Why Your Dealership Shouldn't Skip out on Facebook Advertising

Facebook has 1.6 billion people logging in daily

As of September 2019, 1.62 billion people on average log onto Facebook daily and are considered active users, which means that of the entire Facebook audience, 66% of those users are active on a daily basis (Facebook, 2019). Most automotive dealerships skip out on Facebook advertising and spend most of their advertising budget on Google Ads, but they don’t realize that there is a great opportunity to build brand awareness through Facebook’s platform. When users see your brand on Facebook, they will more likely remember it the next time they are purchasing a vehicle. According to Pew Research, 68% of Americans have a Facebook account, and three-quarters of them use Facebook daily. People use Facebook to connect with their friends and family, as well as the brands they follow and like on a daily basis. Your dealership can be a part of those connections, too. To do that, you need to get noticed. Facebook Ads can help you get started. 

Why Facebook Ads?

Not only are there over a billion people browsing Facebook on a daily basis, but a large number of these users are also auto consumers. Facebook reports that 57% of auto consumers in the United States use Facebook for automobile-related activities. Similarly, 51% of auto consumers ages 18-34 discover new automobiles on the Facebook family of apps. As a car dealership, one of your goals should include generating leads that eventually result in the purchase of a vehicle. Many users choose to research their vehicles and their brands before purchasing, and one of the tools they use to research is to explore social media. If your dealership advertises on Facebook, your brand is being shown to users looking for a vehicle. 

Choosing Facebook Ads allows you to build awareness, grow your audience, and provide exposure for any new vehicles. Facebook shows your dealership’s ads to those who are in the market for a vehicle, which helps the viewers keep you in mind as they are shopping for a new vehicle. The ads also integrate with regular posts from friends and family, thus leading it to be more seamless and natural. At Orbee, we’ve noticed that Google Display Ads and Facebook Display Ads both have similar ROI results, so why not give Facebook Ads a try?

Automotive Inventory Ads are another feature catered to car dealerships that are only offered on Facebook. Automotive Inventory Ads allow manufacturers and dealers to upload their entire car inventory with some details including make, model and year, along with other features. This feature also allows dealers to generate ads to show the most relevant vehicles to your audiences, with the hopes of leading them to the vehicle description page to eventually fill out an important lead form. These ads will only show to people who want to see them, across different devices, and the campaigns are always on. 

Orbee can help you set up the Automotive Inventory Ads as well as manage any other advertisements you would like to post on Facebook. Beyond Automotive Inventory Ads, we also manage all of the other forms of advertising that Facebook offers along with advertisement creatives. We keep up-to-date with Facebook’s current advertising policies to always keep you in the loop and make sure your advertisements are up to standard. We also have systems in place to take down any advertisements with no available VDP or may require changes to the advertisement because of the price.

A lot of times, dealerships are spending more advertising dollars on Google and not enough on Facebook. 

Google CPC and Facebook CPC Display Advertisements both have similar performance levels, but Facebook CPC costs are lower than Google. We’ve noticed that more dealerships choose to spend their advertising budget on Google than Facebook. At Orbee, we believe that using both Facebook and Google Ads can be beneficial to your dealership because together, they create a personalized experience that cannot be done with just one or the other. Using both of these advertising platforms provide a personalized experience for your shoppers. When considering the reach of Facebook, we believe that your dealership should consider allocating funds into Facebook advertisements along with Google Ads. You can analyze the data in these campaigns to previous ones to see if you are generating leads from the combination of both Google Ads and Facebook Ads versus only posting ads on Google alone.

Google Ads seems to be the first choice when choosing an advertising network, causing many competitors to choose this platform. According to eMarketer, 36.3% of the U.S. Digital Ad Spend in the US was done through Google, where Facebook is only at 19.3%. The number of advertisers that choose Google is much higher than Facebook, leading to a more expensive cost-per-click. By utilizing both Facebook and Google Ads, dealerships have more opportunities to generate leads than with just Google alone while using the same budget.

One-to-One Personalized Experience

Facebook is a data-driven platform due to the willingness of its users in providing and sharing their age, gender, location, and interests. Facebook has the ability to obtain and analyze user data, connecting the dots, thus being able to create an audience profile based on these users’ interactions on the platform. Facebook users like, comment, and share posts, pictures, and pages to show their interests. By engaging in these online activities, their posts, pages, and pictures are categorized into groups such as “automotive,” “software,” or “online retail.” Facebook uses this engagement to create different audience groups. Furthermore, the creation of these audience groups through similar interests provides advertisers with pre-created segments of these users for targeting. Facebook also has the ability to use friend lists and user networks to create lookalike audiences, who are groups of individuals who fit into similar demographics. 

By pairing Facebook’s metadata, lookalike audiences, and interests audiences, we are able to provide your dealership with a strong data-driven tool to create a personalized experience for your customers. Advertisers can conveniently target users in the low sales funnel who are more likely to have an interest in purchasing a vehicle because of their Facebook actions. Orbee’s audience segmentation creates diverse audiences on Facebook to boost your dealership’s targeting. We have implemented various campaign strategies and know which ones provide the biggest impact. We analyze your shoppers and their behavior on both Google Ads and Facebook Ads to create the audiences that your dealership can use to target and retarget your future customers. Using our audience segmentation makes the future car buying experience more personalized due to its detailed targeting. 

Conclusion: your dealership should not skip out on advertising on Facebook

Most dealerships skip out on Facebook advertising, but we believe that it is important to consider the benefits of Facebook advertising in addition to advertising on Google. The number of daily active users on Facebook in the United States combined with the number of people that use Facebook for automotive-related reasons should be reason enough for your dealership to give it a try. With Facebook, you can choose special audiences and locations. This, along with the natural look of Facebook posts allows for user engagement and can help your dealership become an effective connection to your customers. By combining Facebook and Google Ads, your marketing efforts can help you spread the word about your dealership on the social network and on the search engine network.