Internet now major force in automotive purchasing process
But forecourt still the most popular place to buy
The internet has fundamentally changed the way consumers make purchasing decisions about cars, altering the role both manufacturers and dealers play in the process, a new study has found.
A third of British car-buyers think the web makes them less dependent on dealers at the pre-sale stage and gives them more control of their purchasing according to digital media company, Specific Media. Half say the internet gives them a wider range of opinion bringing them to the forecourt better-informed having done their own online research, casting dealers in a post-sales role.
Two-thirds of consumers now use the web to research vehicles before purchase with 38% citing the experience as “interesting” and 32% as “enjoyable.” By placing control of information gathering into the hands of car buyers, the internet has become a major force in the purchasing process, with three-quarters of motorists citing the web as an important influence on their decision.
Despite the dominance of the internet in deciding which car to purchase, it has yet to challenge the forecourt when it comes to actual purchase behaviour. The findings show that well over half of consumers still purchase from a main dealer and a fifth buy at other dealers and garages – this compared to just three per cent of cars that are bought through online auctions, sales sites and other web locations.
Read More: Specific Media
Ad Tech’s Behavioral Targeting Shift
Curt Viebranz was the president of Platform-A, the ad network division of AOL, where cost-per-click campaigns often ruled.
But now, Viebranz believes that as last-click analysis falls out of favor, ad tech startups are looking for ways to appeal to the perennial need of brands to maximize ROI, regardless of their specific marketing objectives.
According to Viebranz, who spent 17 years at Time Warner and its predecessor company, Time Inc, this trend is reflected by a slew of rebranding efforts and consolidations in the industry, as many startups are shifting their focus towards attribution services and away from behavioral targeting. This shift, Viebranz, believes, is being driven by some of the newer companies in the space looking to get brands to “kick the click-through habit” by creating better attribution models and better methods of evaluating consumer data.
Besides attribution, these newer companies are promising they’ll be sensitive to privacy issues, a key worry for brands, Viebranz said.
“As an auto client told me two weeks ago, “I want to be sure that if I work with you guys, I’m not going to wake up and find myself on the cover of the Wall Street Journal,’” said Viebranz, now the CEO of Korrelate. “Brands want to bring more dollars online, but they are sensitive to privacy concerns.” Korrelate, formerly Ad Summos, has rebranded to focus on connecting online media usage to offline purchases.
Read More: DigiDayDaily
Major UK Media Companies Renew Deals With Contextual Ad Leader Vibrant
Vibrant, the global leader in premium contextual advertising solutions, announces it has retained five of the UK’s largest premium publisher sites within its impressive portfolio following reviews and pitches over the past three months. Dennis Publishing, AMRA, Northern & Shell, Incisive PTG and IDG have renewed contracts to continue their long-standing exclusive partnerships with Vibrant in the UK. This follows the retention of auto site HonestJohn, in January this year.
Gary Rayneau, Trading Director of Dennis Publishing, says: “Vibrant has been a consistent commercial partner of seven years, and we’re pleased to continue our relationship. They have proven to be experienced and innovative in the contextual advertising area. This means we are offering advertisers and therefore consumers a rich experience that complements our premium editorial.” The agreement brings a further 13 new properties into the partnership and Dennis Publishing is now working with Vibrant across 20 premium sites covering the core Automotive, Technology and Lifestyle verticals.
David Cleave, Digital Manager of AMRA, comments: “Vibrant continues to beat the competition when it comes to the premium nature of their creative and the advertisers that they work with, and this is a key consideration for us in ensuring a positive user experience across our network. We are really proud to have renewed our agreement with Vibrant.” AMRA, backed by parent company Trinity Mirror plc, is a recognised leader in regional media representation for the past 30 years. The deal with Vibrant will include sites across the UK, with key regional publications: The Birmingham Mail; Coventry Telegraph, walesonline.co.uk and Surrey Herald.
Read More: PRNewswire
How Web Ad Attribution is Gamed
Just about every media buyer would agree that above-the-fold ads are more valuable than those at the bottom of the page. But often those ads on the bottom, which are far less likely to be seen by people, are priced higher. This a huge problem created by improper usage of algorithms and misaligned incentives in a broken Web ad attribution system.
The problem stems from the fact that the entity to serve the last ad before a conversion is given full credit for that conversion. That means the last ad on a page, even if it is tiny and not viewable, receives full credit because it is the last one to load. This is a complete waste of advertiser dollars — and a risk to the exciting developments in programmatic ad buying.
The mis-attribution is tantamount to what happened in the bond market, prior to the economic collapse. Towers of B-minus paper were packaged together and rated as AAA by the rating agencies. That house of cards eventually came crashing down, and so might this one if credit is not assigned to real value creation, rather than to faulty attribution tricks.
Read More: DIGIDAY
Cox Merges Adify With Digital Sales Arm
Aiming to reduce redundancy and offer more integrated online ad services, Cox Media Group said Tuesday it will merge its Cox Cross Media and Adify units to form Cox Digital Solutions. The new company will be led by Cox Cross Media head Steve Shaw and promises to facilitate online buys across Cox Media properties and third-party niche content networks.
Adify, which helps publishers build vertical networks and serves ads across the 180 networks it powers, was acquired by parent Cox Enterprises in 2008 for $300 million. The move has helped Cox expand its online ad operations and create vertical networks around its own properties, which include newspapers and radio and TV stations as well as related Web sites.
In 2009, for instance, Cox used Adify to build an auto-related ad network around its AutoTrader.com brand. Now the company will tie the Adify platform more tightly into its own digital ad operations to offer agencies and advertisers more efficient placement across its 1,300 local media sites in 145 markets as well as national reach through the more than 7,000 specialty publishers it works with. That adds up to traffic of about 135 million unique visitors a month, according to Cox.
Read More: MediaPost
New Year, New Attribution Model
A few years ago, marketers discovered that most of the conversions happened without an associated click in display advertising. Then, a little while later, view-based conversions were added to the performance metric. While it was a small step forward, the obvious question is: if the last click is not always indicative of the user’s decision to convert, why would the last view be any better? In short, it’s not.
In an earlier ClickZ column, I discussed the importance of going beyond the last click or last ad impression and described why an incorrect attribution model will lead to suboptimal results. Well, a new year calls for a new model – multi-touch attribution where all interactions within an association window are considered to have influences over a user’s conversion.
The power of digital advertising offers more than just targeting with higher precision; it also provides instantaneous feedback on how ads perform. With consumers exposed to increasingly more ad impressions and interactions of different media types, it’s become harder than it should be to explain how each event along the path to conversion affects the user’s decision. In the analytics sense, the current flawed last-touch attribution model suffers from the lack of a probability framework. Since the last touch (click or view) is defined by the conversion event, it’s difficult to calculate the probability. Therefore, it’s nearly impossible to measure the true influence of the last touch.
Read More: ClickZ
