaign progresses, continue to make incremental tweaks to your budget allocation, targeting, and tactics, then assess the effect on the overall campaign. Remember, small corrections are critical. You don’t want to over-correct and drive your marketing off the road.

In closing, the path to marketing attribution is a complex one, but it need not be out of reach. The most potent weapon in your arsenal will be the patience to craft a robust and data-driven campaign upfront, to implement a tailored attribution model, and to read your results with accuracy and adaptability.

Following these steps, not only will you have the resources you need to prove your efforts, but you will gain the ability to continuously improve your campaigns, steadily increasing their effectiveness over time.