In the spirit of continuous improvement, H/L began a quest to connect actual Toyota Sales to the advertising impressions that it was investing in.

We did this for 2 primary reasons: first, to know which media and creative executions were the most effective against actual sales. Second, to leverage that end-to-end connectivity to find the highest converting media placements from a planning standpoint.

With first-party sales data directly from Toyota, as well as troves of other data we compiled ourselves, we set out to create a revolutionary Sales Match-Back System that could turn vast amounts of data into actionable insights. This data connected the dots of who had bought a Toyota, and indicated who might be interested in buying one in the future based on their online actions. With so many paths for a buyer to take to the dealership, our Sales Match Back System had to map the exact journey each buyer took.

This empowered us to optimize which audiences we targeted, which media channels we used, our sales tactics, our creative—all based on what we knew had sold cars. Unlike other advertisers that optimize based only on online actions. We were optimizing directly to sales.

We leveraged this process across our data sharing and first-party data targeting, decreasing the cost per sale among first-party audiences by 87%, while increasing our quarterly spend on these audiences by 80%. The Toyota Sales Match Back effort has earned H/L a 2024 Silver Effie for Data-Driven Media.