With so many different ways to advertise on Facebook, car dealerships and automotive agencies alike can be overwhelmed by the options presented when creating a Facebook Ads campaign. Video is most engaging right? Or should you do ads that allow users to message your page? What about good ol traffic ads to your website? Oh look, lead generation that’s gotta be it!
The answer will vary depending on what your goal is. If you’re looking to gain likes on your page or build brand awareness in the community, this article will not cover those goals. However, if you are looking for the most effective way to advertise your inventory on Facebook and generate VIN specific leads from local in-market shoppers on your vehicles, Facebook Automotive Inventory Ads (also known as Dynamic Ads) are the way to go! Here’s how to run an effective Inventory Ads campaign.
Step 1: Integrate Your Inventory Feed to Facebook
Find a vendor that will work with your inventory feed provider and sync your inventory feed to Facebook on daily basis. This is important because you want to be able to showcase all of your latest inventory and updated prices automatically. Just as you wouldn’t manually upload just 2–3 of your best cars on Autotrader or CarGurus and hope they are the right cars people are searching for at the moment, you should not be running a Facebook ad where you manually promote certain vehicles. Let the market decide which vehicles they want to engage with.
Step 2: Segment Your Inventory
Once all your inventory has been loaded into Facebook, don’t create ads just yet! Blasting all of your inventory out there to everyone in the region is the old newspaper method of advertising. With Facebook, the more targeted you are with your advertising, and the more specific and relevant it is to who you are targeting, the better your ad will perform. You need to go into your catalog and create “Vehicle Sets” for the ads you want to run. For example, if you want to run a campaign for all of your Ford F-150 to local shoppers who are in the market for trucks, you will need to create a vehicle set just for your F-150's.
Step 3: Target The Right Audience
This is the most important step! If you are not serving your ads to the right audience, you will waste your ad dollars “spraying and praying” that your ads will happen to land in front a car shopper. Using a custom audience would be the most effective way to target people who are likely to purchase a vehicle. You can upload your customer data and create “Lookalike audiences” that share similar characteristics to those that have bought from you in the past. Alternatively, you can also work with an agency that has access to Oracle and Polk data to target customers who are deemed as “in-market” based on their browsing history and recent online searches.
Step 4: Generate VIN Specific Traffic and Leads
Finally, decide whether you want customers to visit your vehicle detail page when they click on your ad, or be able to submit a lead directly on Facebook. Here’s what the end result will look like once you’ve setup an Automotive Inventory Ads campaign:
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