CARY, N.C. -

Aimed at helping dealers justify their ad budgets, a proprietary digital solution designed to show just where ad dollars are going each month can match car buyers with the exact display campaign messages that initially brought them in the door.

A Texas dealer group that used the solution called DataMatch to increase the sales of a particular brand during a December campaign saw impressive results.

Performance-marketing agency MNI Targeted Media, which specializes in targeted ads, created the solution.

MNI Targeted Media's senior vice president of digital Matthew Fanelli says that a month after the launch of the Texas group's December campaign, 17 percent of the targeted brand's sales for December were attributed to the audience and the campaign delivered by the company.

This is a result of the DataMatch solution's ability to focus on marketing across a number of media properties to deliver specific audiences, Fanelli explained during a phone interview with Auto Remarketing late last month.

Fanelli said, "And the tool doesn't just necessarily deliver up a specific audience, but it delivers up that audience at the right place, at the right moment in time, in the right mindset – to complete a pre-determined desire to action."

MNI Targeted Media offers digital advertising programs that facilitate media strategy for engaging target audiences through cross-platform solutions that wield local, social, network, search, social, email and programmatic data.

The company presents its clients with a single point of contact for multi-platform, customized, demo- and geo-targeted advertising.

"They’re basically getting targeted down to the IP address or their mobile device ID number, that are also shared with the dealerships," Fanelli said.

Upon completion of the sale or lease payment, dealerships pass back their sales data, including customer email addresses that can be matched with target audiences.

Fanelli explained, "We’re doing a one-to-one match, to say okay, ‘we know that person X was actually exposed to this based on his or her behaviors and where we served the ad'."

The company can target consumers based on the applications they have on their smartphones, their online consumption, and offline data sources, as well.

MNI Targeted Media collects data from 7,000 plus mobile apps to identify audiences based on individual’s device ID and app usage, according to its website.

"Offline data sources include car registration data, lease registration data, their warranty data on their vehicle, and then delivering up those messages based on those three components," Fanelli explained.

When it comes to competing with sites that bring in leads like Cars.com or Autotrader, Fanelli stressed that this type of targeting can attract consumers who aren’t shopping but may still be interested in considering their next vehicle purchase.

"I think that has been the missing link, if you will, specifically in automotive advertising," Fanelli added. "This is very much centered around how do we take that display targeting to the next level and prove its worth for individual dealerships."