It should come as no surprise that sales are down this year, per sales reporting from major  manufacturers. This makes an efficient, lean marketing budget more important than ever. If your marketing cost per car sold is at or above the industry average of $629 for mass-market and over $700 for luxury vehicles, ask yourself a few questions.

Question No.1: Am I spending investing in programmatic media?

Programmatic media are channels such as Pandora, video pre-roll and social media, where bids are automatically adjusted as a campaign runs to create the most effective spend possible. These channels have targeting capabilities that other channels cannot match. In addition to demographic and specific geographic data, you can also leverage behavioral and contextual signals that help you truly understand your audience.

When you use programmatic media, you’re selecting the exact car buyers that you want to reach instead of also paying for people outside of your primary marketing area and demographics, which is an unfortunate reality of traditional media.

Furthermore, you can already see the evolution of television to becoming a programmatic channel (e.g. HBO Now). By investing in programmatic, you’re creating a better ROI for today’s channels, as well as preparing yourself for tomorrow’s.

Question No. 2: Has my internal team or agency partner created an effective paid media strategy?

If you’re not prepared for responsive search ads, you have fallen behind. Google’s AI selects from among 15 headlines and four descriptions that you craft, with some automation, to deliver ads that best match search intent.

The more granular that you create your ad groups, the better you can align ads with car shoppers’ search intent. By doing so, you’re also helping to boost your quality score, which can save money on every click by requiring a lower bid price to be competitive for the top spots in paid SERPs.

Also, are you deep linking on those ads to take consumers to highly relevant landing pages that satisfy the ad clicking expectations?

Question No. 3: Am I implementing a data-driven strategy to drive highly qualified organic traffic to my site?

By leveraging tools within Google Analytics, you can cut your dependency on third-party sites that cost you money for traffic you can earn yourself. This information will allow you to examine content across all digital assets, to ensure that you’re ranking for low-funnel searches that have intent modifiers like “near me” and “for sale.” This helps you take up organic SERPs at the top of page one for the types of searches most vital to your digital strategy.

When you start analyzing the right channels and strategies to implement within them, you can start chipping away at that marketing cost per car sold to combat those falling gross profit margins and weaker market demand.

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