In the market for a new vehicle? Talk to Daniel Kim.
“I probably helped two dozen people buy cars on a yearly basis,” said the self-proclaimed auto enthusiast, who doesn’t charge for the service. “I just know how to work with the dealers. I know the pain points and how to negotiate for a good deal.”
Kim’s day job, meanwhile, is helping those same dealers sell more cars by optimizing their digital marketing spending. His Irvine-based analytics company, Orbee, focuses on “advertising waste,” including bot traffic that eats up about 40% of paid digital advertising stemming from the automotive industry.
About 200 dealerships nationwide have subscribed to Orbee’s services since the company’s 2015 inception, including Mercedes-Bens of Laguna Niguel, Audi South Coast in Santa Ana, Delillo Chevrolet in Huntington Beach and Tuttle-Click Automotive Group in Irvine.
“We haven’t experienced a lot of issues with bot traffic, but I do know that it’s rampant across our industry and probably across several industries for that matter,” said Shirley Dordell, marketing director at Tuttle-Click, which posted about $950 million in sales last year. “[The Orbee collaboration] has definitely brought a lot of transparency when it comes to where our (digital) traffic is coming from and where we are spending our ad dollars, and what’s working and what’s not.”
What’s a Bot?
Bots are software applications that perform automated tasks online at a scale and speed that surpasses human capabilities—think perusing thousands of webpages in a matter of minutes. Some benevolent bots index website content so it can be found by search engines. Malevolent bots are created to distribute malware or generate false ad clicks. Orbee’s proprietary platform detects the latter—its clients want to be sure that the traffic they’re paying for is legitimate. It cross-references all visitor data it collects against a list of known “bad IP and device ID combinations.” It also analyzes visitor behavior, looking for erratic moves, such as clicking on 10 links per second.
“We put our code on a dealer’s site, and we look at every single customer that comes,” Kim said. “For the average dealership, we probably collect about one million data points on a monthly basis.”
Digital display ads—dealers’ favorites—are usually sold and bought via online ad exchanges.
“You got people that say, ‘Hey I have these ads that I want to show,’ and people who say, ‘Hey I got all these website properties where we can show your ad,’ and it’s very easy for someone who owns these properties to deploy bots and make it look like [potential consumers] clicked on the ad—because every time someone clicks on that ad—bot or human—they get paid for it,” he said.
Orbee’s team of nine employees has encountered “some really crazy things,” he said, including “traffic coming from pornographic websites,” and a publisher with “90% bot traffic.”
“So the dealership was spending $5,000 a month on this advertising source—that’s $4,500 in wasted money,” Kim said. “It adds up … We are not trying to make anybody look bad, but if we do see areas where you need improvement or we see that there’s a lot of waste that’s going on, then we’ll talk to the dealership and say, ‘Get together with the vendor to fix the problem.’”
Human Grade
Orbee, whose corporate name is Sparki Labs Inc., also analyzes the quality of “human” traffic that’s directed to the dealers’ sites. It looks at visitor location, as an “Irvine shop does not want to serve ads to folks up in the Valley—they are not going to drive down,” Kim said. Consumers’ interests and needs are another focal point—a service campaign from a BMW dealership should not appear in front of “somebody who’s got a 2005 Honda Civic who wants to get an oil change for $15.”
“We have a platform to identify search queries that we feel are not optimal,” he said. “We download a list and give it to the (dealer’s) ad agency and say, ‘Add these search queries into your negative keyword list so you don’t serve ads to these people in the future.’”
Orbe also analyzes dealers’ websites, pointing to instances where the content or design can be optimized to better serve specific consumers. For example, visitors identified as in the market for a pickup should not be directed to a dealer’s sedan inventory page.
Tuttle-Click has six dealerships in the state and another 11 in Arizona, and works with “hundreds” of digital advertising vendors. The group also uses Orbee’s platform to consolidate its monthly reports—a process Dordell refers to as an “unbiased way to look at data, to see consumers’ behavior and their shopping patterns,” as vendors in some instances rely on different information than what the dealership is trying to analyze.
“[Digital advertising] is something that our group invests a lot of energy, money and effort into, and it’s changing every day,” she said. “I think that a consumer has a lot of options and is doing a lot of research online. We’re trying to reach those that are in market, so doing that in an educated way definitely helps.”
Kim, a Wharton alum, got the idea for Orbee while working at consulting giant Bain & Co. on Atlanta-based Cox Automotive Inc.’s account. His very first job was at Neoflam in Irvine, a then-small company “run by an immigrant” that generated about $120 million in sales of ceramic cookware just five years after it entered the U.S. market.
“I probably learned more things there about how to run [Orbee] than working at Bain,” Kim laughed.
