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Welcome
Driving value at Cars.com: Using spatial data to identify 7MM leads on dealership lots
Jeff Bloomfield
Senior Software Engineer
Cars.com
# T C 1 8
Who Are We?
Cars.com is a leading two-sided digital automotive marketplace that creates meaningful connections between buyers and sellers.
Who Am I?
Jeff BloomfieldSenior Software Engineer
Avid Amateur
Cyclist &
Commuter
Agenda
In this presentation, we’ll focus on:
• Developing processes and partnerships to capture dealer lot polygon data and visitor location data
• Using Python to generate a GEOJSON file
of dealership polygons to join with visitor data
in a data extract
• Building performant geospatial views that provides
dealers detailed information about their visitors
Cars.com revolutionized the attribution game when it released its award-winning Lot Insights dashboard, which shows physical visitors on or near a dealer’s lot.
Overview
Our Dashboard Overview
Basic Stats• 8k Monthly Views & 429
Avg Prints• 5.7 Sec Load Time• 13 Months of Daily Data• 3 Extracts
Business Problem We Needed To Solve
Changing The Value Story
Traditional Leads No Longer Telling The Whole Story We Needed a Way to Quantify Mobile Shoppers on Dealership Lots
Half went on Cars.com from a mobile device for the first time
1 week prior to their dealership visit
1 month prior
3 months prior
>3 months prior
Developing A Proof of Concept
Can We Do It?:
• How to combine data on dual-axis map?
• What data do we use for POC?
Cars-Sponsored Event:
• Mapped Wrigley as polygon
• Employees turned on location services
• Proved out solutions with 100 records
Key Requirements
Marketing:
• How many visitors on/near a lot?
• What other dealers are they visiting?
• How many visitors in a market/DMA?
Technical:
• How to map 30k+ dealer polygons?
• How to capture & process lat/long of 35MM+ monthly searches?
• How to combine 13 months of dealers & visitors into performant dashboard?
Lot Insights
Dashboard
Visitors On Lot
DMA Visitors
Cross Dealer Visitors
Dealer Polygons
Visitor Location
13 Months of Data
Building Our Geospatial Dataset
Defining a Dealership Lot
Defining A Dealership Lot
Determine your polygon criteria
• Cannot cross other dealerships
• Buffer between street & polygon
• Don’t include inaccessible areas
• Centroid determined by largest building on lot
• No jagged lines
Capturing & Maintaining Dealer Polygon Data
Name & Address of
Dealerships to Map
(300-400 monthly)
Identify Trusted
Mapping Partner
Maps Centroid,
Building & Lot
Return Monthly WKT
file to Cars (+ Exceptions)
Load to Dealer
Lot table
Develop a process to capture and update 30k+ dealership lots’ polygon data
* Unique permissions id assigned to each dealer
Capturing & Maintaining Visitor Search Data
1.1MM Daily
Searches on Cars
Apps & Mobile
50% w/Location
Services On
Device lat/long Where
Search Initiated
(Session Only)
Flag 4k Daily
Visitors Within
Dealer Polygon
Load to Lead
Walkin table
Develop a process to capture and update 35MM+ monthly searches
** Heavy lifting done in database for performance
Flag 11k Daily
Visitors .1 Miles
of Centroid
Extracting Dealer Polygons & Lot Visitors
Generating Polygons:
• Tableau geospatial functions not supported in Teradata
• Developed Python script to transform data into geojson file
• Pull unique visitors by dealer and month and roll up total sessions
• All dealer data comingled in single extract
Benefits:
• Eliminates 500k dealer records (avg 15 polygon points)
Dealer_Polygon.py
Designing our Geospatial Dashboard
Create a Dashboard Framework
Use templates and common filters:
• Standardization speeds development & ensures consistency
• Standard parameters allow us to control multiple data extracts & are performant
• Users authenticate to web portal -control access with URL with trusted authentication
User Logs Into
Web Portal
Tableau URL Sets
Parameters
Report Shows
Correct Dealer
CONTROLLING DATA ACCESS
https://...views/LotInsights/15LotInsights?CustomerUUID=82170000779&DMACODE=602
Use Targeted Extracts for Performance
Volume
Spoke – Lot InsightsDealer polygons joined with lot visitors for
last 13 months4.7MM
Spoke – Lot Insights DMA
Percent of mobile searches and percent of
devices with location services on in each
DMA market by month
3.1K
Spoke – Lot Insights Imps
The vehicles that are being viewed through
the app, and the location they are being
viewed from for the last 3 months by dealer
150K
No blending required – all controlled by UUID, Date, and/or DMA parameters
Keeping The Traffic Map Simple
Showing dealers 500K+ monthly visitors on or near their lot:
• Minimize map background – focus on the story
• Created using a dual axis map overlaying visitors on top of the dealer lot polygon
• Defaults to previous month but is users can choose month to view
• Help make it pop by using branded shape file and color palette
• Provide additional context with tooltips
Enhanced Mapping - Other Lots Visited?
Showing dealers what other lots their
visitors are going to find a car:
• Use conditional Sets to identify visitor records
• Use Great Circle Distance formula to determine distance and they had to be ON another dealer’s lot
• Use map radius tool to validate data
• Use Dealer Lat/Longs instead of polygons for
viewability
• Provide additional context with tooltips, and allow users to highlight dealers with actions
Building Geospatial Worksheets
DEMO!!
Future Enhancements?
Lot Insights is constantly evolving:
• Potential Mapbox integration
• Tableau 2018 Point in Polygon functionality
• Showing visitors who also wrote a review on Cars.com
• Integrating visitor data from 3rd party vendors
MAPBOX INTEGRATION
Questions?
Please complete the
session survey from the
Session Details screen
in your TC18 app
Thank you!
#TC18
Developing Our Initial Prototype
Keys To Success:
• Wireframe to glass in two months
• Dedicated team – database architect, dashboard developer, and marketing lead
• Agile approach – released initial dashboard and iterated through changes/enhancements
WIREFRAME PROTOTYPE DASHBOARD
INITIAL RELEASE
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