By Kayla Hammersmith, Senior Content Marketing Manager, DialogTech

The U.S. reached $15.91 billion in automotive digital ad spend in 2019, a 15.8 percent increase from 2018. The forecast looks steady for 2020; eMarketer projects U.S. automotive digital ad spend will reach $18.15 billion (a 14.1 percent increase from 2019).

With increased online ad spend comes more competition for clicks and conversions. And many of those leads are generated offline – via the phone. Phone calls to dealerships, BDCs, and call centers are important drivers of sales and service revenue. Most consumers start their purchase journey online but will contact the retailer offline, calling in with questions or to schedule test drives/showroom visits or book service appointments.

But not every call that comes in is a valuable lead, and dealerships often spend just as much for the bad calls as the good ones. That’s why, to accurately measure results and make the right decisions to improve performance, you must understand how ad spend drives not just calls but leads that convert to sales and service appointments and revenue.

By leveraging conversation intelligence and tapping into insights from these inbound calls, you can optimize ad spend and messaging to drive more valuable calls and ultimately boost revenue.

Determine What Types of Calls You Want to Generate from Paid Media
Incorporating call analytics data into your digital marketing strategy is wise, but classifying all calls as conversions is not. It gives you an inaccurate picture of the value of the calls you’re paying to generate and will lead you to make optimization decisions that can hurt your ROI.

You should decide what types of calls you want to drive from each digital ad channel, campaign, ad group, and even search keyword. It’s a no-brainer to exclude certain calls from being considered conversions, such as hang-ups, solicitations, job seekers, and customers calling about existing appointments. But you should also decide if you want to count all phone leads as conversions or only those that booked appointments.

Start by determining the goals from each source of ad spend. Common goals include awareness for the dealership and its products and promotions, capturing leads for the service department, and encouraging customers to schedule a visit or test drive.

How Conversation Intelligence Data Empowers Auto Marketers
A simple call tracking tool isn’t enough for auto marketers anymore. Conversation intelligence is what empowers marketers to understand what’s happening on these calls and how they impact revenue. A conversation intelligence platform can tell you the following.

• If the call was answered
• The channel, campaign, ad group, keyword, and webpage that drove the call
• The caller’s name
• The geographic location they called from
• If they’re a new or repeat caller
• The duration of the call
• If it was a sales or appointment opportunity
• What vehicle model or services the caller expressed interest in
• The caller’s lead score based on the conversation
• If the caller is looking to make a purchase soon
• If the call resulted in an appointment
• If a CX issue occurred on the call

This conversation intelligence data is then pushed into marketing tools like Google Ads, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Adobe. You can then use this data to optimize your marketing to drive more of the right type of calls.

For example, you can use KPIs from these offline call conversions to optimize Google Ads Smart Bidding. Because over 70 percent of advertisers are leveraging Smart Bidding to automate bidding and drive leads, accurate conversation intelligence data can make an auto marketer’s paid search strategy even more powerful.

If you’re not pushing conversation intelligence data into Google Ads, you’re either optimizing without any data on calls or you’re counting every call (including bad ones) as conversions. Either way, you will struggle to make the best decisions to optimize your return on ad spend.  

When pushing conversation intelligence to Google Ads, you can use lead quality and call outcomes to inform Smart Bidding. For instance, if you only care about scheduled appointments as conversions, the conversation intelligence platform integrates this appointment data into a specific column in Google Ads. Then, Google doesn’t waste spend on bad calls — it allocates spend to maximize more of the right kind of calls.

Calls Are Key to Driving Valuable Leads
As auto ad spend grows but sales growth slows in 2020, a data-driven marketing strategy that leverages insights from calls is key to success. The phone is regularly used as a communication channel with consumers, but underused as a source of data to optimize ad spend and classify conversions.

Whether auto marketers decide to classify them as conversions or if they just focus on leveraging insights from these conversations, converting these callers will help drive auto sales, revenue, and marketing ROI.

About the Author

Kayla Hammersmith is the senior content marketing manager at DialogTech, the world leader in conversation intelligence for marketers. After working at a Chicago digital marketing agency for four years, Kayla brings her data-driven content expertise to the DialogTech team.