Capturing people in the 2.5% auto purchase window

The Challenge

The time people take to choose and buy a new car is falling all the time. According to eBay Motors Group, the amount of time between a consumer first enquiring about a new or used car to making a purchase in Dec ‘23 is 37 days (down from -7.7% from the previous year).

While that may sound like a long time, according to the RAC that purchase window is open only once every four years, meaning consumers are in the auto purchase mindset for just 2.5% of the time.

With such a short window of opportunity for automotive brands, one of the biggest challenges automotive marketers face is knowing when a potential customer is actually in-market for a new vehicle.

Two other factors complicated the situation further;

• The first was that JLR has a policy of using owned channels first, and wanted to look into how to enhance and drive more effectiveness around those.
• The second was that the company’s media budget was limited as an after-effect of the pandemic.

JLR turned to LiveRamp to help them solve this problem.

The Solution

Rather than using marketing budget using targeted paid media tactics, JLR wanted to leverage permissioned partner data via LiveRamp into its own data ecosystem, including the CRM system. That meant working closely with LiveRamp to bring data into its instance of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and further incorporate it into their modelling.

The other key element of the relationship was LiveRamp’s data collaboration partnership with car-buying comparison site Carwow.

Car buyers use the Carwow site to configure their ideal vehicle, book a test drive, and get a price. Using LiveRamp’s technology, JLR was able to collaborate with Carwow and use that intent data in a privacy-compliant way to work out when a particular Carwow user was in-market.

Results

By using their own first-party data and data collaboration strategies, one very direct and one more indirect, JLR were able to get a more accurate in-market signal from potential buyers. These two steps also allowed JLR to precisely target those audiences, without having the need to utilise expensive audience targeting methodologies.

Overall, the campaign delivered JLR a 12:1 return on investment for their campaigns.

To learn more about how JLR and LiveRamp are partnering, watch the interview of LiveRamp’s Auto Lead, Jon Cagle, talking to Ben Cheadle from JLR.