Auto Industry | Client FF ~ Multi-Channel Marketing

Saskatchewan Auto Industry

ELNCO was tasked with helping Client FF, a local enterprise company, to create a more accurate view of multi-channel marketing performance.

The Challenge

ELNCO was tasked with helping Client FF, a local enterprise company, to create a more precise view of multi-channel marketing performance.

That had been a challenge for the auto industry because of various factors:

• The product itself was non-digital, meaning that the customer journey was more complicated than traditional eCommerce retail
• The company utilized multiple tracking technologies across several channels and platforms all grading activity based on a last click attribution model
• Non-paid action (such as SEO) was not tracked at all. Therefore ROI could not be measured

The outcome of these three conditions was that it was tough to quantify the return from individual marketing channels, particularly those that emerged in the early stages of the sales funnel.

In turn, this made it challenging for the marketing team to defend investment in acquisition and brand channels since there was limited visibility into how these channels occurred in sales using the last click attribution model that was implemented across the business.

A multi-dealership operation is more complex than a typical vendor-retailer from an attribution perspective because many of their sales can come from walk-in buyers and traditional marketing as well as conversions on their website. That makes it difficult to effectively monitor, track and estimate the value of this in the customer journey because tracking must be set up in the product itself as well as across the website.

Additionally, to gain a complete possible view of customer experience, it was important to factor in all customer journeys, even if they did not convert. Customer journeys that do not result in a conversion are frequently entirely omitted from how marketers view performance, leading to a limited understanding of the complete 360-degree customer journey.

Finally, each dealerships manager were interested in how they could use attributed data to help the wider business. While this type of analysis usually sits with the marketing team alone, they were interested in figuring out how it could be used across the enterprise to inform wider decisions about sales development.

Our Solution

The initial stage of the project was a consultation with the corporate leadership team, to fully understand how the business operated, what they hoped to achieve, the metrics that mattered most to their goals and the problems that the company had been experiencing from a data management perspective.

ELNCO then developed a tailored attribution model capable of designating weight dynamically based on the detected performance of a particular channel in a given position. Most common attribution models, such as the first click or last click, use subjective weighting to allocate conversion credit. That leads to a simplistic view of performance that often undervalues the channels that are truly driving sales.

The benefit of ELNCO’s dynamic attribution model is that the channel weightings are a function of effectiveness and place in a path. That means every customer path to conversion has a distinct weight distribution, depending on the channel’s performance and order of occurrence in the client path. That reflects changes in marketing effectiveness driven by strategic and tactical decision-making, meaning that it provides a far more accurate reflection of marketing effectiveness per day.

ELNCO also worked with auto industry’s tracking provider, and their in-house data team to join up log level data, product data and anonymised customer data to add useful dimensionality into the raw data set. It is this granularity that allowed the management team at each auto dealership to view performance across specific business units, customer segments, and product types.

The ELNCO data science team also created a bespoke dashboard to allow the teams at the auto dealership to interrogate explicitly, segment and explore the attributed data to make it easier to use for tactical and strategic decision making. Those as mentioned above was updated daily so that the information was always fresh.

Additionally, ELNCO exported this data on a daily basis to the management team centralized data team so that it could be chartered in operational-wide reporting. That made it useful for teams outside of the marketing department and added functionality.

Results

As a outcome of the innovative attribution model, the enterprise client was also able to differentiate between the marketing/media channels that efficiently produced new customer acquisition versus other that were better placed to drive product upgrades. This knowledge was applied to help with marketing mix planning and budget requests.

A few of the applied insights from this work included the following:

• Client FF was on the verge of cutting their affiliates program in 2013. With the help of the attribution data, we helped them prevent an estimated loss of 10% of digital revenue in Q1 through the attribution-backed decision to keep affiliates on.
• ELNCO proved that in the absence of brand bidding, SEO would pick up PPC traffic without losing any sales meaning that the enterprise marketing team could confidently pause brand PPC activity. The results from this test helped the client save a significant amount of budget per quarter from the PPC budget.