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:
Facebook Page
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.
Meta Business Manager
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
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:
- Catalog Sales: if your goal is to showcase vehicles from your inventory and generate sales, selecting the “Catalog Sales” campaign objective is ideal. This objective is specifically designed to drive conversions and increase sales by showcasing your available vehicles.
- Reach: on the other hand, if your primary aim is to maximize the reach of your ad and expose it to as many people as possible within your target audience, choosing the “Reach” campaign objective is recommended. This objective prioritizes expanding your ad’s visibility and ensuring it reaches a wide audience.
To run a Facebook ad successfully, you need to understand the three key components as follows:
- Campaign: at the campaign level, you define the advertising objective. This objective sets the tone for your entire campaign and aligns with your specific goals.
- Ad Set: within the ad set, you fine-tune your strategy by setting parameters such as targeting options, budget allocation, and scheduling. This allows you to reach your desired audience effectively.
- Ad: the ad itself comprises creative visuals such as images or videos that capture the audience’s attention and drive engagement with your product or service.
Meta Pixel
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
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.
Offline Events
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:
- Utilize the maximum attribution reporting window available, which is 28 days in Ads Manager and 90 days in Attribution. This allows for a comprehensive understanding of the impact of your campaigns.
- Enable Auto Tracking: When creating an offline event set and assigning it to one or more ad accounts, consider enabling auto-tracking. By doing so, any future campaigns within those ad accounts will automatically be associated with the offline event set. This streamlines tracking and reporting processes.
- Utilize Offline Events to create Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences. These audience segments enable targeted marketing to your existing customers and others who share similar characteristics.
- When uploading offline event data, ensure you include an Order ID field. This allows for the tracking and identification of unique identifiers for each transaction, facilitating accurate reporting and analysis.
- Upload your offline event data regularly, either on a weekly or monthly basis. It is recommended to upload the data in the order in which the events occurred. This ensures that the reporting reflects the sequence of the events accurately.
- Assign an event set to an ad account before launching a campaign. This allows for the tracking of the account from the moment it is assigned. Remember to enable auto-tracking so that any future campaigns in the account will automatically be associated with the assigned offline event set.
Vehicle Catalog
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.
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:
- Create a catalog in Catalog Manager, accessible in the Business Manager menu.
- Create or upload a vehicle feed, ensuring all required fields (such as vehicle ID, make, and model) are included in a supported file format. A template can be downloaded at facebook.com/vehiclefeedtemplate.
- Utilize Vehicle Sets to limit and group the vehicles you want to promote together, such as SUVs or used inventory.
- Associate a pixel or mobile SDK with your catalog to track and optimize ad performance.
For smaller automotive dealers with less than 50 vehicles, manually add your inventory to a Vehicle Catalog:
- Create a catalog in Catalog Manager, found in the Business Manager menu.
- Select Vehicle Data Sources, then proceed to Add Vehicles and Add Manually.
- Fill in the vehicle details, including make, model, and an accompanying image. Save the added vehicle.
- Repeat the process to add all your vehicles individually.
- Associate a pixel or mobile SDK with your catalog for comprehensive tracking and optimization.
P.S.: This article has also been published in the Digital Dealer Magazine.
- ย For smaller automotive dealers with less than 50 vehicles, manually add your inventory to a Vehicle Catalog:
- Create a catalog in Catalog Manager, found in the Business Manager menu.
- Select Vehicle Data Sources, then proceed to Add Vehicles and Add Manually.
- Fill in the vehicle details, including make, model, and an accompanying image. Save the added vehicle.
- Repeat the process to add all your vehicles individually.
- Associate a pixel or mobile SDK with your catalog for comprehensive tracking and optimization.
P.S.: This article has also been published in the Digital Dealer Magazine.
