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Relocating Budgets of Auto Traders and Car-Type Channels

A large GMC/Buick dealer moved ad budget from sources including Auto trader and Cars type platforms in order to allocate some of it to programmatic advertising. They did not increase budget, but simply reallocated it to Genius Monkey to see if they could realize a better return on ad spend.

Goals

The Core KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) in this test was to increase online traffic and, more importantly, increase leads that included:

  • Inventory form fills
  • Verified sales calls

Genius Monkey wanted to prove that reallocating existing budgets (vs. asking for more budget) could result in a stronger performance, accomplished by programmatically diversifying channels via the Genius Monkey platform.

Approach

The allocated budget Genius Monkey received was to be split between video and ad display, so that amount was pulled from the Cars and Auto trader-type channels. As we always encourage, we do know that there were some advertising funds left with those other channels to retain a small presence.

Results

From their initial start with Genius Monkey, they not only saw an increase in impressions and site traffic, but leads jumped up right away, as well.

Over time, they continued to see the following results:

  • Leads went from 180 per month to 280 per month inside 6 months.
  • Within 2 years, monthly leads had reached 550.

They noticed that even though they moved the majority of budgets from those providers, performance through them only got better. Leads from all sources increased due to the amount of impressions/branding Genius Monkey produced internet wide. This is a very common byproduct of proper branding. Everything should work better.

The cost per acquisition decreased significantly as they didn't make any changes in the overall marketing budget, but rather reallocated budget from those mediums to Genius Monkey.

Within the first six months there was a 36% reduction in CPA. Or, a 67% reduction in CPA within 2 years.