Amazon Advertising For Car Dealers

Vasilios Lambos is the Chief Marketing Officer at CognitionDigital.io, an ad-tech company that helps auto dealers utilize Amazon's various advertising channels. In this episode of the Dealer Playbook, you'll learn about how Amazon advertising can help expand your paid media effectiveness and place your inventory in front of highly engaged shoppers.

Episode Highlights About Amazon Advertising For Car Dealers:

Vasilios provides context to where Amazon fits in the overall media plan today.
We're super familiar with paid search, paid social, and third-party cookies as the privacy concerns come to life, dealers and marketers are looking back at programmatic advertising as the way to better find a more niche audience that fits their marketing objectives for their business.
The Amazon Garage allows users to upload their vehicle information, make, model, and year and that does a couple of things. One, it allows the user to get a personalized shopper experience on Amazon.com, and second, it allows advertisers to better target users based on the make/model and year that they have sitting in their driveway.
Amazon garage is the second-largest repository of user-generated vehicle ownership data outside of the DMV in the United States.
Your media plan should have a strategy related, most importantly to the business objective that you're looking to solve.
Listen to the full episode featuring Vasilios Lambos for even more insights about how to step into who you really are!

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Thanks, Vasilios Lambos

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Michael: Get your Google vehicle ads up and running fast with flex dealer.com. The car business is rapidly changing and modern car dealers are meeting the demand. I'm Michael and together we're going to explore what it takes to create a thriving dealership and life in the retail automotive industry. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with subject matter experts that are designed to help you grow.

[00:00:27] This is the dealer playbook

[00:00:41] at time of recording this episode of the dealer playbook podcast. I've just returned from N a D a 2022. Of course, when you walk around the floor, PV, Dan, you probably already know this, but you hear people tongue in cheek. Oh, what's the buzzword going to be. I might even be one of them from time to time.

[00:01:00] It was SCL. Then it was big data. Then it was now, I don't know D digital retail. And of course, walking around the floor of this. We heard a lot about, oh, well the buzz is probably going to be Amazon advertising and I got to think, well, maybe there's good reason for all the buzz. And so no better individual to sit down with right now, the CMO of a company called cognition, digital Vasilios Lambos.

[00:01:26] Thanks so much for joining me on the dealer playbook podcast. Thanks Michael. It's a

[00:01:30] Vasilios: pleasure.

[00:01:32] Michael: All right. So let's talk about this. We got Facebook. We've got Google. We've got Bing. Now we're talking all about Amazon. I want to turn this over to you. Let's set the table here. Why, why Amazon? Why? As a dealer who maybe they're thinking really another platform.

[00:01:53] Well, how many, how many platforms do we need? Why Amazon.

[00:02:00] Vasilios: Well, I think by, you know, first off we got to give Amazon advertising a little context and to where Amazon fits in the overall media plan today, we're super familiar with paid search, paid social, and with, you know, the, I say that cookies, third party cookies as the privacy concerns sorta come to life.

[00:02:25] Dealers and marketers are looking back at programmatic advertising the way to better find a more niche audience that fits their marketing objectives for their business objective. And Amazon's pretty well suited to F to fit the needs of marketers and dealers today because of the data, the first party data that Amazon has.

[00:02:48] Because they are the largest e-commerce site in the country or in the world for that matter. And so for why does it matter for dealers as well? Um, there's this little known thing and I, you know, I think a lot of people have overlooked it, but over the past five to six years, Amazon created a shopper experience called the Amazon garage.

[00:03:09] The Amazon garage allows users to upload their vehicle information make model year. And that does a couple things. One, it allows you to get a personalized shopper experience on amazon.com second, um, it allows advertisers like cognition to better target users based on the make model and year that they have of the vehicle they own in their, in their driveway on amazon.com.

[00:03:35] So. You know, programmatic fits two categories, it's display in OTT. But what we built was a dynamic solution to meet, um, those audiences with the right creative, you know, and we talk about personalization all the time. When you're going to advertise your business, you want to create the right message to the right audience.

[00:03:55] What better way to do that with first party data that Amazon has, because they know what you're shopping for. They know where you're shipping your product. And they now know what vehicle you own. And so that level of personalization kind of put Amazon on the map. Amazon garage today is actually the second largest repository of user generated vehicle ownership data outside the DMV.

[00:04:20] It's actually over 200 million vehicles are uploaded on the Amazon garage. So it's a, it's a force to reckon with, and it makes sense why it's become such a hot topic.

[00:04:31] Michael: Now, tell me a little bit more about this garage. Cause I think people are probably using it and not even realizing they're using it. Is this the, to clarify is this where say I type in BMW, X five products and it says, Hey, well tell us exactly what your vehicle is so we can show you the products that will be an exact match.

[00:04:50] Vasilios: You hit the nail on the head. It's it's that simple and there's many. Uh, you know, we speak with many dealers, even agencies today who are asking us questions around, where is this experience? And Amazon isn't aggressively, um, marketing, the Amazon garage has, Hey, use this product and experience. It's not there yet.

[00:05:12] It's still early in terms of the integration to their overall shopper experience. Right? However, there are many people who have uploaded their vehicle information that may be in their Amazon garage. Three years ago, two years ago, kind of in that early infancy of how Amazon was building this experience out fast forward today, you see large brands like Honda and, um, you know, uh, uh, think even, no, it was Honda that, that created a kind of a unique partnership to push inventory from a digital retailing standpoint, brands are buying into translating digital retailing, right.

[00:05:48] And integrating that more exclusively with Amazon. From an advertising perspective, like all we want is the. And in allowing you, the, you, the user to upload your information. It's a, win-win, you're going to get personalized parts and accessories recommendations. You're going to get to the product faster.

[00:06:07] You're going to get to maybe a better product that is going to be lower cost than what you're purchasing right at your local dealer. If it's, if you're more of a DIY and you're looking to fix your vehicle yourself. So there's tons of advantages just in general, having that data in your account, but for the advertiser for the dealer.

[00:06:25] It's it's super beneficial that we now are not just going to spend money on marketing and not know who are seeing our ads. Right. And we can get very, very granular. And so when you, the biggest value to Amazon, in my opinion, is coupling model, audience, data with life-stage or other e-commerce. So, what I mean by that is there over 50 plus subsidiaries companies that Amazon owns, like whole foods or Twitch TV, those purchase behaviors that occur at whole foods, right.

[00:07:04] That indicates maybe a newborn, um, you know, family, like a mother that has having a newborn baby, or just saying like baby formula. She might be in market to shop for a larger SUV for her growing family. And you can couple those audience segments together and serve them very specific inventory. Right? So that, that level of granular granularity is pretty powerful.

[00:07:29] When you're thinking about spending your media dollars effectively,

[00:07:32] Michael: all dude, all the people that shop at whole foods are sitting here. How did they know that I want to buy a Subaru? I was like, dude, cause you were a granola. It's so true.

[00:07:46] Vasilios: It's kind of, you know, we try to, we try to articulate our value, add, you know, cognitions, Amazon only, right.

[00:07:53] Like right through one thing, we do a really, really well. And we try not to sound creepy because here you have a kind of this conflicting message in the market from a strategy perspective, everybody's saying privacy, privacy, privacy. It's becoming harder to track online engagement. And you're seeing that struggle with Facebook in particular, in the last 18 months.

[00:08:15] Right. You know, programmatic has sort of been, it's been, it's been around forever. Probably seen those really annoying display. On a website, you probably clicked on them a hundred times or not, um, and made a purchase behavior because our purchasing decision, because you saw that ad, it's been around there since the inception of the web only now are we seeing that programmatic and display in OTT is become significantly more targeted and more effective.

[00:08:43] And so, yeah, you're, you have so many, I say there's an audience for everything, you know, as like my, my line that I like to yeah.

[00:08:51] Michael: You know, what's more annoying than advertising in general advertising that has nothing to do with and or speaks to anything you're interested in my wife, we lay in bed, we're watching something on Hulu, Amazon, whatever, Amazon prime.

[00:09:12] And we've noticed we're starting to get commercials in these platforms. Maybe we're not paying for the luxury tier at all. And, and by the way, this is not a racial comment. I hate that. I even have to say this, but when my wife and I get ads delivered to us in Spanish, dude, we don't speak Spanish. I don't understand what they're saying.

[00:09:39] And it doesn't make me want to buy your baby as beautiful as the language. It doesn't make me want to buy your baby formula. Also side note, no babies for baby formula. So what we're talking about here, what I think is really interesting from a, and by the way, DPB gang, this is me with my marketer cap on.

[00:09:59] I've got nothing against it, you know, don't, don't get all woke on me and be like, oh, Spanish people. No, I don't. I just hate irrelevant advertising more than I hate advertising, you know? And so, um, to your point, first party data coupled with household level targeting, coupled with. Um, life milestones and, and I'm sure a, a thousand plus more other signals, you have the ability not to be creepy and not, and it's not even a privacy issue.

[00:10:37] If, if people really had an issue with privacy, they wouldn't input any information to begin with. So to couple all of that, so that the end user can actually get messaging that's relevant to something going on in their. Much more enjoyable to consume those ads than it is to get something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything

[00:11:00] Vasilios: you're 100% correct.

[00:11:02] And so, you know, our, um, solution right. To serving more personalization, more granularity has been sort of broken up for the dealer in a few different ways. We have F a few products that meet very specific business objectives. So for variable operations, it's VIN specific ads that we deliver to these first party, make model your audiences, and we're dynamically serving and layering to your point, those key moments in life stages based on your inventory mix.

[00:11:37] So at know, broad stroke at this right. We don't know your name and address as a company, right? We have these audiences that are made available to us in the DSP and our software, which is that layer above Amazon advertising makes the decision engine to serve that ad or that vehicle to the right customer.

[00:12:01] We're doing it with fixed ops. And so if you have certain purchase or search behavior for specific. Parts and accessories we can layer in, um, you know, service offers through the advent of a feed. We can layer in parts and accessories that the dealer is selling and even market that to users based on their person, purchase history and behavior on amazon.com.

[00:12:27] I think the most compelling, right. That we've that, you know, I think a solution that we brought to the market with Amazon is vehicle. Given that the entire market has sort of seen a lot of pressure on the new car side. And we've been able to create dynamic offers for the vehicle with a range and actual value range based on where that user lives and what vehicle they own.

[00:12:52] I think that's been, we've seen the most success out of that, out of that specific product. And the reason we've seen success is because. Amazon and is allowing a lot of technology to be built that we are sort of first to party on building. One of those tools has been offline attribution. And so we can match back today, sales data, whether that's ROI, data, uh, uh, lead data showroom, visit data.

[00:13:21] As long as it has an email, we can match it back to OTT and display on that. Wow. And what we're finding is that we are getting significantly high match rates out of the gate. This is something that was brought to market less than three months ago. Okay. And so it's, it's definitely on the bleeding edge.

[00:13:40] We have a lot of developing case studies, a lot of complete case studies for each of these strategies, but that's the biggest advantage. For dealers, uh, uh, to take advantage of in the media space is they haven't had a concrete channel to measure success in even Facebook has significantly been watered down on their offline attribution matchback and we found a great solution here with no limitations on the attribution window, we can match back to 90 days.

[00:14:09] We can match it back to a hundred days if we were. And so to create that story is really not only be able to target the right audience, but are we driving business results? Is it achieving an ROI? And we've been able to prove and say, yes, not only, yes, but in the 300 to 600% range in terms of return on ad spend.

[00:14:30] And so the data doesn't lie, it's there. And a lot of the advantage I think in the next year is going to be a blend of media arbitrary. Where dealers are going to be looking for media channels, just outside of the traditional Google Facebook, where they're going to get a more efficient, buy, more value for their money.

[00:14:53] And then second, secondly, yeah, aligning again, you know, as we see inventory recover in 20 end of 2022 into 2023, how are we now ramping dollars back up in the most effective. Yeah, there were a lot of dealers that turned off their ad budget or reduce their ad budget. They're going to be kind of lost in the fray.

[00:15:12] Come time to say, Hey, now how do I remain competitive? And we see that every day. I mean, the dealers we talked to, um, we, we built this business on early adopters looking for that new channel. Um, and we've seen success now. Come time for the market to recover. Those dealers are going to be way ahead of the game, uh, when it comes to advertising on Amazon.

[00:15:34] Michael: Is there a saturation point. And what I mean by that is I would venture to say, majority of dealerships are advertising in some way, shape or form on Facebook. Um, Google, is there a similar saturation point with Amazon?

[00:15:52] Vasilios: So in automotive, I would say at the tier three level, individual franchise, like. There may be more saturation on the OTT side, then there would display.

[00:16:07] Okay. But when I, when I say that I say with a grain of salt, so back of the napkin math, 80% of the country, if you're 18 or older, has an Amazon account, broad strokes where we see some limitations and your ceiling in terms of how much you could spend in the channel. We've really only seen it on the OTT side and really rural.

[00:16:30] Um, uh, market areas that may have sub a hundred thousand people that you could target. Gotcha. And that a hundred thousand, you know, person DMA or market areas of code list, whatever it may be, you know, amounts to a ceiling of about $5,000 on OTT. Um, when I look at Metro areas or areas that have between a half, a million to two and a half million people, most dealers.

[00:16:58] You know, when you're looking at a balanced media plan, they are way off for maxing out the channel or are really spending in a channel that's quote unquote oversaturated. So we are far from that. I think we're five years out from having a conversation of Amazon or buying an Amazon in our market programmatically as quote unquote expensive.

[00:17:17] It is super, super effective. So, you know, to give you an idea of that, you know, in any average market dealers that are spending between three to $5,000 on display, they're seeing between two to $5 $5 in terms of a CPS. And that's for an audience that's first party, that's an audience, you know, what vehicle they own.

[00:17:41] We may also know that that person has purchased a very specific part, a product on Amazon and has very specific intent. To me. That's a no brainer versus the 10 to $15 CPMs you see on like a Facebook, a Pinterest, the Tik TOK, and it's, you know, shotgun approach. You have no idea who clicked your ad, right.

[00:18:02] And who visited your website? Uh, outside of what the pixel is delivering, you know, in terms of the signals, right? Those signals that are going to indicate in the algorithm, who to serve the attitude that doesn't occur, uh, on Amazon advertising. And this use case, because we were very specifically dialing in which audience is seeing which ad unit, right.

[00:18:23] Which actual creative I

[00:18:25] Michael: want to, I want to sidebar just for a minute because there's, uh, there's, there's this thought rolling around in my mind. As it pertains to Amazon. And as it pertains to all of this data that we now have to leverage and the power of this advertising platform and that sidebar thought is how important it is to play the long game.

[00:18:49] And here's what I mean. Can I just, just entertain me? I watched this, this Amazon documentary. Jeff Bezos and the space shuttle. And, and, and, uh, what's the dude's name? Captain Kirk, uh, William Shatner going to space and blue origin, right? Is that what it's called? The I blue origin. One of the things that I thought was particularly interesting about this documentary is the fact that Jeff Bezos, as a kid were accounts, um, spending a lot of time in his local library where.

[00:19:25] He read every book about space, space, being his first passion, his first love. But in that process, he also learned that he really enjoyed reading and there was this long game kind of plug about how he wanted to find a way to get to space and married, to passionate. The launch of ad Amazon, which started with books, selling exclusively out of his garage, which then turned into what it is today, which ultimately was the vehicle.

[00:20:01] He needed to create enough wealth to create a space company, to build rocket ships, to put him in space. Also though, along the way, I'm sure they got clarity. That's the name of the game wasn't even to get to space. It was to collect data because data is the new natural resource. And you're talking a lot about first party data.

[00:20:30] And I want dealers to understand in this little sidebar, But if you're not playing the long game, if you haven't identified what your space is and what your dealership, operations and advertising is the vehicle to get you toward. It's going to be really difficult to, to ever play the long game, but there's gotta be a greater purpose than just what's in front of us today.

[00:20:56] And you said something which triggered the side. Uh, Vasilios did I say, man, you crushed it, dude. Um, you don't get to talk to people with sexy names very often. Um, it, uh, you said something about, um, the first party data that made me think about this. Um, and it was the mixed, having a mixed, a balanced, mixed point.

[00:21:27] And so often dealers, they're just, they're there. They're spending all their money on low funnel because they're so stuck in the today. I need to sell cars today. I need leads to work today. So let me ask you this. Now that you've entertained me for a minute, I'm going to shut up. How well does this Amazon, how well does the Amazon ecosystem work as part, is it part of a mixed, balanced approach?

[00:21:59] Can it handle top of funnel all the way through the phases of the buying journey to low funnel? Do we still need to rely on other platforms?

[00:22:10] Vasilios: Yeah, so I would a hundred percent agree that we're applicable. You want to have. Obviously media, your media plan should have a strategy related Mo most importantly to the business objective that you're looking to solve, regardless of that business objective.

[00:22:32] And for dealers, it's driving Aros, driving sales, right? Retaining customers, acquiring new vehicles, maybe upselling that vehicle, uh, that customer into a new vehicle. And the end of the day, it's lifetime value. We measure success at the dealership. It's how do we retain and keep that customer for life. And Amazon fits very, very well into that marketing funnel because Amazon naturally is a mid funnel customer.

[00:23:06] And at times it's going to be upper funnel. And so when we say, talk about brand awareness and. It's all the OTT that we're delivering is predominantly going to be upper funnel in terms of building that brand awareness. And then we layer in, we sorta couple that bottom funnel and 10, or we get more into that consideration, mid funnel attack by layering an inventory feeds by trying to show users, Hey, this is the dealer's brand promise, right?

[00:23:36] This is the brand promise from the dealer and here's inventory coupled with. That experience with that dealer's brand promise. And so we sort of blend it. I would say Amazon's a very mid funnel customer. And based on the strategy you deliver could be more upper funnel, more leaning into that brand awareness play or extraordinarily bottom funnel.

[00:23:56] And I would say most of our display direct response campaigns are mainly bottom funnel, uh, ads that are served to mid funnel cluster. Out of the box, amazon.com is an e-commerce shopper. Think of who an Amazon user is. It's somebody who's shopping for convenience. They want it delivered to their home.

[00:24:17] They want it fast, right? In terms of today or prime shipping. And so, you know, I would say you need, in terms of the media plan, you hit the nail on the head. You need Google, you need Facebook, you need other channels to support. Uh, wholistic media plan. Um, but depending, you know, I'm not, I don't want to be, I tell people, you know, dealers in particular, you know, marketing directors, we talk about this all the time, all the time.

[00:24:44] I am not the shiny thing on the block that you're going to go all in on as a media buyer or media planner, I would highly advise against that. And we tell our customers, even though we only deliver. Programmatic media on Amazon. We have customers media plan with us and say, Hey, let me look at your media plan, your cost per sale, and try to back into finding you efficiencies to buy on our channel.

[00:25:13] Right? And so in doing that, we naturally. I would say your, your point, which is, you know, where does Amazon fall? Well, Nana's on users, mid funnel and how you attack or approach that strategy you can make. You can push budget towards a more brand awareness, upper funnel intent, or you can, you can gear that budget more towards a more bottom funnel, uh, campaign strategy.

[00:25:38] Um, so it's flexible, you know, whereas search tends to be mainly right. Bottom funnel, mid funnel and tent, social being a lot more of that brand awareness. Um, I don't even call Facebook ads. I don't even look at Facebook ads as a significant mid funnel bottom. Uh, campaign strategy anymore after I've evaluated, you know, over the years, the quality of the leads that I've seen coming through the platform.

[00:26:05] I really think that, you know, they've been, they've validated the effectiveness, uh, really through that offline attribution piece as well. And they did it because they knew that they can track back the impression. Right to someone who was exposed to the brand. And so Facebook was, Hey, let's turn to Facebook to get leads, leads, leads, then dealers realized no, let's go to Facebook.

[00:26:26] And some of these paid social strategies as a way to be more brand awareness to go long-term. And so, you know, my best recommendation there too is like, well, what is your dealer trying to accomplish? How does that media let's stop? That's the biggest thing. Let's stop media planning on the 30 day. Can we stop?

[00:26:45] Can we stop? We understood as an, as a, as a vendor in the space, we will tailor to your incentives that the OEM is great, but let's think about your strategy over a 12 month window, right? I think that's another thing here too. Right? When we're thinking about how do we get that media plan and be more effective?

[00:27:04] We'll look at it. It'll broader. Um, and, and back into your business objectives from there, you're going to find, you're going to give yourself a lot of more flexibility and you're going to give yourself a lot more, um, I think effective, uh, direction in terms of who and what media you're buying. Right. And so that's, that's where it's going to expose.

[00:27:25] Am I spending too much on Google. Am I spending it too much on Facebook? Over a longer window, right? That's that's what I'm getting at.

[00:27:31] Michael: Yeah, it makes perfect sense to me. I mean, look, if your only business objective is to get ads with dynamic inventory insertion happening, then. You're you're successful. If that's your only objective you succeeded except, oh, wait, you're not satisfied with that.

[00:27:52] Y doesn't turn you around the results that you're looking for. Uh, oh, why? Because you haven't defined your business mission yet. What are you trying? What are you aiming to achieve? And then, oops, can't happen in a 30 day window because historically a life experience tells all of us. Anything worth while takes a while.

[00:28:18] And so I love what you're saying, man, about let's look at your year, you know, where you want to get this year. I mean, heck let's look at your quarter. You even know what you're trying to accomplish this quarter and then lean backwards. Um, kind of your point lean backwards into, well, what are the, what are the tactics then?

[00:28:37] What, what do I need to deploy? Or execute upon in order to make that overarching goal happen. But again, like I said, if just getting vehicles listed through dynamic ads is the goal. Then you already won except, oh, oops. You didn't get the result you wanted, which tells me that wasn't your objective. You know what I mean?

[00:28:55] Like it's, it's funny. And I say it that way, um, you know, tongue in cheek because it's like, we need to start acknowledging the fact that so few dealers. Not just dealers businesses. Um, people don't have a roadmap that they're working off of. And I, and I think, I don't know, I'd love your take, but I think that's, what's keeping people in 30 day cycles.

[00:29:21] Vasilios: It is. It definitely is. Um, you know, I, I do want to round that out a little bit more. I think it needs, you know, this topic needs to be spoken about, uh, more effectively because, you know, A lot of the conversation we had. I think we built this. I say we built this Amazon business at the bottom of the market.

[00:29:42] What I mean by that is dealers were not looking to spend ad dollars. And we were walking in with a very effective solution to find a more efficient media. But it, wasn't just, it's not just about efficiency in the end of the day, right? You look at the big, big brands, like Carvana CarMax, who are coming in a little bit more of a macro level.

[00:30:01] When, you know, they obviously have a lot more in spend at that DMA space, but they, they understand the brand awareness. They understand the long-term impact. And our solve to, um, dealers who are thinking a little bit more short term is let us prove it out for you. Within 30, 60, 90 days, you give us your sales data and lead data to match back to the channel.

[00:30:26] We can prove the return on ad spend. And so that's been very, very compelling and a space where measuring success in a media channel today is rather difficult. And so, you know, Amazon being on that bleeding edge, we can solve. Once we do that. Um, the other more basic approach without going that deeper, I say full funnel, Amazon advertising is what we've we've brought to market.

[00:30:52] You can just look at your overall media mix, put everybody on paper, your vendor fees, your Google specs. Your, um, cars.com. Third-party endemic snake oil, uh, listing, right, right. Oh, that's beyond there. Throw the, the, you know, some random tool that you bought, you know, you're paying 600 a month, add it all up.

[00:31:16] Calculate your cost per car sold simple math. Right. And back in, back into your media plan from there, you'll probably forget. 50 $60,000. So you can start to spend in a more longer-term media buy like a brand awareness campaign, like a awesome video asset on OTT that talks about so-and-so dealer. Right?

[00:31:40] And your message in the local market, you can compete is what I'm telling dealers with this. I'm not saying buy us because it's Amazon. No I'm saying by the, into the media channel and instruct your media plan to deliver results for you. Right. And so I think that's the biggest thing. Um, and I think you hit the nail on the head.

[00:31:59] I, I hope that if there's anything dealers take away from this it's that you gotta stop thinking short term with your media and marketing and embrace that long-term investment into what you're delivering. In the market, what you're saying to your prospective customers?

[00:32:14] Michael: Um, yeah, that makes perfect sense.

[00:32:16] I've got one final question for you. Um, along the lines of attribution, how, when, when we met back in Amazon, is it taking all the credit? Is there a way to account for a mixed media model? Um, how does that, how does that look out? What should dealer be aware of when mapping back through him?

[00:32:37] Vasilios: Yeah. So when we receive the data, it goes into a clean room, right?

[00:32:42] Fully anonymized. We don't know who the user is on Amazon. And what we get back are a few key results. One is the integrity of the list that we just uploaded. And when we do that, we can see the match rate on, uh, the actual user email. So what we found is like our match rates right now, and this may be an advent of.

[00:33:06] You know who the actual stakeholder in the household was when they purchased the vehicle, right. That doesn't always translate to an Amazon user account. Or the other piece to this too, is, um, you know, maybe they purchase the vehicle with, you know, a different email that was more towards their work email, but their Amazon account is on their personal email.

[00:33:28] Our average match rates are 60 to 70. As well we found and when we match it, it matched back. The, the view through attribution is from the impression, so it's not the click. And so Amazon's going to attribute, right? They know who you are when you are logged into Amazon. All of our campaigns, this is pretty, this is pretty key.

[00:33:51] We use the shipping address, zip code when and across all of our targeting. Okay. So if you go on vacation, so Bahamas who still getting an ad and a DOCSIS where you live, right? Uh, because we know that the sh zip codes on your shipping, your actual shipping address, right? So we minimize up to 30% of wasted spend and we are matched back is attributed more accurately because we're only serving an ad to a lock, an Amazon user.

[00:34:21] That's pretty key. Um, and so there's, there are efficiencies and also benefits in the match. Because we're serving it to a real eyeball. Somebody who is locked into Amazon, they live in a very specific location. And so, you know, when you ask that question, it is still variable, right? It's a moving target and we are testing and uploading the entirety of the list.

[00:34:47] The same as true though. And we asked dealers, you know, when we are to articulate this back in our reporting calls, how clean is your CRM? And, you know, we do rely on the market a little bit here on dealers, uh, effectively, uh, giving us the data right. And having that data be, uh, clean. Um, you know, and that's the other side to this too, that I think is that it's sort of a, it's a little bit of a work in progress, you know, because it is new, it's not normal for an agency to say, Hey, give me your sales data or a vendor say, Hey, give me your stuff.

[00:35:20] And people are reluctant to do it. Um, but once they understand why. Um, it it's a no brainer, right? Like I want to know as much information about my business in order to get, to spend my dollars most effectively. And I think dealers are really leaning into that.

[00:35:35] Michael: Yeah. I appreciate the realistic answer. Um, you know, and, and how in depth you went there, there's this thing in our industry in human nature, we just got to get rid of, and that is thinking.

[00:35:52] That perfection is possible. You look at NASA who arguably employees, the smartest people on planet earth, and they still manage to blow a billion dollars in a rocket that explodes on launch. And so if they're prone to not being perfect, but always striving for progress, then in our industry. We need to stop expecting that a perfect anything exists.

[00:36:24] We need to stop being so hard on vendors and on dealers because we're all screwing up and we're all failing forward. And it's impossible for us to read a Zig Ziglar book, fail forward and be like, oh, it was so inspirational. And then close it and turn around and be like, oh, what do you mean your attribution's a work in progress F this, you know, no, sorry.

[00:36:47] Um, We screw things up and it's never going to be perfect. However, what I appreciate, um, is how you laid that out and said, well, look, here's, here's how the data gets clean. Here's, here's some things that can mitigate some errors, like how well is your CRM process, et cetera, because I guess what I'm just trying to highlight here is if you're listening to this and you're expecting perfect without a process internally, you've already failed.

[00:37:16] Um, but if you do some key pieces, right, that it shouldn't have to really alter a ton, um, that are healthy practices. Anyway, this can be a very beneficial, very efficient, very practical addition, or compliment to programs that you already have running. Um, Vasilios man, thank you so much for joining me on the show.

[00:37:41] How can those listening get in touch with.

[00:37:43] Vasilios: Yeah, I'm going to be a in digital dealer in Tampa next month. So you can see me in person, but you can find me on LinkedIn. You searched, Basileus Lambos. Very easy to be found on LinkedIn. That's sort of my preferred channel per se, on social to get in contact. Um, and also cognition.

[00:38:02] digital.io is our web. Come check it out. Um, submit, submit a request for demo and our team will hop on it and we'll be there to educate, like you said, it's really about education and we're here to pursue excellence, but

[00:38:17] Michael: not perfection while the man. Thanks so much for joining me on the dealer playbook.

[00:38:23] Thank you.

[00:38:36] I'm Michael Cirillo and you've been listening to the dealer playbook podcast. If you haven't yet, please click the subscribe button wherever you're listening. Right now, leave a rating or review and share it with a colleague. Thanks for listening.

Vasilios Lambos: Amazon Advertising For Car Dealers

Episode Highlights About Amazon Advertising For Car Dealers:

Thanks, Vasilios Lambos