Automotive Internet Media

CarClicks

Connected TV Advertising in Automotive

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In early March, when Covid-19 restrictions began locking people in their homes, many dealerships began to either cut or halt all marketing budgets.

Was that the right thing to do?

If you look, used car prices hit a record recently, in what can be described as a surprising development amid a global pandemic and falling new car sales. In June, the Manheim used vehicle price index hit a record, rising about 4% year over year, 7% compared with the May reading, and surging more than 16% compared with the April pandemic-induced low. There are a few reasons for the rise, which were a positive for all retail automotive stocks.

PAG Penske Automotive Group Inc.

GPI Group 1 Automotive Inc.

SAH Sonic Automotive Inc.

LAD Lithia Motors Inc.

AN AutoNation Inc.

 

There are numerous data points that suggest the U.S. auto industry is in the midst of a V-shaped recovery – sales snapping back rapidly after a sharp decline.

New car sales are coming back strongly as well. After dropping from an annualized rate of about 16.8 million units in February to 8.6 million in April, sales hit 12.2 million units in May. Analysis believe annualized sales could top 14 million units in June. That would be a 67% jump from April lows.

So why are some dealerships and dealer groups excelling during the pandemic?

After a slight hesitation by almost all dealerships, which is normal because know one knew what we were facing, some operators made a decision to take advantage of whatever buyers were in the market. As Robin Williams would say, Carpe Diem – Seize the day. That’s right, some dealerships made a conscious decision to win at all costs. Not to cut all their advertising expenses and wait it out, but to realize there would be consumers sitting all day, either on their phone or computer.

They assumed their audience would not be consuming content the same way they always have, and they were right. The standard media patterns were changing dramatically. With extensive work from home policies, this required little driving, which meant less people listening to the radio. All sports were canceled. Movie theaters and box offices closed.

Good operators assessed these shifts and looked to other ways to reach their audience.

One approach to get in front car buyers was to leverage the promise of Connected TV (CTV). It appears COVID-19 has pushed Connected TV to the forefront for many dealerships. CTV advertising spend increased by 35% in Q2 2020.

Dealers learned that advanced targeting tactics can support reinvestment across both linear and CTV to take advantage of increased at-home viewing.

The case for CTV advertising in automotive is compelling, especially when considering 1.8 million subscribers “cut the cord” from traditional pay television services to embrace subscription-based streaming services in Q1 2020, and the pandemic prompted a boost in streaming hours. Audience reach is not the only opportunity that is drawing direct response marketers towards CTV.  The great appeal for dealers is the ability to bring all the beloved aspects of digital marketing to the television channel — especially granular targeting, retargeting, and better measurement. There can be little doubt that CTV is here to stay and will become the norm in households across the United States if it isn’t already.

Yet, while CTV advertising has accelerated in recent months, there are considerable complications for dealerships to overcome.

There are over 200 OTT (over-the-top) streaming providers, and CTV devices range from smart TVs and HDMI sticks to gaming consoles and Blu-ray players. All these platforms complicate creative development, tracking ads, gathering performance metrics, and attributing conversions.

At Automotive Internet Media we realize the marketing environment has become vast and complex. We offer a dynamic video media service.

AIM’s Dynamic Video Media including CTV, OTT, Instream, Outstream and YouTube!

Benefits of AIM’s Dynamic Video Management:

  • Comprehensive platform with CTV, Digital Audio and Programmatic Buying capabilities
  • AIM Strategic Insights (Audience, Competitive trends, Vertical information)
  • We are living in a multi-screen, cross-platform world, AIM Video allows dealerships to follow the viewer regardless of device
  • There is no one-size-fits-all approach to AIM’s Video Management, so we continue to test and learn
  • Placement can be pre, mid or post roll in addition to in-banner, in-feed and interstitial
  • We provide the ability to track view and completion rates giving dealers insight into the level of engagement your content is receiving

There is no doubt that CTV should be tested and will undoubtedly become a permanent fixture of the marketing mix for most dealerships. However, for dealerships that are still lacking getting serious, highly-engaged shoppers to their website, there is an overlooked digital channel that delivers high quality traffic to your website. That channel is CarClicks Inventory Marketing. Click here to learn more about CarClicks products.

Can CarClicks Be the Future of Dealership Advertising?

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AIM’s Tony French argues for a new approach to allocating your marketing budget that ensures getting more visibility on your inventory and more auto shoppers on your website. 

The CarClicks Inventory Marketing platform had a smooth ride in 2019, its best year yet. 

For dealership owners and managers, getting the best marketing platforms and vendors has always been a challenge. Many elect to work with the big players; but find themselves dealing with tighter and tighter guidelines and restrictions. These companies often struggle to achieve results equal to smaller marketing companies with more at stake. 

Competing with the major companies historically meant it was us or them, but now dealers see that diversifying their monthly ad budget can produce better results. With the right visibility, they can determine the best performing campaigns themselves. 

Here’s why CarClicks should be included in every dealership marketing strategy:

Paid traffic should (always) drive auto shoppers to vehicles: Before you launch any digital campaigns, you need to determine what goals you are trying to achieve. If you are paying for advertising to help you sell cars, when the shopper gets to your website, they need to shop your inventory. 

Track your results: When it comes to judging campaign performance, data and KPI’s beat your gut feeling every time. Regardless of the paid campaign, measuring the amount of inventory views, bounce rate, time on site and goal conversion is critical for all paid campaigns. 

Budget allocation & optimization based on results: On a monthly basis you should review the results of every campaign and decide how you want to move forward. If you discover one campaign is performing better than others, you should re-allocate budgets appropriately. Determine the cost per session for each campaign. If one campaign is driving higher quality traffic for less per session, you should increase that campaign’s budget taken from the poorer performing campaigns. 

Eliminate waste: The key to selecting the right media is to choose the sources that drive the highest quality traffic to your website. Paying to reach people that may not be in the market for a vehicle isn’t an effective spend. 

Allocate: A CarClicks campaign creates an integrated and cohesive approach to inventory marketing. We seamlessly promote your inventory to auto shoppers across multiple channels, while factoring in the different devices that auto shoppers are using to shop for your inventory. CarClicks Inventory Marketing Products will drive serious, highly engaged auto shoppers to your website while lowering your overall advertising costs.  

Changing landscape: With budgets under increasing pressure, dealerships must allocate every dollar with precision and purpose. 

Often, however, dealers and managers feel obligated to their OEM or by relationships with vendors. What dealerships need is an analytical, forward-looking approach that allocates marketing dollars to campaigns and products that have the highest performing results rather than those that are being pushed by the manufacturer. 

Differentiate your brand, dealership and most importantly, your inventory by allocating part of your budget to CarClicks Inventory Marketing. 

 

To learn more about how CarClicks can help your dealership, contact us at sales@aimyes.com. 

How to Increase your Dealership’s Online Presence

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Absolutely every dealership has some kind of Internet presence -they can be part of a large automotive group, single point location or independent used car lot – they all want the same thing: to reach the largest number of people while investing the smallest amount of money and getting the largest amount of sales possible.

There’s a very efficient method for achieving all of this while getting all your potential customers to know your dealership and inventory: CarClicks Inventory Marketing.

Unlike traditional advertising, CarClicks advertising is increasingly more accessible for every dealership and enables you to quickly, easily, efficiently and affordably reach serious, highly-engaged auto shoppers. That’s why CarClicks is gaining more ground among those dealerships that want to increase their online presence.

Having a website is fundamental, having a presence on social networks is indispensable and having a marketing strategy is necessary. The reality is that CarClicks Inventory Marketing is also essential and is becoming a more habitual and necessary practice by some of the best automotive operators in the industry.

What’s the biggest benefit to CarClicks Inventory Marketing?

Imagine that you have an attractive dealership on one of the best streets in town, open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is what happens when you invest in CarClicks: you automatically become visible to thousands of people who have been in the market for a vehicle but didn’t even know you existed!

A CarClicks strategy creates an integrated and cohesive approach to inventory marketing. We seamlessly promote your inventory to auto shoppers across multiple channels, while factoring in the different devices that auto shoppers are using to shop for your inventory. It’s all about driving the auto shopper to your website!

CarClicks is very important marketing tactic for both large and small dealerships alike, since with just a few bucks you’ll be able to get better visibility, which will certainly translate into an increase in website traffic and a boost in vehicle sales.

CarClicks Inventory Marketing campaigns are designed and well executed. Our campaigns will dramatically increase brand awareness and drive more auto shoppers to your dealership website.  

Increase your dealership’s online presence by contacting us at Automotive Internet Media at: sales@aimyes.com

The Smartest Ad Spend in Automotive

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Data Driven Targeting has revolutionized the way automotive digital advertising can be delivered. It has enabled dealerships to be precise in how and whom they target, and improve how effectively they manage their ad budget.

 

To reach auto shoppers with marketing in today’s digital climate, dealerships need highly accurate and relevant advertising campaigns. Multiple touch points from different channels usually precede the purchase of a new or used vehicle. In the digital environment, the consumer-purchasing funnel might involve touch points from channels such as paid search (i.e., Google Ads, CarClicks Inventory Marketing, etc.), social media (e.g., Facebook ads) and email campaigns. This makes it important to understand the complex customer journey across marketing channels prior to a vehicle purchase.

 

Consumers are multitasking with different devices which lowers the attention towards each channel and thus complicates the dealership’s abilitiy to get the attention of the shopper to their ad promotion. For example, a shopper may be watching TV and shift attention back and forth between their smartphone and TV. Today, consumers are getting bombarded with ads from different channels on different devices, which can be overwhelming causing them to block their attention to the ads.

 

We at Automotive Internet Media, Inc. saw an opportunity in the automotive industry to build an advertising product that moves from mass advertising to individual-level personalized vehicle ads that breaks through the clutter and grabs the auto shopper’s attention.

 

We have built a product that leverages proprietary algorithms to determine which auto shoppers are most likely ready to buy. We place the code on your website that allows us to create an individual user profile for each shopper that visits the dealership website. Our algorithms are enhanced with machine learning and big data; note that I didn’t say artificial intelligence!

 

Once we determine the individuals to target, we begin delivering ads. Data Driven Targeting drives new sales by serving dynamic personalized inventory ads to attract and inspire each auto shopper. We target those auto shoppers at the right moment in their purchasing process.

 

It is also very important to recognize the auto shoppers across different devices. Over 72% of buyers use at least 2 devices and switch at least 3 times before they purchase. Our cross-device matching technology and a shopper identify graph ensure we deliver an integrated ad experience which helps gain efficiency in ad delivery, costs and results.

 

Media buy is critical for success. Our ads are served on the largest network of premium publishers in the automotive industry. Other networks may have more publishers, but Data Driven Targeting has better ad placement on higher quality websites.

 

Data Driven Targeting will increase auto shopper engagement, efficiency and consumer purchase behavior. Data Driven Targeting is one of the most effective products in automotive marketing by enabling a personalized vehicle offering to every visiting auto shopper.

 

Convert auto shoppers and maximize sales with Data Driven Targeting.

Did Your Dealership Pause Your Ad Campaigns?

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Dealership Must Seize the Marketplace Opportunity

Dealership Must Seize the Marketplace Opportunity

As many dealerships scale back, it’s time for aggressive dealerships to seize the opportunity.

For those of you in retail automotive marketing, you have likely seen ad budgets paused or dramatically reduced. Having been on every side of the automotive industry, these moves don’t surprise me.

For savvy dealerships it’s time to quickly act in order to take advantage of dealers in your market that may not be as visible online in the current state of affairs. It reminds me of one of my favorite sayings in advertising.

“A man who stops advertising to save money, is like a man who stops the clock to save time.”  Henry Ford

I’m painfully aware that when things get tight for dealerships, one of the first things the management is tempted to cut is the advertising. It’s like a survival tactic that kicks in and all they want to do is shore up resources to make it to the other side. I understand, but it’s important not make the mistake of sabotaging your short- and long-term success.

When dealerships advertise, in addition to generating immediate sales, they bolster consumer confidence in the future of their business. Consumer confidence builds market share. Market share leads to profit. Those that continue to advertise in tougher or slower times will actually gain a bigger piece of the pie when business starts back on the upswing…leaving their competitors (who cut way back on their advertising efforts) cleaning up the crumbs at the bottom of the pie tin.

Adjust Your Marketing Strategy

Perhaps the most powerful way to keep generating sales is to rethink your marketing strategy. Maybe it’s time to stop spending on expensive ads and rethink where you’re putting your marketing efforts.

It’s time to move to CarClicks Inventory Marketing to drive high quality traffic to your website while lowering your overall advertising costs. The CarClicks platform is easy to use and an excellent way to promote your inventory to shoppers that are most likely to purchase them. It’s time to reboot and restart the momentum to seize the sales opportunity in your market.

CarClicks Comparative Case Study

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CarClicks 
Challenge

Inventory Marketing 
Comparative Case Study

A Midwest auto dealer needed to increase the number of in-market auto shoppers to their website to help them sell more vehicles.

Their Challenge?

Getting the right shoppers that are interested in their brand and inventory.

Companies

How a Midwest auto dealer compared two inventory marketing companies to drive more traffic to their website to help them sell more vehicles.

 

CarClicks promotes dealership inventory
to auto shoppers that are most likely to purchase them.

A CarClicks strategy creates an integrated and cohesive approach to inventory marketing.
We seamlessly promote dealership inventory to auto shoppers across multiple channels, while factoring in thedifferent devices that auto shoppers are using to shop for your inventory. It’s all about driving the auto shopper to the inventory on the website!

LotLinx Inventory Marketing Platform provides several channels to merchandise inventory at the VIN level.

These channels include third party inventory listings sites, ad placement on key consumer sites, Facebook, SEM and retargeting.

Over the past few years, dealerships have moved a significant part of their advertising budget to digital marketing. It is critical to properly measure the returns on investments spent on digital. Google Analytics offers the dealership the medium to do so.

Google Analytics have features to collect click-stream data and processing and presenting the website data as meaningful information to help dealers and managers make informed decisions.
As most dealerships aim to outperform their competitors, website analytics helps them proactively optimize their ad spend to ensure they are getting the best returns.

This case study is a good way for dealerships to understand the basics of Google Analytics and provide them guidelines to facilitate the informed decision making in using technology to improve the sales and marketing function of their dealership.

Both companies were given the same ad budget for one month
to drive traffic to the website by promoting the dealership inventory within their ad networks. Getting auto shoppers to the website is an important part of any dealership’s marketing strategy.

The goal was to determine which product, CarClicks or LotLinx produced better results.

The results indicate that CarClicks is the best choice.

CarClicks drove twice as many auto shoppers to the site, their shoppers were more engaged, and conversion was more than double. The data made clear that CarClicks is the leader in driving VIN-specific in-market shoppers to the dealership’s websites.

CarClicks Case Study For Proven Results

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Dealer Background

This Midwest Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram dealer was looking for a way to gain online market share to sell more vehicles, so they partnered with CarClicks to turn browsers into customers and increased their monthly sales by 15%.

The ChallengeTHE CHALLENGE

The greatest challenge the dealership faced was breaking through the clutter online in the highly competitive automotive industry.

The dealership’s goal was to reach as many potential auto shoppers in their market as possible. In order to do this, they needed help growing their brand online. The dealership was already leveraging traditional advertising and conventional digital like search engine marketing and third-party automotive sites. They wanted to dramatically increase their visibility online and drive more serious automotive traffic to their website to increase vehicle sales.

The Solution THE SOLUTION

To reach their goals, the dealership partnered with CarClicks Inventory Marketing to promote their new and preowned inventory to in-market auto shoppers and CarClicks Data Driven Targeting to bring back serious, highly engaged auto shoppers who are ready to buy.

Before shoppers take a single step into your showroom, they must find your inventory online!

How It WorksHOW IT WORKS

  • Deliver scalable inventory marketing campaigns to in-market buyers across a network of 3rd party automotive shopping sites and search engines.
  • Highly personalized ads showed vehicles that the shopper was most likely to be interested in, when they were most likely to buy.
  • Advanced bidding technology focuses bids on those who are most likely to convert. Inventory ads seamlessly connected with every auto shopper across devices, apps, and the web.
  • Machine-learning technology worked continuously to improve the campaign’s performance, based on specific goals.
  • Campaigns were continuously optimized to remove ineffective placements and focus on highpotential shoppers based on conversions, not just clicks.

The ResultsTHE RESULTS

The campaigns were able to dramatically drive more high-quality traffic to the dealership website. The dealership was extremely pleased with the cost effectiveness of CarClicks marketing.

CarClicks Case Study Results

ATTRACT The Right Auto Shoppers

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Your Marketing

CarClicks Inventory Marketing

CarClicks Inventory Marketing Helps ATTRACT the Right In-Market Auto Shoppers to Your Dealership!

How you ask? We find the shoppers that are already ATTRACTED to the vehicles on your lot. 

CarClicks has the TOTAL PACKAGE to make in-market shoppers TURN HEADS! Make your dealership stand out by adding CarClicks to your marketing strategy.

Take the CarClicks Challenge and allow your dealership to APPEAL to the right consumers.

Not sure exactly what the CarClicks Challenge is? Reach out to us for a FREE demo on how to increase your online leads ASAP!