CarGurus program aims to boost dealers’ digital marketing campaigns

If you ask Spencer Scott why CarGurus launched its Real-time Performance Marketing suite nationwide, he starts by saying that dealers noticed how CarGurus had grown its own audience.

“And they were turning to us to ask us how they could do that for their own website,” said Scott, who is the company’s senior vice president of advertising and digital marketing, in an interview with Auto Remarketing

Real-time Peformance Marketing, or RPM, is designed for dealerships to strengthen their digital marketing programs Scott says that  digital is becoming more important to dealers, and they want to drive traffic “that converts to their sites.”

As CarGurus provided advice, the company realized products and technology were available that it could offer dealers to help them drive high-performing traffic to their sites.

“And we decided to take this on as a product initiative,” Scott said.

The result is RPM, and CarGurus says that through its’ engaged car shopping audience of more than 38 million unique U.S. monthly visitors, dealers using RPM will see more high-quality traffic to their websites and locations through multiple digital channels.

CarGurus says that through RPM, dealerships gain the ability to target CarGurus audiences with an omnichannel approach. That means use of channels such as targeted display ads, paid search, social ads and retargeting ads.

Expanding on the omnichannel approach, Scott said, “It’s just the nature of digital right now.”

Scott continued, “Where omni-channel is important is we want to be able to capture that consumer across any channel where we can find them, and the most prevalent to our targeted display. And this is that targeted display ad on another premium publisher site.”

As an example, he provided a scenario in which a consumer is on the ESPN site, “or social, because social is a good-performing channel.”

“We don’t want to just focus on finding one place where we can target consumers,” he said.

He continued, “We looked at this omni-channel approach: Consumers are interacting with the internet across multiple sources. And our technology allows us to find those consumers wherever they’re interacting.”

He explained that the core components of the program include having information to exactly match the consumer with the inventory he or she is viewing, being “real time inventory aware” to ensure the vehicle is available, and “dynamically assembling and creating” for a high click-through rate for a consumer that is actually in market for that vehicle.

The company says RPM also provides dealerships with the ability to improve their social marketing by exclusively reaching CarGurus shoppers on Facebook, which according to CarGurus is a “high-converting social platform.”

RPM can also help dealerships boost their digital marketing performance through real-time analysis that it says automatically adjusts campaigns and budget allocation across channels.

Scott also said in a news release that the multi-channel digital marketing approach will help dealerships navigate the current car buying environment in which shoppers are shopping online “but taking many different paths to find the right vehicle.”

“What really excites me having spent 20 years in this space, is that now we have a chance to map together consumer interest and real time inventory,” Scott told Auto Remarketing.

He said RPM simply helps match consumers with dealers that have the inventory the customer wants, “as close as real time as possible.”

“And ultimately … the holy grail of a market or an advertiser is to market to consumers that have something that’s available right now in that local area,” he said.

He continued, “And we’re uniquely positioned in automotive to deliver against that, and that’s really exciting.”