Mercedes-Benz Toronto Retail Group
Mercedes-Benz: Dynamic Inventory Ads

The Goal

Drive qualified traffic to Toronto Mercedes Dealers

The Target

Toronto Luxury Car Buyers

Insights and Strategy

Canadian consumers are driving luxury vehicles off dealership lots at a frenzied pace supported by the burgeoning wealth of the Boomers and the brand-centric Millennials. The competition is stiff, manufacturers are expanding their line-ups to attract new customers to their dealerships, none more so than Mercedes-Benz that is determined to hold its position as the number one luxury automotive brand.

Because 80% of car purchases start online, consumers are walking into dealerships armed with information about nameplates on show and in most cases a preference to a specific model. The statistics on dealership experiences are not favorable – one in two people have a negative experience, typically not finding what they’re looking for. To make matters worse, in Toronto especially, competitor dealerships are within walking distance from one another!

The Mercedes-Benz Toronto Retail Group identified four high-valued Environics potential customer segments within the Greater Toronto Area, drilling down to a postal code level.

The Challenge

With flat budgets, increasingly fierce competition, and a dealership experience that disappoints when consumers can’t find what they’re looking for, the agency set out to connect prospective buyers with the actual cars on the lot.

The Idea

To update the brand’s search ads with first party inventory data from the car lots of all seven dealerships within the Mercedes-Benz Toronto Retail Group.

The Plan

Integrating this first party data allowed consumers to see within the search ad the number of available nameplates, the lowest price, as well as information about the closest dealership to their physical location. If the dealer did not have the queried model in stock, the ad was automatically paused and the customer saw a regional ad highlighting the number of models at the remaining dealerships.

This execution was managed through a dynamically-updated feed that integrated with the search ads, organized on a nameplate level. The ads gave prospective customers all of the information they needed before landing on the site, allowing the brand to bypass the click altogether in a high competitive and costly market. At every point in time the team was pushing nameplates we knew we could sell.

The agency developed a script that pulled raw data from the dealer inventory feed into a Google sheet. This sheet served as the data hub that housed the brand’s monthly offers and all nameplate data (organized by model, dealer, price, and year). By utilizing ad customizers the team was able to not only dynamically update the dealer’s sales offers, but also update inventory data, price points and dealership locations – all in real time! The resulting ads put very valuable data right at the consumer’s fingertips.

The Results

The brand saw a dramatic improvement in results, with 30% increase in inventory searches on the dealer sites, 38% decrease in cost per inventory search and a 268% improvement in click-through rate on the ads in a highly competitive automotive search environment.