Hyundai proves Amazon Autos shopping engagement drives real dealership sales

Goals

Car buyers often research online but buy in person. Nearly two in three prefer a blended digital-and-dealership experience.¹ When Hyundai became the exclusive launch partner for Amazon Autos in December 2024, customers gained a new way to browse inventory, compare pricing, and check out inside the familiar Amazon shopping experience. The open question was the one every automaker asks: does that digital investment actually drive sales? Before this work, Hyundai lacked a privacy-enhancing way to connect Amazon Autos shopping engagement and Amazon Ads exposure to verified dealership sales outcomes.

Approach

The proof comes together in Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), a secure, privacy-safe clean room from Amazon Ads. Amazon Autos shopping engagement signals and Amazon Ads audience signals, accessible only through AMC, offer intent and media exposure insights unavailable anywhere else. By matching those signals with Hyundai's own sales data using pseudonymized identifiers, and never raw customer data, this approach closes the loop between what customers do online and what they buy at the dealership. The result is a closed-loop measurement capability not currently available through other automotive measurement providers.

“For the first time, Hyundai can see the full path from an ad impression or a browse on Amazon Autos to a sale at the dealership, and act on it, while helping protect customer privacy. That means fewer redundant ads and more of the vehicles customers actually care about,” said Aby Angilivelil, Director of Amazon Marketing Cloud at Amazon Ads.

Amazon Autos launched in December 2024 with Hyundai as the exclusive launch partner. Customers can browse inventory, compare pricing, secure financing, e-sign paperwork, and schedule dealership pickup, all inside the Amazon.com experience they already know. It is now live in more than 130 U.S. cities with over 1,000 dealerships across twelve automotive brands.

When a customer searches inventory, browses a vehicle, or begins checkout on Amazon Autos, those actions signal genuine purchase intent. Paired with Amazon Ads media signals from display, video, and streaming campaigns delivered through Amazon DSP, Hyundai can see which campaigns reached the customers who ultimately purchased and shift investment toward what works.

Hyundai built the framework on AWS Clean Rooms and owns and controls the entire environment. Customer data is converted to coded tokens before any collaboration, so no personally identifiable information is ever shared with Amazon Ads or Amazon Autos. Those tokens are matched against Amazon's shopping engagement and media signals inside AMC, where insights are generated without either party seeing the other's raw data. Hyundai decides what data is available, how it can be queried, and what insights come out.

“Our dealers sell more cars when we meet customers where they are, and customers find the right vehicle faster with more relevant experiences. Now we can prove it, optimize for it, and invest with confidence that every dollar is helping customers discover the vehicle they love and helping dealers close the sale,” said Sean Gilpin, Chief Marketing Officer at Hyundai Motor America.

Results

The result is a more personalized, relevant shopping experience that drives real cars off real lots, and a way for Hyundai to prove which digital investments actually put buyers in dealership seats.

For the first time, Hyundai has closed-loop online-to-offline sales attribution, including a 10x+ offline sales multiplier among Amazon Autos shoppers. Amazon Autos influences the shopping journey whether customers buy online or in store: for every Hyundai vehicle purchased via Amazon Autos, 10+ additional Hyundai vehicles were purchased at the dealership by customers who browsed Hyundai on Amazon Autos. Notably, 78% of offline Amazon sales are new to the Hyundai brand, showing that the Amazon Autos experience is helping grow the Hyundai brand by meeting new customers where they want to shop.

The measurement framework itself proved equally powerful. Amazon and Hyundai signals matched in AMC achieved a 90%+ customer match rate, nearly 2x the prior third-party benchmark, giving a more complete view so more customers get relevant experiences and fewer impressions are wasted. That improved signal quality led to a 22% reduction in duplicated audience reach, meaning customers no longer see redundant ads for vehicles they already bought or aren't interested in, which reallocates budget to true incremental reach. Together, these gains delivered a 2.2x campaign efficiency improvement: by suppressing existing owners and enriching audiences with real purchase data, Hyundai delivers more relevant ads to in-market shoppers, so every ad dollar works harder.²

Looking ahead, the framework is built to grow. Hyundai plans to extend it across additional media channels and partners so a larger share of its investment can be measured and optimized using first-party outcomes, with no rebuilding required. Next, Hyundai will add an AI-powered decision engine that lets teams ask measurement questions in natural language and get privacy-safe answers on demand. The long-term vision: unify the full customer lifecycle, from first ad impression through purchase, service, and next-vehicle consideration, into a single Marketing Data Lake on AWS.

Sources

¹ Cox Automotive, 2025 Car Buyer Journey Study (16th annual), January 2025.
² Hyundai Motor America internal reporting.