Johnson Automotive Group’s Holy Grail: A Decade of Multi-Touch Attribution

Most car shoppers never fill out a form. They browse, compare across sites, and walk into the showroom saying they “saw it online.” For most dealers, that journey is invisible, and ad budgets get decided on guesswork.

Johnson Automotive Group has been seeing that journey for more than a decade. Since 2015, Clarivoy has been the first place its marketing team goes to answer one question: what is actually leading to sales?

“I’ve always referred to it as my holy grail,” said Erick, Director of Marketing at Johnson Automotive Group. “It really fills in that gap.”

Today, Erick leads a six-person internal team, including Marketing Coordinator Kaity, running an almost entirely digital strategy. Clarivoy helps them defend proven spend, find where deals break down, and give real-time answers to their store leaders.

“Nothing else is gonna give you visibility into your marketing efforts the way that Clarivoy does,” Kaity said.

At a Glance

• 10+ years: Using Clarivoy’s multi-touch attribution, since 2015
• 7.5 and 8.8 days faster: Average days to sale at the group’s two Hyundai stores over the past year
• 6-person: Internal marketing team running the entire digital strategy for all rooftops

The Story

A group built on volume, profit, and CSI.

Johnson Automotive Group opened its first store, a Lexus dealership, in 1991. The group grew quickly through the 2000s, adding franchises and expanding into new markets.

It is still privately and locally owned. Most stores run a volume strategy, and leadership keeps three priorities front and center: volume, profit, and CSI. And the group remains in growth mode to this day.

“We have a recipe for success with our marketing strategies, and we just have to tweak that recipe for each store,” Erick said. “Whether it’s a new store that we don’t have any customers in, or a store with a lot of competition.”

A marketer who grew up around cars.

Erick’s path to automotive marketing started in a driveway. As a kid, he helped his dad sell used cars on the side.

He studied marketing in college and worked at a dealership the whole way through. He started on the wash rack and was the used-car manager by graduation.

That was the mid-’90s. Erick could see the internet was about to change how people bought cars, so he and his future wife moved to Los Angeles to be part of it.

He joined CarsDirect as its 36th employee. He spent 12 years there, helping build one of the first online car-buying programs, years before others now in the market.

Later, Erick stepped outside the industry. He spent about six years at a digital agency that worked with anyone but car dealers, as well as at an e-commerce business.

“It was sort of a journey to see if there were other industries I would rather work in,” he said. “That sort of answered my question that I missed automotive.”

From traditional media to an internal digital agency.

Erick joined Johnson Automotive Group as Director of Marketing in 2014. The previous marketing team came from radio and broadcast, and the group needed a reset.

“They just couldn’t really make the transition from traditional tactics and knowledge into the digital side,” Erick said. “The company was looking for a reset, really wanting to go all in on digital.”

Today his team has six people who act as an internal agency for every store. The mix is almost entirely digital, with a little radio and little to no TV.

The newest member is Kaity, Marketing Coordinator, who came from one of the group’s BDC departments.

“She was handling the opportunities before. Now she’s generating them,” Erick said.

The Challenge

Decisions were being made on half the picture.

Before Clarivoy, store-level decisions ran on CRM reporting, which credits the first source. Google Analytics mostly credited the last click.

Erick knew the real shopping journey happened in the gray area between the two. He just could not prove it.

“I knew it was happening, but it wasn’t measurable in closing ratio lead reports in the CRM,” he said. “There’s so much more to the picture.”

The gap gets worse at the showroom. When a walk-in arrives, the best a salesperson usually hears is “I was looking at cars online.”

“Customers are not gonna be like, ‘Oh, well, I was on CarGurus and then I went to Autotrader.’ They don’t know where they went,” Erick said. “That gets logged as a showroom visit, and there’s nothing in the CRM to help identify what brought them in.”

The report that changed everything.

In 2015, Erick got fed up with one of his marketplace vendors and canceled it across every store.

The vendor responded by running a multi-touch attribution report to show what was actually happening. For Erick, the report answered one question and raised a bigger one.

“I’m like, ‘This is what I should be seeing anyway. If this is the real picture, why aren’t you doing this? Why are you only showing this to dealers that cancel?’”

His team tracked down where the data came from and signed directly with Clarivoy. That vendor eventually came back on board.

Why Clarivoy

A crystal ball for the anonymous shopper.

For Erick, Clarivoy fills the gap between first-touch CRM credit and last-click analytics. It shows the full path to purchase, most of which happens before a shopper ever submits a lead.

“It literally gives me almost like a crystal ball into validating and justifying what my gut was telling me,” he said.

He still spends more time in Clarivoy than in Google Analytics. Traffic metrics matter less to him than what is producing real opportunities and sold cars, including advertised cost per car sold by source.

A competitive edge most dealers don’t have.

When Johnson Automotive Group first signed on, few dealers were using Clarivoy. Erick saw that as an advantage that still holds.

“Most of my competitors are looking at the wrong data to determine their advertising decisions,” he said. “I always have a leg up by understanding the true path to purchase, which is mostly anonymous.”

Beyond the siloed dashboards.

For Kaity, the value is having one place to see everything. Website reports, email reports, CRM reports, and every third-party dashboard all tell part of the story.

“It’s a lot of places to check for one person, or even a small team of people,” Kaity said. “Clarivoy is one of the best ways to see the reporting beyond the siloed dashboards.”

She also uses it to spot trends by market and ZIP code, and to see what may be influencing vehicle sales in a specific area.

How They Use It

Keeping calm when the market panics.

When the market slows, dealership leaders look hard at their three biggest expenses: advertising, floor plan, and personnel. Every red number month over month or year over year raises the same question. Is there something else we should be doing?

“When the market slows or shopper activity changes a little bit, everybody goes into panic mode,” Erick said.

Clarivoy is how Erick answers with data instead of opinion. More often than not, the data points away from cutting marketing spend.

“We have to fish where the fish are,” Erick said. “There’s places that I’ve caught fish before. Stop trying to look for new spots when we already have spots that are proven.”

Measuring the impact of change.

Johnson Automotive Group’s two Hyundai stores made changes over the past year, including new leadership and follow-up processes. Clarivoy’s days-to-sale reporting showed the results.

• 56.9 → 49.4 days: Average days to sale at the Apex Hyundai store, over the year
• 59.2 → 50.4 days: Average days to sale at the Wake Forest Hyundai store, over the year
• 7.5 and 8.8 days: Faster to sale at Apex and Wake Forest, respectively

Real-time answers on the road.

Next month, Erick heads out on his roadshow to sit down with each store’s leadership, and the new Clarivoy dashboard with its built-in AI assistant, Claire, arrives just in time.

“This new Clarivoy dashboard couldn’t have come at a better time,” Erick said. “Oftentimes I say, ‘Let me take some notes and I’ll get back to you.’ Now I think we’ll be able to dive into things in the moment and come to some answers right away.”

After just one day on the new platform, he was already impressed.

“With Claire built into it, I feel like this might be everything I would not even know that I would ask for,” he said.

What They’d Tell Other Dealers

Ask what the other 99% are doing.

Erick’s pitch to another dealer group starts with a simple question about their own website.

“You have 20,000 visitors to your website every month, and say 15,000 of them are looking at cars, but you get 150 leads,” he said. “So what are the rest of those people doing? Wouldn’t you like to know?”

It is the old advertising line about knowing half your spend works, but not which half. Clarivoy, Erick says, closes much of that gap.

“It might not be 100 percent, but it’s a lot more than half,” he said. “You’re not just using your gut to make advertising decisions. You can use true data on what customers are doing that leads to an actual sale.”

See your marketing as one picture.

Kaity’s advice focuses on the reporting sprawl every dealership lives with.

“Every dealership has their own assortment of third parties and reporting. It’s all over the place,” Kaity said.

Clarivoy brings it into one view, so the team can see what they are doing well and what they need to improve on.

The bottom line.

For a group that is opening new stores and adjusting its recipe for every market, guessing is expensive. Clarivoy gives Johnson Automotive Group’s marketing team the proof to protect what works, fix what doesn’t, and keep fishing where the fish are.

“We’re not just looking at what’s not working; we’re looking at why it’s not working. Or vice versa: what is working, and why it’s working. Clarivoy helps tell that story,” Kaity said.