For the more than 52,000 car dealerships spread across Europe, local advertising is a must. Even national-level brands have to drive sales to local dealerships – where individual businesses have to create trust and make sales once leads walk through the door. Historically, that’s been achieved with a combination of national-level television and print media campaigns combined with local radio, TV, and print.
Today, auto adverts are more and more moving into the digital space, where technologies like Adcombi’s polygon targeting and automation enable truly hyperlocal digital ads – distributed from a central advertiser. That allows national car brands to maintain control of the branding and even to offer budgets – while giving local dealerships customization, freedom to promote their own local deals and offers, and the ability to build local trust.
Generating Leads for a Top Auto Dealer
In Germany, Adcombi works with an auto dealer with roughly 160 dealerships in the country. As an automotive retailer, each dealership is its own organization, independent of the motor company itself. So, the brand wanted to incentivize the dealerships by offering advertising budget based on the previous quarter’s sales. Those ads had to be local, but also had to be run from a central DSP and with central branding.
Leveraging Polygon Targeting for Dealership Locations
Advertising inside a dealership's sales region is crucial for many reasons. For example, many areas have non-compete clauses. Many also commit to advertising in specific regions when signing the franchise contract. And, of course, advertising to nearby customers increases the likelihood that those customers can actually get to your dealership to buy a car. That’s important, even with the estimated 52,000 dealerships in Europe. In the U.S., it’s even more important, with an estimated 16,658 light duty franchised car dealerships and over 100,000 dealerships in total.
Adcombi’s polygon targeting – which allows you to fully map a dealership area with small polygons to get full coverage of an area – makes targeting those dealership locations possible. It’s also a massive improvement over traditional radius targeting, which extends a radius outward from a center point. Polygons allow for full coverage of a zip code or other area, without waste and without missing locations.
Building a Hyper-Local Digital Advertising Campaign for 160 Dealerships
The campaign eventually included high-engaging creatives for both lease contracts and for the dealerships themselves. Local dealers were able to choose from multiple car models, share their location, add route planning and their own address, and add their own lease and finance rates to the ad. Adcombi’s technology also allowed dealers to add real-time data like route planning and temperature triggers into the creative.
This freedom allowed brands to allocate budget to their own top selling models, to drive sales in ways they saw fit.
The campaign was set around goals including to drive uptake for lease contract, while engaging local audiences, and incentivizing them to visit local dealerships. And, with Adcombi’s automation tooling, we were able to set up customized programmatic campaigns for each dealership – so each received its own budget, its own ad control, and its own targeting. Those line items are each under the control of the national motor company – but linked to the local dealership.
The Results
Adcombi delivered customized digital ads across 160 auto dealership locations. Each dealer was able to select its own vehicle model to promote for the quarter, with three models to choose from per quarter. In addition, each dealer could set its own lease and finance rates. And, with the option to opt in or out per campaign, every participant had a significant amount of freedom. Adcombi followed up by sending each participant a PDF report of its own ad engagement, budget, delivered ads and clicks.
Adcombi also delivered individually localized in-banner video campaigns. Our integrated media consisted of solutions for Facebook, Instagram, and Google Search. And, with API integrations in the ads, dealerships were able to add route planning and weather targeting.
Since the start of the campaign, some 735,720 different creatives have been served for 160 dealerships.
If you want to learn more about Adcombi’s hyperlocal ad technology or how we can leverage it to deliver local ads at a national scale – get in touch.
