Dispelling the Incentive-Only Advertising Strategy
Two Weeks Off, Two Weeks On
Third party automotive websites offer marketers a very simple advertising solution - Place your message here and speak directly to automotive shoppers and influencers while they’re researching. In-Market advertising eliminates advertising waste because the audience is already defined. There is no need to carve out demographics or psychographics, whether they are 18 or 62 years old, they are seeking automotive information.
Recent industry studies, polls and website surveys show that the length of time from when consumers begin gathering information regarding their next vehicle purchase to the actual purchase has increased from a 3-4 month period to what is now closer to a 5-6 month period. That being said, it’s crucial to be in front of this in-market audience throughout the whole process with messaging that speaks to the various stages of consideration that a consumer is experiencing.
We’ve seen however, that there is still hesitance among many regional dealer associations and individual dealers to even have an online presence for a full month, let alone to have various messaging strategies depending on where the consumer is in the shopping process. Often we are posed with justifying our recommendation of full month campaigns, rather than the two weeks off, two weeks on strategy that is requested by some advertisers. Their strategy is simply following incentive messaging, which sometimes isn’t determined at the beginning of the month, and therefore they only want to run the second half of the month when their incentives are defined.
In the following, we’ll attempt to dispel the theory that an incentive-only advertising strategy is the best approach for regional and dealer advertisers. By taking a look at weekly shopping activity through general site traffic, traffic to various content sections, leads that were submitted and site activity to a sample of regional and dealer websites via site re-targeting, we feel confident that our recommendation of consistent presence on in-market websites is relevant for all tiers of automotive advertisers.
Weekly Visitation to Jumpstart Websites Over Two Months
In Table 1.1 we see that Pageviews remain steady for most weeks ranging anywhere from approximately 25 to 32 million per week, with the exception of M2 / W3 (Month two, Week three) when there was a spike up to 3 million Pageviews, largely driven from enthusiast sites, CarandDriver.com and RoadandTrack.com during the heart of the Chicago Auto Show. Similarly, Unique Users showed little fluctuation outside of M1 / W5 (Month one, Week five) when Yahoo! syndicated an article from CarandDriver.com, causing three times the traffic from the previous week. What we take from this table is that the general audience across our sites shows little fluctuation week to week outside of the occasional enthusiast driven events/articles.
Table 1.1 Weekly Traffic Trends on Jumpstart Sites (Pageviews & Unique Users)
Looking a level deeper into our automotive audience, we see in Table 1.2 that the following site sections or content areas also show consistency for the course of the two months. Similar to the traffic spikes above, we see that the only content area that shows volatility is the enthusiast content. Interestingly, the pricing sections and buyer’s guides show the steadiest volume over the course of the two month period we examined. When shoppers are in-market, they logically spend the majority of their time in those areas to obtain the necessary information to purchase a vehicle.
Table 1.2 Jumpstart Site Section Usage by Week
Lead Activity by Week
Another way to analyze shopping activity on our sites is to observe the amount of leads that were submitted on a weekly basis. This view of what would be considered lower-funnel shopping activity is interesting as we see a one-week-up, one-week-down pattern (in Table 1.3 below) rather than the first half of the month vs. the second half of the month trend that the incentive strategy follows.
Table 1.3 Lead Trends: Weekly Leads Submitted on Jumpstart Sites
In-market consumers are generally going to spend time in the buyer’s guide and pricing sections of the site where they will often submit a lead, either via advertising units or through the site itself. Based on the activity in the site sections from Table 1.2 and the patterns in leads submitted in Table 1.3, it’s fair to say that in-market activities are occurring in consistent volume throughout the entire month.
And When the Consumer is Already on the Dealer Website?
Our last attempt to analyze the weekly trends of automotive shoppers was to look at the volume of site traffic on regional dealer association and individual dealer websites to see if there is actually more activity during the last two weeks of the month when manufacturers and dealers heavy-up on incentive advertising. In Table 1.4 we took three examples of advertisers whose audience originated on their website and followed the traffic over the two month test period. What we found in their traffic mirrored our other data sets in that there were no outstanding results that show us that incentive advertising for the last two weeks of the month is driving more automotive shopping. However, by not being present for half the month, advertisers are creating a missed opportunity to reach potential buyers.
Table 1.4 Site Re-targeting Traffic — Originating on Tier 2 & 3 Sites
It seems that waste could be eliminated in other forms of advertising and invested in providing effective messaging to consumers who are actively researching automotive information and showing intent to make a vehicle purchase in the near future. If an advertiser has the ability to capture in-market shoppers’ attention through display advertising while eliminating the guessing game of what percent of the audience may actually be in-market, why not have a presence there at all times? Instead of always promoting a pricing incentive, why not rotate various messaging strategies over the course of the month? Based on the data above, we feel confident that our recommendation of consistent presence on in-market websites is relevant for all tiers of automotive advertisers.
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