CHICAGO -

Dealerships may want to look into where they are putting their dollars while investing in digital media, according to online auto shopping behavior research company Dataium LLC.

In a study commissioned by Cars.com, Dataium apparently found “inefficiencies” between dealerships’ digital marketing mix and the quantity and quality of traffic to their websites.
 
Further explaining the study — conducted between January and June, measured the activity of more than 20 million automotive shoppers per month on Dataium’s network — Jason Ezell, president of Dataium, said,  “Dealers’ websites are one of the primary ways they connect with potential customers, and when they see the bulk of traffic to their sites coming from search engines, it makes sense that they would drive more of their marketing dollars into paid search.

 “Because our study was able to look beyond direct referral traffic, however, we found that the majority of search engine traffic comes as a result of a consumer typing a variation of the dealership name into the search field.  In other words, consumers are forming impressions earlier in the process, likely via other forms of media – search engines are often the taxi taking them to the place they’ve already decided they want to go,” he continued.

In all, the study focused on evaluating the direct and indirect value of the two primary dealer advertising investments, paid search engine marketing and automotive marketplaces and its findings. And Dataium provided analysis on some of the studies more interesting findings.

First up, the company provided some data that might convince dealers to reconsider funds spent on search engine marketing.

Despite an average of 55 percent of dealerships’ online advertising budgets being devoted to paid search engine marketing, Dataium shared that just 6 percent of dealership website traffic on average is referred by paid search keywords, according to the study.

And, that’s not all: Less than 1 percent of this traffic resulted in email form leads submitted on dealership websites.

So what is driving customers to dealership sites through the big search engines?

The study found that nearly 80 percent of direct referrals from search engines during the study were driven by keywords that were a variation on the dealership name, “representing traffic a dealership would theoretically receive via high rankings in organic search results regardless of the level of paid SEM spend,” company officials reported.

The Role of the Automotive Marketplace

In its study analysis, the company also commented on the role of automotive marketplaces in digital advertising.
 
According to Dataium, automotive marketplace websites are among the primary ways for dealers to influence purchase decisions “because they facilitate the research process and link unique shoppers to a specific vehicle quickly and easily, ultimately helping to deliver prospects to dealership websites who are closer to purchase. “