Dealer Inspire was built on the foundation of providing transparent reporting to our clients so they would have visibility into their marketing performance across all channels and could effectively measure their ROI.
Our recently assembled PRIZM team is tasked with turning those efforts up to 11, by unifying access to reporting from multiple platforms — and more importantly — bringing our clients unprecedented insights into their data from diverse sources.
One of the challenges the PRIZM team wanted to tackle first was quantifying car shopping activity that takes place on Cars.com and showing dealers how it benefits them beyond direct referrals and form fill leads.
Thanks to Roxanne™, our proprietary event tracking technology, we’re able to track users from Cars.com, to a dealership’s Dealer Inspire website, to final sale and quantify the impact it has on a dealership’s business.
With Roxanne™ in place, we analyzed 140 million shoppers on 3,000 Dealer Inspire websites in addition to the 19 million monthly shoppers on Cars.com. The data that we gathered allowed us to extrapolate the probability for a consumer to buy a vehicle who only visited a Dealer Inspire website, compared to that of a “cross shopper”.
Cross Shopper: Someone who visited Cars.com AND a dealership’s Dealer Inspire website.
What the data tells us is that cross shoppers are 4x more likely to buy a car compared to a shopper that only visited a dealer’s website.
Cross-shoppers will also look at 5x more VDPs on a dealer’s website than a non-cross shopper. And lastly, cross shoppers are 40% more likely to return to a dealer’s website.
What’s really powerful about these insights is that it clearly shows how a marketplace like Cars.com has a positive impact for car dealers during the consumer car shopping journey. In the near future, the PRIZM team will be able to drill down to this data on the dealer level, showing our clients precisely how many of their own website shoppers also visited Cars.com, providing a stronger link to the ROI of Cars.com beyond referrals and lead forms.
