Automotive Advertising for Dealerships Using Programmatic Advertising and Layered Data
In today’s world, marketing technology has made advertising for car dealerships increasingly more sophisticated. Car dealerships and programmatic advertising are closely linked, but it can be challenging to understand programmatic advertising and how it works. An important part of understanding why car dealerships and programmatic advertising are a good fit is to learn about how advertisers use layered data to help make advertising more effective for car dealerships.
What Is Programmatic Advertising?
Programmatic advertising refers to a systematic method of purchasing and dynamically serving advertising that leads to a reduced cost and greater ROI for advertisers. Programmatic advertising gives your dealership a more targeted advertising focus than other advertising methods. A programmatic approach gives car dealerships a dynamic advertising campaign that shows the right advertisements to the right people at the right time. In an Adweek article from November 2013, former VP at NBCUniversal, Peter Naylor, calls programmatic advertising the “newer, better mousetrap” of the advertising industry.
Why Does Programmatic Advertising Help Auto Dealerships?
Programmatic advertising and car dealerships are a good fit because of the very specific way that people shop for cars online. In many cases, prospective car buyers use something called “long tail” search terms. These are search terms that are much longer than the common keyword searches that SEO marketers target in their marketing efforts. It is challenging for dealerships to engage these prospects through traditional online marketing methods. This is where programmatic advertising’s layered data approach becomes very important. Using search data and a number of other data inputs enables the intelligent delivery of display ads with the right content.
How Programmatic Advertising Uses Data For Automotive Marketing
The first step for dealers that use programmatic advertising is loading the dealer’s vehicle inventory information into the advertiser’s system. This is done automatically and is constantly updated, since a dealership’s available inventory will change on a daily basis as cars move on and off the lot. From there, web users who are searching for cars in your inventory will be shown your advertisements based on several important data criteria, including:
• Which website the user is browsing
• Historical browsing activity
• Where the user is located
• Vehicles the user has searched for
• Etc.
These are just a few examples of the kind of layered data approach that programmatic advertising takes for car dealerships. Another of the reasons that car dealerships and programmatic advertising are excellent together is because of the unique structure of the industry. When leveraged correctly, this structure facilitates partnerships that can lead to greater profitability across every level of the automotive industry’s distribution model.
How The Automotive Industry Promotes Programmatic Advertising
Often the way we break down the parties involved in the automotive industry is to place them into three tiers: manufacturers, regional dealership groups, and local dealers. Programmatic advertising has seen immense growth already, but according to an article in eMarketer from January, the continued growth of this trend in advertising depends on partnerships between groups in the three tiers. Individual dealers will rely on regional groups and manufacturers to support them with sophisticated advertising networks that account for modern digital marketing principles. Conversely, local dealerships will play an important role in the identification of ideal customers and which kinds of prospects are most likely to buy which vehicles. This concerted effort across the industry will lead to greater access to data that is used in programmatic advertising.
Speed Shift Media’s Role In Auto Advertising
At Speed Shift Media, we are your liaison into the world of programmatic advertising. Our unique experience means that we understand both car dealerships and programmatic advertising and how they work together best. Using market-leading tools and platforms based in the cloud, we help your dealership harness the power of dynamic advertising. We help you understand the process, decide how it will best work for you, and track all the pertinent data, which gives you the result that you are looking for: the ability to sell more cars in your inventory to the specific buyers who want them.
If you have any questions about programmatic advertising or your online marketing activities, please feel free to contact us. We are always happy to provide a free audit of what you are currently doing.
