Facebook Ads can be an effective advertising tool to drive low-cost web traffic and leads for auto dealers.
An agency can manage your Facebook Ads campaigns, but you’ll often pay a steep management fee, possibly based on a percentage of your ad spend. This means as your ad investment grows, so does your fee, which makes running many highly targeted campaigns cost prohibitive. But with the right tools, you can generate incredible results managing ad campaigns on your own. However, you’ll need several tools and technologies to make this possible.
The keys to any successful ad campaign are making sure you reach the right audience at the right time with the right message.
The Right Audience
You want to reach people who are most likely to respond and have the means to purchase what you are selling. Facebook has limited built-in targeting options to help reach the right audience, such as basic geographic and demographic information.
Some of your best targets come from custom audiences where you upload your own customer lists to Facebook. You can then target people you know are due for various services, or have a lease about to expire. However, these lists tend to be small and you want to be able to reach new prospects.
Using the Oracle Data Cloud, you can target vehicle ownership, by vehicle age and price information, by auto service spending or even narrow these targets with income or credit score data. There are literally thousands of data options that allow you to reach prospects high up in the funnel as well as at the bottom when ready to purchase. Oracle data provides the best supplement to your custom audience lists, while allowing you to reach a much larger audience with laser focus.
The Right Time
You also have to reach the right audience at the right time. A consumer may love your brand and have the means to purchase, but if they just bought a vehicle last month then timing eliminates them as a prospect.
This is where Oracle data becomes even more powerful. Using data from many partners to identify purchase patterns, Oracle data enables you to target people who are “in market to buy or lease” a vehicle. Oracle data integrations to
Facebook are only available through Oracle Data Partners, so you will need to work with a qualified vendor to have access to these tools.
You are at a big disadvantage to other dealers without them. Another way to reach people at the right time on Facebook is when they come looking for a vehicle. If you’re not listing your pre-owned inventory on Facebook Marketplace, you’re missing a big opportunity. Finally, you should also have a website retargeting pixel in place so that you can target people on Facebook who have recently been on your website.
The Right Message
To succeed on Facebook, your ads must be relevant. Relevancy has a big effect not just on overall response, but how much you pay for your ads. The more your ad content is relevant to the audience, the higher click-through rate you should see. With higher CTR, you get a higher relevance score and so pay a lower cost per click.
One of the best ways to make your ads relevant is running dynamic inventory ads. Instead of creating an ad with a static OEM image of a vehicle, or even several vehicle photos from your inventory, you create a feed of your entire inventory in Facebook’s Automotive catalog format. The vehicles then show in a carousel ad on Facebook that changes based on the user. If two people view the identical dynamic ad campaign on Facebook, one might see SUVs and another see trucks. Why? Through re-targeting, Facebook can show specific vehicles to each individual based on their interest.
Originally, this was limited to people who visited a dealer’s website, showing you vehicles similar to what you viewed. Similar to custom audiences, website re-targeting tends to be high-quality traffic, but low volume, and you need to reach more people. With Facebook Broad Audiences, Facebook is able to re-target ads to people based on vehicles they searched on other websites (think: national automotive sites with very large audiences). This offers the best of both worlds, reaching both high-quality and high-quantity audiences, where the ads are customized to be most relevant to each person. In some cases, we see increased relevancy through dynamic ads drop cost per click by 50 percent or more.
Managing Facebook ads on your own means you can create as many targeted ad campaigns as you want, and at very lost cost. But to truly get the best results, find an ad tech solution that can provide to you these key resources. You want to find a partner that: 1) is an authorized Oracle Data Partner, 2) can provide you a dynamic inventory feed in Facebook’s Auto catalog format, updated daily, 3) will install a Facebook pixel on your site for Broad Audience targeting and 4) is a Facebook Marketplace Partner and can upload your pre-owned inventory to Facebook Marketplace.
Track your results and you should see significant increases in performance using these tools.
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