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With reduced inventory and increased demand for new and used cars, competition between dealerships is fierce. And with the average age of vehicles on the road pushing 12 years, automotive service and repair businesses have similar challenges and opportunities to capture the market.
It’s critical that you use every tool available to optimize your digital advertising to drive more high-quality leads to your dealerships and service locations to improve your customer acquisition rates and improve marketing efficiency. A large percentage of business comes through phone calls in the auto industry.
Over 60% of car buyers will call a dealership following an online search, and 66% of calls generated by search engines come from paid search. Phone leads typically convert faster and spend more than web leads, but many automotive sales and repair businesses can't properly track phone leads across the marketing funnel. One of the main challenges remains setting up proper attribution for those customer calls to get that full marketing visibility and proper attribution for every customer across the funnel. Without having the marketing intelligence data it becomes really difficult to interpret the rest of the marketing funnel and see which campaigns are working and what should be optimized.
Let's dive deeper into the attribution challenge and explain what it means.
The average consumer starts their research online, but most will call to schedule test drives and service appointments, creating a data gap between the online and offline journey. This is because the dealer or service center can't attribute a call or a physical appointment with all the previous touchpoints such as paid search, a brand awareness campaign, or an email campaign. Without call attribution data, the business is unable to tell which campaigns contributed to each phone call and what should be optimized to get even better results.
Adding conversation intelligence to your marketing tech stack can get you this attribution. Here's how it works in four simple steps:
Let's break down each step and streamline the process for you.
Most marketers know how to track a customer's online journey. The challenge is tracking customers when they make a call. A phone call creates a data gap and many companies are unable to correctly match the caller data with their customer journey data. Invoca conversation intelligence makes it easy to bridge that gap by using a process called DNI or Dynamic Number Insertion which replaces phone numbers displayed online with a number that's unique for each customer. The unique phone numbers are what enable you to get granular attribution data, down to the search keyword level. You can learn more about getting full marketing attribution with conversation intelligence here.
Invoca conversation intelligence records a variety of data including customer journey data, first-party data, and third-party demographic data that is all combined together along with the call data to create an accurate customer profile on each caller. Call data could include the outcome of the call, call duration, click IDs and keywords that drove the call, and campaign data, and more. This combination of data from multiple sources creates the closed-loop attribution that many automotive companies need to optimize marketing to drive more leads and reduce acquisition costs.
There is a lot of conversational data that can be derived from customer calls. For example, was it a customer support or a sales call? Was it a current customer or a new lead calling? And did the conversation happen or not? That is critical information that can't be easily tracked and pushed into the rest of the marketing tech stack using conversation intelligence. It can predict different things about each caller like whether it was a sales call or a customer service call and your team can use that to optimize your campaigns and better predict user behavior to increase your ROI.
Invoca's AI software captures a variety of information — including call outcomes and topics discussed during the call — and pushed that out to the rest of your martech stack. Use the data to fuel your retargeting campaigns, programmatic advertising, analytics tools, email marketing, SMS flows, and more.
When all the call data goes into a black hole there is no way to optimize advertising campaigns and adjust bids. There's just no data to base decisions on. With Invoca and AI-powered call tracking, automotive businesses are able to integrate their call data with ad platforms like Google Ads and adjust keyword bidding in real time. With Invoca, customers have seen a 150% reduction in CPA by using phone conversion data to optimize search ads.
After pulling back in 2020, automotive digital ad spending grew over 20% in 2021 and is projected to reach $19 billion by 2023. The increase in ad spend will make it even harder for dealerships to stand out and and increase their conversion rates. Automotive businesses use call tracking software and integrating that data into their Google Ads campaigns means businesses could now better allocate ad budgets and improve the efficiency of their ad campaigns.
The challenge with phone conversations is that they create a gap between the digital data and the 1st-party data companies get from each call. This gap makes retargeting campaigns very inefficient, with companies showing the wrong advertisements to customers, at the wrong point in the customer journey. This annoys customers and wastes marketing dollars.
With Invoca's AI software the marketing team is able to retarget callers with the right messaging using the right channels. The software lets the team predict and classify the call type (sales call, service call), combine it with digital journey data (UTM, keyword, GCLID), and then feed that into Google's automated bidding algorithm to supercharge retargeting campaigns based on what happens on the phone call.
Our Signal Discovery technology uses a type of AI called "unsupervised learning" which groups conversations into distinct topics and then creates data clusters based on similarities in speech patterns. The marketing team is then able to use these insights to create signals that make retargeting campaigns even more effective.
Personalization is more important than ever with over 66% of customers expecting companies to understand their needs and expectations. Since 74% of customers use multiple channels to start and complete a transaction, automotive businesses need to make sure they are personalizing the interaction with each individual caller.
For example, if the caller mentioned they were interested in purchasing a Toyota Camry, then all of their ads need to be showing that same vehicle to match their interests. If a customer mentioned specific pain points like having comprehensive insurance or having service locations in the area that's something that should be reflected in the ad copy and the type of messages they receive after the call.
“The car buyer journey is different for everyone — some people want safety features and others want performance. Invoca has helped us tap into phone conversations so we can understand each buyer’s unique needs,” said Marc Cannon, Executive Vice President, and Chief Customer Experience Officer at AutoNation. “As a result, we can deliver a truly peerless car buying experience.”
It's not enough to serve generic ads anymore. The market has become way more competitive and it's even more critical in our day and age with the decreased cookie tracking and limited availability of 3rd-party data. Companies need to be smart about retargeting and personalizing every subsequent customer touchpoint in order to ensure a smooth transition from each phone call to other digital channels.
In today's hyper-competitive market, every lead and every dollar spent on your ad campaigns counts more than ever. Businesses need to use conversation intelligence to collect conversion data to automate and inform their digital advertising campaigns. With Invoca AI-powered conversation intelligence, businesses are able to dramatically increase efficiency, decrease their CPL and CAC, improve the customer experience throughout the buyer journey, and continue to outperform the competition.
Want to see how Invoca can help you drive and convert more phone leads from your digital ads? Request your personalized demo.
