Edmunds.com Drives Towards Success by Leveraging IP Intelligence to Enhance the Online Experience for Site Visitors – and Increase Revenue for Online Advertisers
Scenario
The mission of Edmunds Inc. is to empower, engage and educate automotive consumers, enthusiasts and insiders. The company prides itself on being the premier online resource for automotive consumer information and tailors content for its audience through four websites: Edmunds.com®, Edmunds’ InsideLineSM, Edmunds CarSpaceSM and Edmunds’ AutoObserver. Its most popular feature, the Edmunds.com TMV® “True Market Value”, is relied upon by millions of people seeking current transaction prices for new and used vehicles.
In order for Edmunds.com to enhance and improve the online consumer experience, increase advertising revenue, and enhance the performance of partner ads, Edmunds needed to know where website visitors were geographically located so advertisements and content would be geographically relevant. Although some areas of the website request users to supply a zip code during their car shopping experience, a number of consumers either choose not to do so or do not enter the site in a way that would capture that information. This presented a problem for Edmunds because it was not able to obtain essential information about some of its website visitors in order to provide accurate and relevant information — such as regional advertisements and accurate True Market Value information on cars in the visitor’s area.
Solution
When investigating ways to improve the user experience for those consumers who were not sharing location information, Edmunds elected to deploy IP Intelligence technology in order to more effectively reach those users, helping to improve site interactions while also increasing the value of site traffic for its advertiser clients.
Through recommendations from partner vendors and after extensive technical analysis, Edmunds selected Digital Element’s NetAcuity® solution. Edmunds was impressed with the ease of implementation, the frequency and simplicity of data updates, and the consistency and high accuracy of the data. All of these were key factors when examining ways in which the technology could be leveraged within the existing online strategy.
“We utilize Digital Element’s IP Intelligence to improve the user experience with geographically relevant car pricing data for site visitors and to realize incremental revenue by responding to advertiser client needs to serve geographically targeted advertising messages,” said Jay Fayloga, director of advertising tools for Edmunds.com. “Digital Element’s technology allows us to create a truly valuable online experience for both site visitors and advertisers alike.”
Additionally, Edmunds is using the NetAcuity data to resolve unknown user locations so the company can map website visitors to Designated Market Areas (DMAs), providing placements for its national and local advertising partners at more familiar levels.
Success
In a short period of time, Edmunds has found that adding IP Intelligence into its online strategy has been successful in many areas including simplifying and enhancing the experience of site visitors, increasing local advertising inventory and increasing revenue.
Car shopping via Edmunds.com is now optimized to present local information to website visitors based on geographic location. For example, vehicle pricing for Edmunds’ TMV product is based on regional data so instantly knowing where visitors are coming from allows the website to provide accurate True Market Value information for each visitor’s area. Also, with Edmunds now having the capability to identify the location of most of its site visitors, depending on what section of the website they visited, local advertising inventory has increased by approximately 20 to 30 percent. The result is an improved customer experience, along with increased advertising revenue and performance.
According to Fayloga, “NetAcuity has lived up to the high expectations of taking content delivery to the next level.”