A joint study between Facebook and PureCars shows the impact social marketing tools have on dealers that rely more heavily on digital retailing while cutting advertising expenses.

Understanding how today’s digital advertising resources measure and attribute offline sales back to Facebook/Instagram was one purpose of the study, which took place during the first quarter.

The study also sought to show the overall impact advertising on those channels has for automotive retail clients.

According to the study, Facebook’s Automotive Inventory Ads brought a 23% increase in vehicle sales, at a $136 cost per incremental sale. That is compared to the traditional dynamic product catalog ads on Facebook.

The analysis showed test dealers also achieving 83% of their retargeting audience and 11% of their prospecting audience. PureCars says those are significant numbers for the average automotive retailer.

In conducting the research, Facebook and PureCars studied online and offline engagement and sales rates resulting from Facebook’s automotive inventory ads and retargeting campaigns for 16 auto dealers.

For the research, observers launched a lift test in January to attempt to show the incremental impact Facebook advertising has on a dealer’s business.

Observers tracked online actions (VDP views and leads) and offline actions (vehicle sales).

PureCars chief executive officer Jeremy Anspach said an increasing number of consumers use digital retailing resources during the research, shopping, and transacting phases of vehicle buying.

“At the same time, many automotive retailers have cut their advertising spending but are still looking for ways to connect, engage and convert automotive shoppers,” Anspach said in a news release.

Anspach continued, “Auto dealers are realizing there is great power and cost efficiencies found in social marketing today that’s even more robust than just a few short years ago, and today’s sophisticated attribution technology makes it more accurate to determine ROI.”

PureCars said the high 76.4% increase in dealership web traffic means the campaign was responsible for bringing a great deal of traffic to the dealer’s site.

That, in turn, populated the retargeting audience. PureCars said that helped fuel the retargeting campaign, and that was the engine behind attribution for clearer ROI identification back to the dealer’s advertising expenditure validation.