Monthly Archives: February 2016

How Car Dealers Can Target In-Market Car Shoppers Using Facebook

In the Fourth Quarter of 2015 Facebook had $5.6 billion in ad revenue. Mobile advertising made up a huge portion of their revenue, accounting for 80% of it. If you want to reach out to your customers on mobile devices then Facebook advertising needs to be a part of your dealership’s digital marketing strategy. There are multiple ways you can target your ads in Facebook. You can set up a custom audience (Facebook’s version of retargeting), demographic targeting,  financial resources, interest-based targeting and in-market targeting. In this post we’re going to be discussing Facebook’s In-Market targeting capabilities and how it can be utilized by your dealership.

What Is Facebook In-Market Targeting?

Our online behavior says a lot about our buying intentions. Utilizing data from a variety of sources that may include websites you’ve visited, Facebook is able to tell who is in process or considering buying a specific product. This is a powerful digital marketing tool that will allow you to show ads to people who is interested in or actively looking for your specific product.

How Dealerships Can Utilize In-Market Audience in Facebook

Facebook behavior targeting allows you to target people in-market for specific vehicle brands such as Honda, Toyota, Chevrolet or Ford. You can even target people who are in-market for certain vehicle types such as SUVs or trucks. Below is a table showing the potential reach for various in-market target audiences within a 30 mile radius around the Seattle market.

There are multiple ways a dealer can utilize in-market audiences to target potential car shoppers. Here are some potential ideas:

Target Competing Brands. Show your ads to people interesting in competing brands to try to sway them into your sales funnel. Example: A Honda dealership could target ads to people who are in-market for Ford, Hyundai, or Kia cars.

Combine In-Market Audience for competing brands with people who have liked your page. As a dealership brand loyalty plays a big part in your bottom line. You don’t want past customers to switch over to a different car brand when it’s time for them to get a new car. By targeting people who have liked your page with In-Market competing brands you can target past customers who may be thinking of jumping ship from your brand.

Target your own brand. This one is rather straight forward. Target people who are actually interested in your product.

Target In-Market off brand interest. Target high sales funnel shoppers who are interested in a specific type of vehicle, but haven’t quite decided which brand yet.

These are only just a few ideas to get you started in targeting potential car shoppers using in-market Facebook audiences. It’ll definitely get you started in the right track in targeting the right people with your Facebook ad campaign.

Google recently released their Vehicle Dealer vertical report for the Q4 of 2015. The data yielded some interesting data that shed some new light on the vertical and reinforced past trends. According to the report search queries in the Vehicle Dealers Category grew by 13%. Interestingly, Desktop searches declined by 3 percent and Tablet queries declined by 5 percent, while Mobile queries grew by 33%. This is not groundbreaking news, but it does reinforce the fact that mobile traffic is increasingly becoming a larger part of the pie.

The report also shed some light on interesting trends in regards to the paid search auctions on Google search results.

Queries, Impression and Clicks saw huge increases for Mobile on the Adwords search auction. On the contrary, those same metrics saw a decrease on desktop – no surprise there. An interesting trend that I wasn’t aware of was that Ad Depth decreased quite significantly for desktop queries, a drop of 8.79%. The Ad Depth refers to the number of ad placement spots for a particular search query. A near 10% drop in Ad Depth means that a search term that used to yield 10 search ad spots may only be showing 9 ad spots now. One less ad spot on the search results page means a decrease in impressions and a rise in CPC as the same number of advertisers competes for even less ad space. If your dealership Adwords campaign saw a rise in CPC in the past 3 months then this may be a contributing factor.

The big takeaway from Google’s report is that mobile traffic and desktop traffic is trending in opposite directions. In fact 62% of all searches in the Vehicle Dealers vertical are made on mobile or tablet devices. So what does this mean for car dealerships? Well, it means having a mobile responsive website and a digital advertising strategy to reach mobile users is even more important and increasing by the day.