Beyond Vanity Metrics: How to Truly Measure Streaming TV Success

Beyond Vanity Metrics: Focusing on In-Store and Advanced Attribution

Your latest streaming TV report just landed in your inbox. It’s filled with impressive numbers: one million impressions, a 95% video completion rate, and massive reach across your market. It looks great on paper, but it avoids the only question that actually matters: how many cars did it sell? It’s time to move past these "vanity metrics" and focus on the business outcomes that truly grow your dealership.

The Problem with Vanity Metrics

In digital marketing, vanity metrics are numbers that are easy to measure but don’t necessarily correlate with business success. This includes impressions, reach, and frequency. While useful for gauging the scale of a campaign, they tell you nothing about its actual impact. The true success metrics for any dealership campaign are tangible, in-store activities: website leads, vehicle sales, and service Repair Orders (ROs). As James Klaus of Loon Advertising insists, "The way you want to grade success in programmatic marketing is by in-store consumer actions... Did you feel it in the store?"

Connecting the Dots with Modern Attribution

The historical challenge has always been connecting an ad viewed on a living room TV to a vehicle purchased in a showroom. Today, modern attribution tools make this possible, and you should demand them from your marketing partner.

• Headless Analytics: This technology tracks a user's entire journey, not just their direct clicks. A customer can see your ad on their TV, never touch the remote, but later search for your dealership on their phone and fill out a form. Headless analytics intelligently attributes that lead back to the initial ad view, giving you a far more accurate picture of your ad’s influence.
• Data Clean Rooms: This is the ultimate proof of ROI. By securely and anonymously matching your sales data with the ad platform's data, a clean room can tell you exactly how many households that bought a car were first exposed to your specific streaming ads. It can even reveal who saw your ad and then bought from a competitor—a powerful insight that helps you understand your ad’s impact on the entire market.

It's time to change the conversation with your marketing provider. Stop accepting reports that only show impressions and reach. Demand attribution that connects your ad spend directly to your dealership's most important objectives.

‍