On January 25th, Facebook announced updates to our automotive solutions that are available for dealerships to showcase their vehicle inventory. It’s important to know exactly what these updates are, and how they should be leveraged as an automotive marketer.
Automotive Inventory Ads (AIA)
AIA, originally named dynamic ads for automotive (DAA), was rolled out in Nov 2017 to create a more specific automotive solution for marketers. This vehicle listing solution allows dealers to promote their entire catalog of inventory and show the most compelling vehicles to the right audience, to drive vehicle detail page views, lead submissions, and ultimately sales. The change to calling it AIA further helps simply for automotive marketers the right option for uploading your inventory to show it on Facebook in a dynamic way, thus removing friction and confusion when you see multiple options for dynamic ads on Facebook.
Based on feedback from clients and observing market needs, we began to develop a product that would help dealers reach more high-intent buyers in the market. Thus, came the birth of the newly announced product on January 25th, Automotive Inventory Ads for Prospecting.
AIA for Prospecting lets marketers deliver automotive inventory ads across the Facebook family of apps and services. Whereas targeting was previously limited to recent website and app visitors, you can now expand AIA to target a broader audience and optimize ad delivery to those who have displayed vehicle intent on Facebook properties and across the web. This change allows advertisers to reach more in-market shoppers they haven’t interacted with yet to generate demand while driving efficient return on ad spend.
Targeting, or Optimization?
On first read, marketers might believe that AIA prospecting is a new targeting solution. In fact, AIA Prospecting is not a targeting solution, but rather an optimization tactic to help power your targeting to work harder for you.
The optimization models on Facebook aim to find people who have vehicle intent, based on signals from on and off of Facebook. For instance, these can be based on behaviors such as browsing vehicles across a variety of automotive sites, browsing activities on Marketplace and automotive-related Facebook pages, and asking for vehicle recommendations. We then match the intent that people have expressed with vehicles from an advertiser’s catalog that best aligns with this intent, meaning that the ad creative can be dynamically generated to match a person’s vehicle interest. This optimization allows advertisers to reach a broader group of in-market shoppers than before.
It is important to note that Facebook optimization algorithms seek to understand people’s interests and intent based on all available data. All information used is aggregated with millions of other signals before being read by our optimization systems – the tool prohibits conquesting, ensuring your website visitors are not directly targetable.
Because of the sophisticated optimization capabilities of AIA prospecting, advertisers can simplify their targeting and not worry about including targeting for in-market shoppers. For the best results when utilizing AIA prospecting, make sure that you still keep your basic demo targeting in mind (age, gender, location) so that AIA prospecting can optimize to the people you are most interested in connecting with.
Getting Started with Automotive Inventory Ads
If you have already followed the guidelines for proper pixel and vehicle catalog set up for Facebook, you are ready to create your AIA prospecting campaign in Ads Manager (If you need more set up help, search “Setup Automotive Inventory Ads” in Facebook’s Help Center):
1. Under the Catalog Sales objective, you will see the prospecting option within the ad set level under “Define a broad audience and let Facebook optimize who sees your products.” From there, you will want to pair this with very broad targeting for best performance, which is simply age and gender.
2. Bidding: We recommend starting with “lowest cost” bidding for the first week of the campaign. This will allow our models to collect data and calibrate bids. After the first week, advertisers can either continue using lowest cost or modify their bids to target cost based on the average bid values they have observed during the first week.
3. Budget: As a starting point, we recommend advertisers to choose a budget that corresponds with their audience size. For instance, if the projected audience size with AIA retargeting was X, and the audience size for AIA for prospecting is 4X, then the advertiser should 4X their retargeting budget to accommodate the increased audience size. Please note that this does not mean delivery will necessarily be 4X greater than retargeting but can be used as a starting point for budget planning.
4. Optimization: We recommend optimizing for conversions based on the online events that are most important to your business such as VDP views (using ViewContent event) based on 7-day attribution.
5. Placement: We recommend selecting automatic placements so that Facebook’s machine learning can determine where best to show ads to drive the most conversions at the lowest cost.
For more information on AIA prospecting best practices, please search “Best Practices for Automotive Inventory Ads” in Facebook’s Help Center.
