Driven Data - Blog
by: Jon Berna

On 8/18, Google announced sweeping changes to the rules for ad targeting, affecting the way nearly every car dealership's advertising is placed in Google ad platform.  Zip Code level targeting will no longer work on 10/19.

This changes everything...

I am so proud to announce that we are blazing the trail into the next phase of marketing intelligence and data analysis, through recent updates to our Driven Data platform.

Driven Data connects inventory, operational metrics, incentive data and customer data into one marketing platform.  Providing marketing that is connected, optimized and personalized.

Our platform was built to first understand the data that led to your dealership's performance, second to leverage it in marketing.  Every other marketing product's reporting platform was designed to justify it’s own performance.  We built ours first, to inform our approach and the strategic recommendations we bring your team.

At Driven Data we engineer your marketing.  The heart of our approach is connecting all of your customer data to your campaigns.  This industry first capability allows us to personalize the experience both new and previous customers have with your marketing. 

Customers today expect relevant advertising and dealerships have struggled to refine their messaging to match where the customer is in their unique purchase journey in modern marketing mediums like search and social.

At Driven Data, we don’t use the term “team” lightly. We pride ourselves on supporting not only the many dealerships we serve, but one another. Helping each other get better and holding one another up when approaching complex data problems has been a cornerstone of our journey to the forefront of the industry. Everything we accomplish is done together, as a team.

One of the most challenging aspects of marketing is establishing a budget for each channel.  Spend too little and you concede territory to the competition, spend too much and you waste resources that won’t lead to incrementally increasing sales.  The path most dealers have taken to understand this is to select an initial budget and tune accordingly each month thereafter.

Introducing First Party Audiences for Auto Dealerships

It’s always cheaper to keep a customer you already have than to acquire a new one, but that hasn’t always been true in the automotive industry. While today’s dealerships invest heavily in digital marketing to move their inventory, existing customers represent a shockingly small share of monthly revenue. And it’s no mystery why. The tactics for engaging known customers have been costly and widely ineffective—until now.

Auto dealer digital marketing its own game with its own set of rules. Many eCommerce businesses selling commodities at a low cost can often manage their paid digital marketing initiatives and eventually find a magical convergence of spend and creative to get the ROI they’re after. But for dealerships, who have an endless source of competition selling similar or identical vehicles at a high cost, it’s not so easy—but that hasn’t stopped innovators in the industry from developing new tools and tactics to help auto dealers manage costs and target the right customers online.

Data analytics isn’t a recent innovation. What is different today is the amount of data at hand. Operational reports and market summaries in the eighties and nineties were valuable, but it wasn’t real-time. Ultimately, it was clunky and only a few data points were available. Today, we can gather and store significantly more information, opening new doors in marketing that were previously unavailable. But not every corner of commerce is using their data, their most valuable asset, to their advantage.