Accelerating Auto Advertising Success with CTV

According to eMarketer, more than 7 million auto intenders live in a streaming household. It’s not surprising then that automotive dealers plan to increase their OTT ad budgets by 20% this year — but they’ll also be carefully monitoring the return on every dollar spent.

The auto industry faces a variety of challenges when it comes to advertising:

• Targeting and reach: Ensuring ads reach the right audience at the right time, effectively targeting auto intenders
• Measurement and attribution: Accurately measuring the impact of ads and attributing sales and/or leads to specific campaigns
• Budget allocation: Balancing budget allocation between traditional media, digital channels, and CTV advertising

While auto advertisers are still using traditional and print advertising, they’re increasingly investing in digital advertising as well, particularly OTT. Television has the greatest influence on likely buyers from discovery to purchase, making it vital for auto advertisers to prioritize CTV advertising in their budgets.

Hyper-local targeting on CTV

The automotive industry encompasses a wide range of consumers, from first-time buyers to luxury car enthusiasts, each with distinct needs and preferences. Reaching the right audiences and creating tailored messaging requires sophisticated targeting, which can be challenging to execute across fragmented media.

Data driven CTV campaigns enable auto advertisers to segment target audiences and deliver personalized content, ensuring relevance to car buyers. By using these audience segments, advertisers can tailor CTV ads to deliver a more customized experience for each customer.

For example, a local auto group partnered with Madhive to boost website visits and foot traffic to their three locations in Pennsylvania. Their targeted audiences included:

• Pickup truck buyers with a household income of $50K+
• Used car buyers
• Jeep buyers with a household income of $50K+

By targeting these groups on CTV, the local auto group achieved 400K monthly impressions.

Footfall Attribution: Measuring In-Store Impact for Local Auto Dealers

Footfall attribution enables local auto dealers to directly connect their advertising efforts to showroom visits, test drives, and vehicle purchases. By tracking how many ad viewers actually visit a dealership, auto dealers gain a clear understanding of the effectiveness of their CTV campaigns.

For auto advertisers, footfall attribution offers critical insights into retail performance, helping to ensure campaigns drive tangible results. Key metrics include:

• Offline Attribution: Tracks total sales activity and the number of vehicles purchased based on exposure to the CTV campaign
• Buyer Characteristics: Offers insights into who bought the auto dealer’s vehicle and competitive vehicles, up to 90 days from the campaign start
• Competitor Insights: Monitors total competitive sales in auto dealer’s area to understand where consumers are buying, even if not from you

Top- to Bottom-of-Funnel Measurement

CTV advertising allows auto advertisers to accurately measure the effectiveness of campaigns at all stages of the buyer’s journey.

This includes top-of-funnel metrics such as:

• Impressions
• Video completion rate
• Cost per completed view
• Brand impact

CTV also gives bottom-of-funnel metrics including:

• Website conversions (test drives, requesting more information)
• Footfall attribution
• Customer acquisition cost
• Return on ad spend

CTV offers auto advertisers a highly targeted, engaging and measurable way to connect with their audiences. Through hyper-focused targeting, full-funnel outcomes, offline attribution, and footfall attribution, CTV provides a comprehensive solution for driving both awareness and sales.

For example, Madhive worked with a local auto dealership in Pennsylvania that wanted to measure in-person visits to any of their three locations. They used footfall attribution to assess the effectiveness of their CTV campaign, and in the first half of 2024, they achieved:

• 472 in-store visitors
• 2.7M+ impressions
• 97.8% VCR

These techniques benefit more than just local dealers, too. A national automotive brand aimed to maximize the number of impressions while maintaining a frequency cap of 5 per month. With the frequency held at 5, the campaign achieved:

• 779M+ impressions
• 70M+ unique reach