Looking beyond the last click.
The Challenge
Automotive rarely converts in a single session. Customers research, compare and return across multiple channels before booking a test drive, downloading a brochure or finding a dealer, so conversions attributed directly to programmatic told only part of the story.
The Approach
We compared conversion behaviour on journeys where programmatic was present against journeys where it wasn't, looking at three actions: brochure downloads, test drive bookings and dealer searches. We also looked at how upper- and lower-funnel activity performed together compared with in isolation.
The Result
Organic conversion performance rose by approximately 17% for test drive bookings and 8% for dealer searches when programmatic was part of the journey. These figures measure lift associated with journeys where programmatic was present earlier in the path to conversion, not the performance of any single channel in isolation.
Which channel got the conversion matters less than what actually helped create it.