CarShop transforms digital marketing analytics & ROI optimisation with SegmentStream

Introduction:

CarShop.co.uk — the leading used car supermarket in the UK that has revolutionised the automotive retail space with its expansive selection of quality used vehicles at competitive prices. They offer a full spectrum of services including finance options, aftersales support, and vehicle maintenance.

Goals:

In September 2023, CarShop partnered with SegmentStream to enhance its digital marketing measurement. This collaboration aimed to solve core attribution challenges and optimise the marketing mix across digital channels:

• Unify cross-channel marketing & sales data and automate ROI reporting.
  
  CarShop is a sophisticated business with complex operations and multiple IT systems. As a result, the customer and sales data were scattered across multiple databases.
  
  Besides this, the CarShop marketing team runs advertising campaigns across various platforms, making it difficult to analyse cross-channel media performance, especially when it comes to conversions such as Offline Sales.
  
  In addition to this, the CarShop business has unique requirements for tracking marketing performance. For example, there was a specific need to support negative values in the Conversion Value field, allowing CarShop to report on actual margins.
  
  To achieve agility and gain a complete picture of advertising ROI, it was important to bring all the data into one place and unify it for fully automated, enhanced marketing reporting.
• Understand the true, incremental ROI of top-of-funnel paid media activities.
  
  Buying a car involves a complex, lengthy decision-making process, often spanning multiple devices and exceeding the typical 7-day attribution windows. Traditional models fail to capture this extended journey, making it impossible to properly evaluate upper-funnel advertising activities across Paid Social, Video, or Display.
  
  While such activities often have a positive long-term impact on overall sales, they rarely result in immediate conversions. Due to this, channels such as Facebook Ads, Display & Video 360 or YouTube often don’t get the sales credit they deserve.
  
  As a result, it was extremely difficult for CarShop to make budget allocation decisions in the upper-funnel campaigns without having trustworthy data about the real revenue contribution.
• Future-proof ROI measurement by going beyond cookie-based attribution.
  
  In addition to long customer journeys, traditional marketing attribution tools are heavily impacted by modern-day tracking restrictions and privacy regulations. GDPR and Intelligent Tracking Prevention, along with the advent of iOS 17, private browsing modes, ad blockers, and various other limitations, lead to the expiration or removal of cookies.
  
  This disrupts the functionality of conventional attribution software, which relies on cookies to deterministically track customers across multiple touchpoints with the website.
  
  With the tightening of privacy laws, it became crucial for CarShop to adjust its marketing analytics to align with the current landscape and implement a cookieless marketing measurement solution.
• Find the most optimal marketing mix to achieve the highest revenue returns.
  
  The primary goal of any marketing analytics platform is to help marketers make better budget allocation decisions and improve the overall return on ad spend. However, many analytics tools often provide marketers with even more data to analyse, without helping them make sense of this data.
  
  The team at CarShop was looking for a solution that goes beyond standard reporting and offers comprehensive insights about how to invest their marketing budget across a portfolio of channels and campaigns, providing data-driven guidance on paid media budget allocation.

The SegmentStream overview:

SegmentStream — AI-powered analytics & marketing mix optimisation platform.

SegmentStream combines a customer’s first-party data, such as sales and user behaviour, with third-party advertising data (ad impressions, clicks, costs). The platform then uses proprietary machine-learning models to measure the revenue contribution of each marketing channel and campaign, helping marketers gain a complete picture of their marketing effectiveness.

Key SegmentStream solutions for CarShop:

• A unified, highly customisable, and fully automated ROI reporting. By combining cross-channel advertising data, website user behaviour data, and conversion data (both online and offline), SegmentStream has enabled CarShop marketers with a single interface to track their core KPIs across multiple advertising platforms.
• Tailored reporting for various stakeholders. We were also able to address the unique needs of various internal stakeholders, from providing high-level overviews for senior management like the Head of Marketing to detailed campaign analyses for Media Buying teams. This flexibility ensures that each department, regardless of its focus, receives tailored data insights, supporting informed decision-making across the company’s diverse marketing operations.

Example of SegmentStream report. Demo data.

• AI-driven marketing attribution for enhanced visibility into top-of-funnel performance. SegmentStream implemented 14 custom ML models for both online and offline conversions, each tailored to specific profit margins. It allows CarShop to accurately measure marketing ROI beyond just cookie-tracked conversions.
  
  In addition to this, a unique post-click + post-view attribution model has helped the CarShop team better understand the sales impact of their Paid Social, Display, and Video campaigns by incorporating data about ad impressions and their contribution to overall sales.
• AI-powered budget allocation recommendations & marketing mix scenario planning. By using SegmentStream’s Optimization module, the team at CarShop is now able to make confident and informed budget allocation decisions — both in-channel and cross-channel.

Example of SegmentStream Optimization dashboard. Demo data.

Results:

SegmentStream helped CarShop gain a deeper understanding of the real value of their paid media investments, particularly in top-of-funnel channels, leading to more informed decision-making processes for budget reallocation and channel evaluation.

• Increased visibility into top-of-funnel revenue contribution.
  
  A significant outcome of this partnership was the clarity in evaluating top-of-funnel campaigns across Paid Social, Video, and Display.
  
  Initially, based on the Last Non-Direct Attribution, Paid Social appeared to be less effective in driving offline sales, with a higher cost per action than Paid Search.
  
  However, SegmentStream’s AI-driven Attribution revealed it to be more cost-effective than previously thought, with a significantly lower CPA. This insight not only justified CarShop’s investment in this channel but also highlighted the potential for further growth.
• Newfound agility thanks to fully automated marketing reporting.
  
  By combining cross-channel advertising data with online and offline conversions (such as reservations and offline sales), the marketing team is now able to immediately gain insight into which marketing channel or campaign is driving more value and the highest margins.
  
  This, paired with SegmentStream’s Optimisation module, has transformed how CarShop analyses marketing performance and makes budget reallocation decisions. No more scattered data, or manual reporting and analysis.

Customer Testimonial:

“The collaboration with SegmentStream has been pivotal for CarShop. The platform has enabled us to navigate the complexities of modern digital marketing more precisely, leading to more effective budget allocation decisions and revealing new growth avenues in our advertising strategies.

We were pleasantly surprised by the professionalism of the SegmentStream team and their dedicated approach to our project, helping us achieve a tailored solution that uniquely matches our complex needs.”

— Natasha Holland, Head of Marketing, CarShop