Hyundai UK uses digital marketing to engage the car buying public, lift brand consideration and drive leads for the group’s 157 dealers. Google’s Annual Auto Shopper Study suggests that 63% of all UK test drives were made by a person with no appointment, while only 22% of the people who did have an appointment made it via the online booking form. The brand’s UK marketing team faced a challenge: finding a way to measure the marketing effectiveness of their online activities in driving leads to dealers.
Approach
Implemented store visits in AdWords
Ran test on two branded keyword campaigns
Goals
Engage an in-market car buying audience to increase brand awareness and lift consideration for the Hyundai brand
The hard KPI is to drive drive leads for group’s 157 dealers
Results
303,131 monthly website visits and 7,980 monthly visits to physical retail locations
3.4% of paid clicks and 4.9% of paid mobile clicks resulted in retailer visits
1,737% return on ad spend
AdWords store visits conversions represented a great opportunity to test if search was actually a driver for Hyundai’s business, not only in terms of incremental traffic to the website, but also to the dealerships. Store visits reporting shows the impact of search ads on in-store traffic. This enables Google advertisers to measure the in-store visits that Google Search ads are driving across mobile, tablet and desktop devices.
“Implementation was quite easy with the help of Havas and the Google team,” explains Adam Nickson, Head of Brand Strategy and Communications, Hyundai UK. To gauge offline impact, a store visits test was set to run on two branded keyword campaigns in Hyundai UK’s AdWords account. The test ran for six weeks, with a 30-day lookback window to enable reporting of clicks that might still register a visit to a dealer.
The test demonstrated that the campaigns contributed 303,131 monthly visits to website and 7,980 monthly visits to physical dealer locations, which translated to 52 visits per retailer across 157 locations. An incredible 3.4% of paid clicks resulted in a dealership visit in 30 days. For mobile, the rate was 4.9%.
Based on the Hyundai internal data for walk-in close rate for the UK’s car dealership benchmark, this activity translates to 2,394 assisted visits to units sold. The test demonstrates a 1,737% return on ad spend for Hyundai’s search campaigns (even after very conservatively discounting the incremental impact).
With the store visits report in hand, Hyundai UK presented at the monthly manager meeting. Going forward, the brand is using this data to prove that digital marketing campaigns are driving store leads to their dealers.
