Jumpstart Automotive Group

The endless chatter that you’re hearing around the coffeemaker and in your inbox lately isn’t about how to market on social media properties, or the hottest app to download, albeit all hot topics. What’s really brewing and brimming is conversation on metrics. Marketing metrics have taken on a life of their own since our economy plummeted and consumers became much more frugal about their spending, prompting considerable discussion at events, in newsletters and on blogs all over the industry.

The abundance of points of view on metrics and all of the accompanying buzz words – measurement, ROI, analytics, analysis, attribution, engagement, etc. — are ultimately all asking the same question: what’s the right way to measure media? Not just online, but all media.

It’s no longer enough to simply say that X number of households saw your 30 second spot, or that X subscribers received your magazine or newspaper ad. And most importantly, a dozen years into “this Internet thing”, it’s unacceptable to simply report on the number of people that clicked on your ad and performed X number of actions on your website. Yes, at one time — maybe 10 years ago — it was revolutionary to place action tags on your website to track back-end activities and conversions. That’s internet marketing 101 stuff now.

Agencies and marketers now require more validation for every dollar spent, attempting to quantify every ad delivered. This is understandable given the current market climate, however tying success to one proprietary metric or algorithm is short-sighted and debilitates any real analysis of the true campaign performance output that could be available to marketers. Sticking to this tunnel-vision mechanism for measuring media only ensures one thing — that marketers are likely making the wrong decisions about their media programs and placing all value on a narrow set of results.

A much broader conversation would entail talking about measurement mechanisms and strategies for all media, but for the purpose of this article I’ll focus on online media measurement for automotive marketers. So what is the right way for automotive marketers to determine the success of their online media campaigns? If there was one answer to that question this article would be unnecessary. The only definite answer is that it’s more than just tracking direct low funnel activities that happen after the last ad a consumer sees is clicked. Marketers need to get out of their convenient comfort zone, which is solely relying on their own site’s post-ad analysis.

For automotive marketers, at least three key elements can help determine the success of online marketing programs:

1. OEM or dealer site activity, post-click and post-view
2. Attribution analysis of those site activities
3. Third-party automotive site data

Do we need more complexity? No, that’s not what I’m suggesting. How about better answers leading to better media decisions — a.k.a. better ROI.

1. Marketer Site Post-Ad Activity – For OEM or dealer site activity, the box is already checked for most marketers. Auto marketers have been keeping a close eye on things like brochure requests, build-and-price tools, financing requests, test drive scheduling, phone and email leads, and the like for a long time. If you’re not already doing this we’ve got other things to discuss. Many agencies at this point have employed a weighted algorithm based on these results, placing greater value on more important actions and indexing the outcomes. This all makes complete sense and should absolutely continue to be one piece of the metrics puzzle — but not the entire puzzle.
2. Attribution Analysis – If we’re simply going to take the last ad clicked and measure its effectiveness, the story is only about 30 percent complete. A large percentage of the story is the various layers of the onion that contribute to the last ad clicked, and the way that this is determined is through attribution analysis, otherwise known as engagement mapping. What finally drove that consumer to click typically isn’t simply the last display or search engine ad he was exposed to. Other marketing messages contributed to that consumer’s conversion. In fact, the Atlas Institute reports that half of the total ad engagements with consumers who convert occur between 7 and 60 days prior to the actual conversion, and overall the last ad model ignores 93-95 percent of the audience engagements that occur prior to conversion.
   So if marketers are not utilizing attribution analysis tools to evaluate results, it seems we’re stuck with the same age-old question about the effectiveness of marketing — half of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half. Scary to think about that question applying to online marketing, but sometimes the truth hurts more than we’d like to admit.
3. Third-party Auto Site Data — A wealth of information and trends about consumers deep in the funnel shopping for cars exists on third-party research properties, information that can strongly influence the way marketers think about success of their media programs. According to a recent report from Google, 77 percent of new car buyers visit a third-party site as early as 6 months prior to purchase. There’s also a greater volume of consumers using unfiltered third-party research for its buying advice compared to OEM or dealer sites, which tend to be a better resource when consumers have already made a decision on vehicle make or model.
   The information available to marketers from research sites like Jumpstart Automotive Group’s properties, KBB.com, Cars.com and others is abundant and typically available upon request — cross-shopping, share of shopping, lead volume, shopping path analysis, blog/buzz mentions, video views, and more. Many of the trends realized with these mechanisms are heavily influenced not only by advertising on these properties, but by all of the advertising that a marketer has delivered, making the data that much more valuable to auto companies.
   At Jumpstart we’ve seen campaign metrics deemed lackluster based on a marketer’s black box of last ad metrics. And each time we are able to demonstrate the inherent value that exists through the data that we possess. We helped tell Scion a story about its extreme impact on Jumpstart’s users when simply placing a homepage unit across our properties for two weeks — it drove nearly 50 percent more people to Scion make and model pages on Jumpstart sites. And when using conquesting, clicks weren’t the immediate payback for Scion, but Scion cross-shopping against the competitive models it targeted soared during their campaign.
   We’ve revealed to numerous OEMs the dramatic increases in intent and consideration that category or early navigation placements deliver — over 50 percent more pageviews to the brand make and model pages. Without question, there’s a wealth of data available on third-party auto sites that tells a much deeper story about the successes of a campaign — online or otherwise.

These three factors cooperatively drive a greater balance of analysis by focusing on more than just one piece of the puzzle. Post-ad analysis, while important to the mix, is one ingredient, and automotive marketers have placed considerable emphasis on it for far too long. The three measurement means mentioned here don’t represent everything that can be measured (there’s also keyword search trends, blog and buzz indexes, surveys, external factors and the like), but what I deem the most compelling and telling for auto marketers. With the industry pushing the envelope on metrics and measurement and forcing quantifiable results with every dollar spent, more thought should go into the ways marketers deem media properties and mechanisms successful.

As a collective industry, we’ve billed the internet as the most measurable medium available to marketers. It’s time we start showing it.