What's the Best Way to Advertise My Cars On Facebook?

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!

Import Your Inventory Feed

Find a vendor like ShapeShift Group 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.

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 used Trucks, or all of your New Ford F-150 to local shoppers who are in the market for trucks, you will need to create a vehicle set just for this segment of your inventory.

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.

Ideally, you should work with an agency such as ShapeShift Group, 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.

Alternatively, if you do not have access to "in-market" audiences, using a custom audience would be your best bet 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. You can also create an audience of shoppers who have already visited your website and retarget them.

Dynamic Inventory Traffic & Lead Campaigns

You're ready to launch your campaigns! Create a dynamic inventory ad campaign to showcase your inventory and drive traffic directly to your vehicle detail pages on your website. This campaign will allow shoppers to check out more photos of your vehicle, look at the vehicle history, and other important details.

Simply driving traffic to your website and hoping the customer will fill out a form is not enough! Create a dynamic inventory lead generation campaign to easily collect leads from customers that will include their name, email, phone number, and VIN they are interested in.

Here’s what the end result will look like once you’ve setup a dynamic inventory ad campaign:

Automatically Deliver Leads to your CRM in ADF/XML

If you are working with an agency, make sure they have the technology to automatically download leads from Facebook in real time, convert that into the proper ADF/XML format, and sync that to your CRM (or send that to your email inbox if you do not use a CRM).

If you or your agency do not have this technology, you will have to constantly monitor your Facebook page's Lead Center and manually input the customer information in your CRM.

Track Your Sales

After your campaigns have been running for a while (we recommend 90 days), it's time to see if Facebook can attribute your sales from actions users have taken from your ad campaign, such as clicking on your ad, or submitting a lead.

Upload your sales log into the Facebook Offline Events Manager. Wait for the data to finish processing. Then pull up your Ads Manager and view your sales attribution. You can also view your sales/profit data if you uploaded that.