This is vital reading for any dealer questioning a campaign’s early results—or wondering whether constant changes are making performance harder to judge.

A slow start can put pressure on a dealership to change direction. But before adjusting budgets, targeting, or strategy, someone needs to determine what the early results actually reveal. Dealers need a clear understanding of what deserves more time, what warrants intervention, and how campaign performance connects to appointments and sales.

In a recent article for Wikimotive’s newsletter, Josh Wynne, Wikimotive’s Performance Analyst, explored how repeatedly resetting campaigns can undermine meaningful evaluation. His perspective centers on examining campaign delivery, performance trends, and dealership customer data before recommending a change. In this installment of Q&A | The Wiki Way, we’re following up with Josh to explore the decisions behind that approach: how to evaluate early results, support changing incentives, use existing customer relationships, and establish shared expectations before launch.

1. When a dealer says a campaign “isn’t working” after two weeks, what do you look at before recommending a change?

Before recommending a change, we’d want to look at performance data in the campaign itself to ensure proper setup, placement, and delivery have no issues. Google’s learning period takes up to 30 days to resolve, so ideally, if there are no issues with ad delivery, placement, and no hard red flags on performance trends since launch, we’d almost always recommend that the campaign makes its way fully through the learning period to establish its fully scoped audience before pulling the plug.

Dealer Takeaway | Before requesting a campaign change, ask your marketing partner to check setup, placement, delivery, and early performance trends. Establish whether there is a specific problem that warrants intervention.

2. You recommend giving an initiative at least 30 days, and ideally 60. What can you learn in the first 30 days, and what becomes clearer in the second 30? When would those windows be too short or unnecessarily long?

The first 30 days are absolutely essential for the campaign to make it through the learning period so it can learn and optimize for the established audience. The second 30 days allow the campaign to be benchmarked against itself to inform further adjustments, analyze competitors, and more.

Dealer Takeaway: Schedule an initial performance review and a later comparison against the campaign’s own results. Ask what each review period should reveal before deciding whether to change direction.

3. What kinds of campaign changes tend to disrupt the analysis most? Are there updates a dealer can make mid-campaign without undermining the longer strategy?

Changing the smart bidding strategy mid-campaign, for example, moving from “maximize clicks” to “maximize conversions.” This usually will completely reset the learning period before it even finishes. Secondly, making aggressive budget changes during the learning window can strip away the ability to pace ads predictably, triggering a full ad learning reset phase. Thirdly, modifying active audience targeting such as location radii, age brackets, or core demographics will usually also force the ad platform to build entirely new user profiles from scratch.

Dealer Takeaway: Discuss changes to bidding, budget, or targeting with your marketing partner before implementing them. Ask how each adjustment could affect delivery and your ability to compare results.

4. How do you distinguish a campaign that needs more time from one with a genuine problem—such as the wrong audience, a weak offer, poor tracking, or unsuitable inventory?

There are a few signals we can rely on for early performance analysis, such as CTR, CPC, and conversion rate. For example, if CTR is disastrously low while CPC is very high along with an abysmal conversion rate, then this would require a second look at the campaign itself to ensure proper optimization/audience targeting, GEO targeting, etc. The latter is also true: if we had a healthy CTR, CPC, and conversion rate, it would mean that the campaign is being served to an optimized audience and performing well.

Dealer Takeaway: Ask your marketing partner to review click-through rate, cost per click, and conversion rate together. Have them explain what the combined trends suggest and which issues require investigation.

5. Your article calls first-party data the highest-converting audience. Which dealership audiences are you referring to, and what results have led you to that conclusion? Are there situations where a prospecting audience performs better for the objective at hand?

First-party audience data is usually the highest-converting if utilized correctly because it’s data that a dealer has in their CRM for existing and potential customers rather than just an algorithm supporting an ad being served to an audience of unaffiliated potential buyers. Depending on the intention of the campaign, there are for sure many instances where first-party data doesn’t serve the objective. It’s really the combination of both in concert that gets the job done, and done well.

Dealer Takeaway: Clarify whether a campaign is intended to reconnect with known customers or reach new prospects. Ask how your customer data and prospecting audiences support that objective.

6. What first-party data does a dealer often already have but fail to use effectively? What has to be in place for that data to improve targeting or measurement?

Previous customers that are in-market to purchase or lease their next vehicle. This can also be broken down into two lanes: people that currently service their vehicle at the dealership and people that do not.

The effective use of reporting through the CRM needs to be batched correctly and streamlined, meaning that recurring use cases of first-party data should be woven into the ongoing store customer acquisition process. I.e., customers who purchased but do not service (service acquisition), or the inverse of that (sales acquisition), etc. This is just a single example; the point being that we can interact with these existing and potential customers through marketing differently to optimize outcomes.

Dealer Takeaway: Work with your CRM team to identify customers who purchased but do not service with you, and service customers who have not purchased. Discuss separate messages that reflect each group’s relationship with the store.

7. Monthly OEM incentives are a fact of dealership life. How would you structure campaigns so a store can update current offers while preserving a steadier foundation for learning and measurement?

We can break this down into two approaches: Direct Marketing (dedicated paid campaigns exclusively for incentives) and Supporting Marketing (incentives utilized in ad copy/creative but within an existing new vehicle campaign as a support mechanism).

I am generally against direct marketing for monthly OEM incentives because dealers end up competing directly with the OEMs they serve over the same message. Regarding supportive marketing, incentives are an absolutely great strategy to use in existing and new vehicle campaigns. Aside from that, the real magic happens on a dealer’s website when these offers are woven into the fabric of the user experience. This includes homepage banners, SRP banners, SRP cards, pricing stack, specials pages, etc. This way, the OEM stays in their lane and handles the heavy (paid) awareness lift, while the dealer can support the hell out of it to maximize results.

Luckily, the majority of dealers are enrolled in an OEM website program with an approved website provider. Some OEMs/website providers do a great job of syndicating banners, specials, etc. to a dealer’s website ongoing to lessen the burden that a dealership needs to focus on regarding advertising in lock-step with the OEM for incentives, but the latter of this statement is also true where some OEMs are not doing enough to help dealers, and in those cases it’s up to the dealers to find a partner that can assist with creative. My personal opinion is that dealers advertising incentives through ongoing, solely dedicated paid advertising campaigns is a waste of time and money.

Dealer Takeaway: Review how current incentives appear in existing campaigns and across your website. Confirm who keeps banners, inventory messaging, and specials pages current—and where your website provider needs support.

8. What does it mean in practice for a dealer to compete with its own OEM in advertising? Which searches or audiences would you review to see whether that is happening?

This often occurs if a dealer has a campaign solely dedicated to incentive-based searches where the OEM is buying that space already. This significantly drives up advertising cost for the dealer, and very often, a smarter approach, as stated above, is to weave the value into existing campaigns rather than have a dedicated campaign serving the same purpose as the OEM’s.

Dealer Takeaway: Ask your marketing partner whether dedicated incentive campaigns overlap with advertising your OEM already runs. Review whether incorporating those offers into existing campaigns would make better use of the budget.

9. If a competing dealer is promoting the same manufacturer incentive, what can the local store say or show that gives a shopper a reason to choose that dealership?

This depends on how they are promoting it. If they have a solely dedicated paid campaign with the same intent as the OEM, then they are likely hitting diminishing returns. If a competitor is taking the supportive marketing approach and the dealer in the example here is not, then they are missing out.

Dealer Takeaway: Check whether shoppers can easily find the manufacturer offers your competitors are promoting. Discuss how those incentives can support your existing campaigns and dealership website.

10. Which outcomes should a dealer use to judge a 60-day campaign beyond the platform’s reported leads or conversions? How do you account for lead quality and what happens in the showroom?

CRM’s do a poor job of attribution because the ADF lead format does not send the referral data for the advertising source. Dealers only know if it’s a website lead in that regard, and not enough dealers ask the “How did you find us?” question during the customer acquisition and/or sales process. Total website lead count, lead-to-appointment set rate, and lead-to-sale rate are all great metrics to have a handle on at the store level to associate with campaign performance and the metrics that are shown in the platforms.

Dealer Takeaway: Review website leads, lead-to-appointment rates, and lead-to-sale rates alongside advertising reports. Consistently ask shoppers how they found the dealership to add context to the available attribution.

11. Can you describe a campaign where holding the strategy steady paid off—or one where intervening early was clearly the right call? What evidence made the decision clear?

A good example of holding a campaign steady is any campaign that makes it through the learning phase and sees consistent improvements throughout its lifespan. On the flip side, intervening early (before the learning phase completes) can be the right move if the desired result is nowhere near being reached, or if there is something that is discovered, such as accidental direct competition with a sister store, etc.

Dealer Takeaway: Ask your marketing partner to explain the evidence behind a recommendation to wait or intervene. Check for identifiable problems, including unintended competition between sister stores, before approving a major change.

12. What should a dealer and its marketing partner agree on before launch so the first difficult week does not trigger an improvised reset?

A dealer and their marketing partner should agree, when launching any new campaign, that the learning period needs to be resolved and that all targeting, budget, and more should be clear as day for both the dealer and the vendor at launch.

Dealer Takeaway: Before launch, confirm the campaign’s targeting, budget, and expectations with your marketing partner. Agree on when performance will be reviewed so an early difficult week has a planned response.