How Auto Dealerships Turn Shopper Insights Into Visits and Car Sales

Car buyers don’t shop endlessly. In Azira’s recent U.S. consumer survey*, 27% of respondents said they go straight to a dealership when in the market for a new car, and 41% visit only 1–3 dealerships before making a decision.  For auto dealers, that means every visit counts and every advertising dollar needs to drive high-intent shoppers. 

To grow in today’s market, dealership marketers must confidently answer three critical questions:

• Who are my customers and my competitors’ customers?
• Am I targeting and engaging the right audience?
• Are my advertising dollars driving dealership visitation and car sales? 

Traditional KPIs like impressions and click-through rate no longer determine the success of a marketing campaign. These metrics may indicate online activity, but they don’t capture what actually motivates someone to buy. In fact, 60% of people we surveyed said car features and special offers are what ultimately drive them to make a purchase. Dealerships who rely only on broad digital metrics risk missing these deeper motivators.

With Azira, dealerships can move beyond guesswork and gain a holistic view of shopper behavior, revealing when, where, and how their target audiences move about in the real world, including: 

• Visitation Times – Understand the busiest days and peak shopping hours of your dealership or your competitors.
  
  
• Mobile Trade Areas – Map where and how far dealership visitors are actually coming from.
  
  
• Origin Points & Pathing – See where buyers spend their time, which competitors they visit, and where shoppers were 30 minutes before and after visiting your lot.
  
  
• Demographics & Affinities – Layer in age, household income, education, and brand affinities to identify high-value audience segments.

But customer insights are only the start. With Azira, dealerships can build high-intent target audiences from those insights, activate precise digital advertising campaigns across display, CTV, DOOH, and more, and then measure and attribute performance in real time. Our platform connects advertising exposure directly to dealership visits, proving which campaigns actually drove shoppers through your doors. With first-party data, you can match back your ads to dealership visits and car sales, showing which channels, creative, and audiences deliver the most value and proving your return-on-ad-spend (ROAS).

Today’s most successful dealerships are the ones that connect digital ad exposure directly to real-world visits and car sales. With Azira’s location-based digital advertising platform, dealership marketers can answer the questions that matter most, and turn their advertising dollars into measurable results that attract the right shoppers at the right time, resulting in actual car sales.

Learn more about how Azira can benefit your auto dealership, or contact us today. 

_{*Azira-commissioned survey of 500 U.S. panelists, census-balanced, conducted in August 2025 to measure consumer sentiment and behavior.}

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