How a luxury dealership attracted 500 new customer prospects to its website

The following case study reveals how geotargeting enabled a luxury car dealership to attract 500 new customer prospects to its website and 132 prospects to its showroom.

A Volvo dealership in the New York Tri-State metro wanted to increase brand awareness among its target audience of luxury car buyers, and bring those prospective buyers into its showroom.

While leveraging geofencing marketing, the dealership and its marketing partner took these steps:

• The dealership worked with the marketing partner’s team to develop custom creative assets (banner ads).
• The marketing team built geofences around areas with a very high concentrations of car shoppers in the luxury market, including local competitive dealerships.
• The marketing team set up a conversion zone around the actual dealership so it could successfully track customers who entered the established-target geofences and those who saw or clicked on the ads served, as well as those who actually visited the dealership’s showroom.
• Along the way, the marketing partner and its team optimized the geofencing campaign, which included:
  • Running ads during the best-performing times of the day;
  • Eliminating low-performing apps and websites;
  • Testing the best-performing creative assets (turning off ads with low performance); and
  • Reallocating campaign budget to the geofences driving the most foot traffic to their dealership.

What was geofencing’s impact?

The dealership and marketing team gained the following results and information from the geotargeting campaign:

• Over a 30-day campaign test period, the marketing team delivered over 300,000 impressions;
• 500 clicks were driven to the website (exceeding click-through-rate industry norms by 50%);
• The campaign drove a minimum of 132 people to the dealership;
• The average cost per visit was approximately $21.
• The marketing team was able to track the dealership’s natural foot traffic (people who did not see its ads and went through the target geofenced areas) compared to campaign advertising foot traffic (those who did see its ads and went through the target geofenced areas). While natural foot traffic averaged 0.5%, campaign advertising traffic averaged 1.20%, giving the dealership a 140% geo-conversion lift in foot traffic.

Overall, geofencing marketing offers a way for dealers to effectively spend their marketing dollars on building brand awareness. Most importantly, they reach people who have indicated they’re in the market to purchase a vehicle. And dealerships can do it in a way that drives additional foot traffic to their showrooms in an efficient, cost-effective manner.

Geofencing is not a replacement for dealership’s advertising budget, but it’s a great addition to the advertising mix.