Car Dealer Marketing Attribution

What to check before you buy

Give the vendor one month of your sales. Have it show, for each sale, which touches it found and how it matched the person by phone, email, VIN or name.

Check how a call is tied to a caller, and how offline sales go back to Google and Meta as conversions. Ask how credit is split when several channels touched one buyer.

The rule might be last touch, first touch or a multi-touch model, and you should be able to change it. Reports should show cost per matched sale by channel, with sales and service apart.

The match rate belongs on every report, so nobody mistakes a partial view for the whole.

Plan the reporting rhythm. Decide which numbers the general manager sees weekly, which the marketing owner sees daily and which are reviewed with vendors monthly, and write the definition beneath each one, then review the match rate every month, because a drop in match rate often means a broken form, a changed phone number or a new lead source, and catching it early keeps months of reports from being distorted.

Ask how the tool handles the sales it cannot match. A fair report shows the share of sales matched to a source, the share matched to none and the reasons, such as a walk-in, a phone number that did not match or a customer who came back months later. Insist that unmatched sales appear in every report as their own line so that channel totals are not inflated by guesswork.

Questions to put to every car dealer marketing attribution vendor

• Is the connection read-only or bi-directional?
• Who pays each integration fee?
• What breaks when either product changes?

Other categories dealers compare alongside Analytics & attribution: Vehicle data & syndication, Customer data platforms (CDP), Dealer intelligence & BI, and Data integration & middleware.