Client Success: Increasing Auto Ad Views and Engagement for a Local Dealership

Many consumers will purchase at least one vehicle in their lifetime, making auto advertising relevant to the interests of a broad audience. But at any given moment, only a small percentage of consumers are actively considering an automotive purchase—and for local auto dealerships, this group of likely buyers is their top advertising target.

While auto advertisers often embrace TV and other ad inventories that offer broad reach to a large audience, many dealers also recognize the value in being strategic about ad spending and seeking out channels that offer strong advertising ROI. This desire to build a more efficient ad strategy, and to focus its advertising on active auto shoppers, is what convinced a local auto dealership to seek out assistance from Cox Media.

The Goal

When the local auto dealership first contacted Cox Media, its business leaders recognized the potential benefits of cutting out advertising waste. The business was worried it was wasting some of its advertising budget on impressions among consumers who had no intention of buying a vehicle in the near future.

While the business was still committed to awareness-level advertising such as TV and video ads, the company’s top priority was ensuring that its dealership and inventory stood out in the minds of consumers as they considered their next video purpose.

With those goals in mind, the business was most interested in performance metrics that reflected not only overall ad reach, but also ad engagement that confirmed the campaign’s success in reaching consumers with purchase intent.

The Solution

To help the local auto dealer improve its ad targeting capabilities, Cox Media was able to offer our proprietary data solution: Cox Automotive’s Auto and Make Intenders. This unique dataset takes consumer behavior data from the Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book websites and combines it with our proprietary set-top-box data.

The resulting data profiles allow advertisers on our platform to target ads directly to consumers who have been actively searching for vehicles within the past 60 days. With this innovative, cross-channel targeting solution at our disposal, Cox Media was able to empower the auto dealer’s ad strategy with targeting capabilities that would otherwise be impossible to achieve. This included delivering auto ads for specific vehicle types and makes that consumers were searching for, optimizing the delivered video ads for maximum relevance.

This targeted approach was then used to deliver ads to consumers through our TV Everywhere platform.

The Results

After an initial campaign run bolstered by Cox Automotive’s first-party data targeting solution, the client’s TVE campaign delivered strong results that achieved the intended goals of this revamped approach. Those results include the following:

• More than 258,000 Cox Auto data impressions delivered;
• A two percent increased in video completion rate (VCR) for TVE video ads;
• A 94.5 percent overall VCR for all auto ad videos.

By advertising strategically selected vehicle types and makes to individual users, Cox Media helped the auto dealer optimize engagement with vehicle-specific content and the company’s overall branded ad campaigns. This data-driven upgrade resulted in more conversion opportunities for the auto dealer, and a stronger presence in its local market.

Find out how Cox Media’s proprietary data solutions can help you target your own audience of promising prospects—contact us today to learn more.