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Dynamic Personаlization

From test drives to cars sold: Going beyond Facebook Automotive Dynamic Ads

2020 was a turbulent year for the international car scene. However, with predictions of an economic rebound, the global automotive industry is on its way to recovery. How long haven’t you seen a single auto show? New car offers cannot be showcased in person, so car manufacturers, and car dealerships are adapting to the new normal.

Even so, 97% of people looking to purchase, repair, or customize a car begin their journey online. With fast and effective online shopping methods, buyers can access car reviews, offers, sales, new car models and more. But customers usually take their time before making a purchase.

Facebook automotive dynamic ads are a great way to reach car buyers, albeit that doesn’t tell the entire brand narrative. In fact, it’s not nearly enough to properly show off available stock from the car brand.

Think of it this way: buyers are attracted to familiar car models. To accomplish this, it’s important to serve relevant ads to the right audience, spotlighting the right offers, at the right time. Through personalization car dealerships and car manufacturers reel in more test drives, and easily convert those into actual sales.

Automotive ad example
Stay on-brand, align your message with the car buyer’s interest.

Personalized, high-impact creatives add the perfect flair to ad campaigns and they pave the way for quality leads, high engagement and more.

What it means to use Facebook Automotive Dynamic Ads

Facebook automotive dynamic ads are a very important part of any campaign strategy. Here’s how it works. Your entire inventory is pulled in dynamically. With data such as make, model, year and so on, you can begin to automatically generate ads for people who looked at vehicles on offer, but did not make the purchase. That way Facebook can shorten the buyer’s decision time and it’s simple to set up.

The simplicity of Facebook automotive dynamics ads can be alluring at first. After all, certain processes are easier, such as product selection and dynamic retargeting. Ultimately though, whether you are an OEM dealer or an independent dealer, FB automotive dynamic ads will only get you so far.

Hit the right notes with personalization, increase car sales

For most people, buying a car is usually a big decision, as well as an emotional journey. While Facebook dynamic ads create the opportunity to reach audiences, campaign options are somewhat limited. Creating more personalized campaigns makes it super-easy to identify what resonates the most with the buyer. For better results, shifting focus on more personalized ads with dynamic creative yields better quality leads, quicker conversions, and fewer abandoned carts.

People who have visited your website, looked at vehicles on offer, but did not make the purchase, will get a more personalized offer next time around. This increases user awareness and increases the chance of them returning to your website to make purchases.

Peronalized ad for car

In practice, accomplishing this involves significant production time and manual work. If, for instance, you need to launch 360 creatives, everything related to production, campaign optimization, keeping it fresh, how it’s produced, is all handled automatically via the dynamic creative.

The more you optimize and personalize your ads, the better chance you have to reach prospective car buyers. If you have a huge product catalog, segmentation could be a challenge. However, using the dynamic creative and dynamic retargeting opens a whole range of possibilities for paid social.

Leverage Dynamic Creative for the automotive industry

The automotive industry is heavily focused on short or long-form videos for presenting car models. Most brands are facing the challenge of producing such videos, which usually end up with poor VTRs, and abysmal ROAS. While Facebook automotive dynamics ads can show your inventory to a wider audience, they won’t do much to solve the aforementioned pain points.

In contrast, personalization and contextualization can really turn things around for car manufacturers and car dealerships. In fact, it’s a powerful way to resonate with car-buying audiences, and an effective method to achieve the wins below:

1. Improve engagement

Car dealerships or car brands face the challenge of grabbing the user’s attention with video. That’s where dynamic video templates come into play. Running multiple on-brand videos creates a whole variety of ways to reach car buyers. In addition, these videos are updated automatically based on the car catalog feed. Car manufacturers can run campaigns with the contextualized creative allows car manufacturers “talk” to the user directly rather than merely putting the word out there.

2. Get better quality leads

Facebook has well over 2.2 billion active users, so it’s a quick way to reach a staggering amount of people. It is the perfect opportunity to work on brand awareness, and general prospecting. But, as we’ve said, that’s just the first step. You can start off with lead-form campaigns, contextualizing leads with different models, or the same models but with different colors, for better impact.

3. Unlock better ways to promote car offers

Running different campaigns allows you to accomplish multiple goals, depending on your needs. Well-defined promotion sets for specific cars keep offers current and improve user segmentation. Typically, promoting 6-7 separate car features, equals to 6-7 separate ads - all created manually. By using the dynamic creative, diverse images are produced automatically and with ease. All images are contextualized per user interest and per car feature, prices, lease rates, and so on.

4. Effectively promote new car models

If a car manufacturer is launching a new car model, getting the news out to the right users is very important and contextualized ads just do the job. Let's say one of your website visitors stopped by to check out one of your SUVs. With Facebook automotive dynamics ads, you can retarget that specific user with ads that show that exact same SUV, in addition to showing ads for other SUVs within the same or similar price range.  

Ford ad examples
Showcasing SUV models within the same price range creates impact.

5. Reach more buyers via Dynamic Location Ads  

Powerful localization templates effectively bridge that huge gap in a market without live shows and car fairs. Using appropriate location information, valuable data is gained. The next step is to launch campaigns optimized for specific locations and specific car dealerships. Dealership dynamic lead forms are connected with localized ads, and quality leads are sent to the dealerships. Finally, specific users are retargeted and are served a fresh, custom-tailored offer based on the car they previously viewed.

6. Align brand with needs of car buyers

For the perfect promotional push of the entire vehicle inventory, it’s vital alignment to establish powerful brand consistency across all of your ads. Dynamic creative is an instant solution for accomplishing that and more. It’s possible to visually communicate a single clear-cut message that befits brand standards.

But bear in mind that the new ATT update will have a huge impact on personalization and contextualization in all.

It makes tracking attribution on paid social much more difficult and it’ll no longer be possible to create personalized ads without sacrificing user privacy.

Luckily, I've been in boiling water before and can provide you with powerful insights on the topic, can you create personalized ads without compromising user privacy, and what’s next for personalization.

Simple steps, amazing results  

Think of the dynamic creative as a way of breathing new life into campaigns on Facebook. More elements are added into the creative, it looks better, it communicates more car features, and then it retargets users based on what they are interested in. This means that you finally won’t be losing any traffic on paid social. Instead, you’ll be able to:

  • Get quality leads
  • Convert test drives into actual sales

To discover even more about Facebook automotive dynamic ads, and to explore various ways to improve the performance on paid social, please feel free to reach out.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How to target car dealers on Facebook?

Targeting on Facebook is the most important step in running a successful car dealership campaign. The first thing to know about targeting within Facebook is that it can be done with features like geographic location, interests, friends of fans, company pages and more. One big tip for dealerships looking for a little help is to make use of one of the powerful targeting features - automotive dynamic ads.

2. How to advertise cars on Facebook?

Automotive Dynamic Ads on Facebook are the perfect marketing tool for car stores and dealers. These ads offer some of the features seen in social media ads, including:

  • The ability to upload your own custom creative
  • The ability to target your precise audience with tailored audiences on Facebook
  • Automated targeting based on a series of variables like demographics
  • Interests and behaviors