ATLANTA – PureCars, a leading provider of digital marketing and advertising insights for automotive dealers, today announced it has completed a joint study with Facebook on the impact social marketing tools have on dealers that are more heavily reliant upon digital retailing while cutting advertising expenses. During Q1 of 2020, Facebook and PureCars studied online and offline engagement and sales rates resulting from Facebook’s automotive inventory ads and retargeting campaigns for 16 auto dealers.

A rising number of consumers today utilize digital retailing resources during the research, shop, and transact phases of buying a vehicle.

The purpose of the study was to better understand how today’s digital advertising resources measure and attribute offline sales back to Facebook/Instagram and to show the overall impact advertising on those channels has for automotive retail clients. The study’s observers launched a lift test in January to attempt to show the incremental impact Facebook advertising has on a dealer’s business. Observers tracked both online actions (VDP views and leads) and offline actions (vehicle sales).

“A rising number of consumers today utilize digital retailing resources during the research, shop, and transact phases of buying a vehicle,” said Jeremy Anspach, CEO of PureCars. “At the same time, many automotive retailers have cut their advertising spending but are still looking for ways to connect, engage and convert automotive shoppers. Auto dealers are realizing there is great power and cost efficiencies found in social marketing today that’s even more robust than just a few short years ago, and today’s sophisticated attribution technology makes it more accurate to determine ROI.”

The study showed how Facebook’s Automotive Inventory Ads drove a 23% lift in vehicle sales, at a $136 cost per incremental sale, compared to the traditional dynamic product catalogs ads on Facebook. Based on the analysis conducted during the Q1 study, test dealers also achieved 83% of their Retargeting audience and 11% of their Prospecting audience – significant numbers for the average automotive retailer.

Furthermore, the extremely high lift in dealership web traffic (76.4%) means the campaign was responsible for driving a significant amount of traffic to the dealer’s site, which in turn populated the Retargeting audience. This helped fuel the Retargeting campaign, which subsequently was the engine behind attribution for clearer ROI identification back to the dealer’s advertising expenditure validation.

To learn more about the study, visit: https://read.nxtbook.com/digital_dealer/dealer_magazine/sept_oct_2020_issue/driving_your_dealership.html

To learn more about social marketing and retargeting campaigns visit https://www.purecars.com/solutions/purecars/