• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 6, 2015

The ability to combine advertising and merchandising through a programmatic platform, using data to support decisions, will become one of the major steps taken by the online advertising industry to improve ad targeting and online and offline ordering in 2016, experts agree. On Monday PureCars, a Raycom Media company, will roll out a platform for the automotive industry that combines both.

Inventory Targeting -- one module in a suite of services in the company's SmartAdvertising platform -- aims to better target ads across search, display and video. Accomplishing this requires the platform to consider the quantity of specific makes and models of automobiles on a dealership's lot, and how the inventory compares with others in the local marketplace. It also takes into consideration the number of consumers who took the car for a test drive, whether its prices are competitive, and whether it has a high probability of selling, among other factors.

"Automotive has the dirtiest data we've seen in any industry vertical," says PureCars CEO Jeremy Anspach, agreeing that the model could also apply to other industries such as retail.

For example, the hottest Nike Jordan sneakers on backorder sell out at the retailer each time the brand comes back into stock. A retailer might highlight a specific brand in Google Sitelinks in organic listings, but they will not spend advertising dollars driving traffic to the brand when demand peaks higher than supply.

Anspach agrees that combining advertising and merchandising in one platform could reduce the number of out-of-stock product orders that companies experienced during the Thanksgiving Day four-day holiday weekend in the U.S.

Automotive dealerships invest lots of money in digital advertising running through Google AdWords, Bing, and Yahoo. Anspach says it becomes challenging when the campaigns focus too much on ad groups, advertising and keywords that trigger the ads and don't take merchandising into consideration.

Inventory Targeting gives each car a merchandising score before programmatically bidding on the vehicles the dealership should spend its digital budget to advertise on search, display and video. The ads serve predominantly on Google, Anspach says.

PureCars integrates with the dealership's inventory system, which lists every vehicle on the lot, historic sales, and average days to market and sell each. The data helps to programmatically shift the digital advertising budget to those vehicles in need of a boost to have a higher probability to sell.

Dealerships can view a model’s digital advertising performance to determine whether marketing efforts are focused on the correct vehicles. A dashboard enables dealers to see inventory advertised, spend, campaign performance and performance in market.