In an era where social media holds significant sway over consumer decisions, the power of platforms like Facebook for car dealerships must be leveraged to reach their target audience effectively. By fulfilling the necessary requirements and utilizing tools such as Meta Business Manager, Meta Ads Manager, Meta Pixel, Attribution, Offline Events, and Vehicle Catalog, dealerships can enhance their Facebook Marketing efforts.
In the car industry, the influence of social media on car buying decisions is substantial. 44% of car buyers visit a dealership’s social media accounts when deciding which automobile to purchase. 20% of respondents mentioned that being connected with a brand made communicating directly with the business easier. 38% of Western Europe car shoppers rely on social media to assess the dealership’s friendliness and professionalism.
To achieve advertising goals effectively, dealerships must have specific requirements in place. Let’s explore these requirements to unleash the power of Facebook Marketing for car dealerships:
A Facebook Page is an essential tool for reaching your audience across both computers and mobile devices. It allows you to showcase your business information, engage with customers through posts and messages, run targeted advertisements to increase awareness and drive sales, and obtain valuable insights based on user actions.
Facebook pages help car dealers to build community value and their dealership’s brand
Also, they can execute, monitor and review content performance and set specific permissions for their employees to help manage the dealership’s page.
Meta Business Manager enables advertisers to securely share assets, such as Facebook Pages, Instagram accounts, audience lists, or product catalogs, among multiple team members. It offers control over user access and permissions for ad accounts, Pages, and apps while providing efficient tracking of ad spending through comprehensive overviews and detailed views.
Meta Ads Manager serves as a centralized platform for creating and managing ads across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Audience Network. It offers a seamless experience for ad creation, scheduling, placement, and campaign performance tracking. To create a successful ad campaign, you’ll begin by selecting a campaign objective. This crucial decision will impact various aspects of your campaign, such as who sees your ad. There are two essential examples:
To run a Facebook ad successfully, you need to understand the three key components as follows:
Implementing the Meta Pixel on your website allows you to display car inventory ads to users who have visited your site. The Meta Pixel collects data on user actions, such as viewing specific vehicles or entering payment information, enabling targeted ad delivery to potential customers more likely to purchase.
To effectively utilize car inventory ads, it is crucial to integrate custom data events into various pages of your website. These custom data events should be accompanied by specific parameters that offer valuable additional information. For instance, including details such as make, model, and year can significantly enhance the ad’s relevance and effectiveness. Additionally, establish a connection between your Facebook pixel and the catalog to ensure smooth functionality.
Attribution is a valuable tool for measuring and understanding the impact of your ads across various publishers, channels, and devices. It provides insights into the true value of your ads and helps determine which campaigns are most effective in driving desired outcomes.
Traditional marketing attribution tools often rely on cookies and last-click attribution, which may not provide a complete and accurate understanding of the impact of your ads on business outcomes. That’s where Facebook Attribution comes in. It is a powerful advertising measurement tool specifically designed to provide enhanced visibility into your customer journey. With Facebook Attribution, you can access comprehensive insights that enable you to make smarter business decisions based on a holistic view of your advertising performance.
Utilizing attribution for Facebook marketing involves selecting the appropriate conversion event, determining the reporting period, and choosing the attribution model and window. Most dealers find a 90-day, even-credit model for vehicle sales effective, providing fair estimates across touchpoints. This enables valuable insights into campaign impact and allows for informed decision-making in automotive marketing strategies.
Combining Attribution with offline events allows you to link sales back to your advertising efforts, providing insights into how Meta ads contribute to real-world outcomes.
To ensure effective tracking and reporting of offline events, consider the following guidelines:
A vehicle catalog serves as a comprehensive repository of product information for the inventory you intend to advertise. While we strongly recommend advertising your complete inventory for maximum exposure, we understand that you may want to focus on specific subsets of your offerings. In such cases, Vehicle Sets come into play.
By utilizing Vehicle Sets, you have the flexibility to curate specific groups of vehicles to be featured in your ads. For instance, you can create a Vehicle Catalog that encompasses your entire inventory and then establish a Vehicle Set to exclusively advertise your trucks. Likewise, you can create another Vehicle Set dedicated to promoting your vans.
There are different approaches depending on the size of your dealership:
For dealers with more than 50 vehicles, add your inventory to a vehicle catalog by creating and uploading a vehicle feed:
For smaller automotive dealers with less than 50 vehicles, manually add your inventory to a Vehicle Catalog:
P.S.: This article has also been published in the Digital Dealer Magazine.
Sean Toussi
If you have any questions or comments regarding this article, please email [email protected]
Glo3D.com Content Team,
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