le Ads for Vehicles: 5 tips to jumpstart your dealership’s growth
It is often a complicated process to buy a car. There is no shortage of models, trims and options available to consumers. However, local dealerships are struggling to keep a large inventory.
It’s not surprising that more people than ever are using Google to find their next car. Online options are limitless, and local choices are few. Nearly 95% all car sales today begin online.
Google launched vehicle ads last year to help searchers find local car dealers that have what they are looking for. Dealerships can advertise their inventory in the search results. This article will explain what these ads look like, how they function, and give you the best tips to help you switch to this strategy.
Table of Contents
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What is Google vehicle advertising?
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How does Google’s vehicle advertising work?
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How to start with vehicle listing ads
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Google’s vehicle advertising policies: What you need to Know
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Google Ads for Vehicles: Tips and Best Practices
What are Google vehicle advertisements?
Google launched its new vehicle ads in 2022 at the National Automobile Dealers Association’s annual show. This new format allows local dealerships to display their inventory on the SERP with a picture of the car along with the make, model and condition.
Vehicle ads (also known as vehicle listing advertisements or VLAs), are an excellent way for local dealers to stand out in a crowded SERP, and sell the cars on their lot. They not only showcase the car on the Google SERP, with tons of relevant information but also direct the searchers to the Vehicle Description Page. From there they can convert directly on their website. Dealerships are paid when users click on their vehicle ads to arrive at their website on a Vehicle Description Page (VDP).
Google vehicle ads are displayed at the top of the page, right above the main search results. The SERP allows a dealer to display multiple ads for the same search result. This can be a huge benefit and complement your PPC Strategy.
How does Google advertising work for vehicles?
They are managed more like a href=”https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/03/04/google-shopping-campaigns” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>Google’s shopping campaigns/a> or a href=”https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2022/07/05/performancemax_tips… They are more like Google Shopping Campaigns, or performance max. Instead of using keywords, car dealers can manage their vehicle listing ads by providing a current inventory feed directly into Google Merchant Center.
Google receives information about each car, including the year, make, model and condition. They also provide other pertinent data, such as mileage, price and other attributes.
their whole lot. This structured data is used by Google to determine which searches are relevant for a specific car. It then serves the most relevant ads when someone searches in your local area for “Used 2020 Nissan Rogue”.
Google’s vehicle ads go beyond SERP. Dealerships, like other retailers can also use Performance Max Campaigns for advertising across Google Search and Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discovery. When combined with a list of remarketing, auto dealerships can dynamically remarket past visitors and remind them about the cars they saw on their website while they browse and continue to think about their next big purchase.
Google Vehicle Ads: How to get started
Google’s VLAs can be an attractive option for car dealers to beat their competition on the SERP. However, getting started is a complicated process. Google offers a comprehensive onboarding guide to dealerships interested in running Vehicle Listing Ads.
1. Create a Google Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts for your dealership. You’ll need to create a separate account for each storefront if you manage more than one. You can use your Google Ads account or Google Business Profile for the new vehicle listings ads.
2. After you create your Google Merchant Center Account, you can use to submit your interest for vehicle ads. Google’s review will determine if your location is eligible and you will be contacted once it has completed its review. This usually takes Log in to your Google Merchant Center to enable Vehicle Listing Ads after you have received confirmation from Google. You’ll have to navigate from the Overview page of Google Merchant Center to Growth > Manage programs > Vehicle Ads. This card will have a “Get Started”. Click it.
3. You’ll then need to submit your feeds to Google Merchant Center. Google wants the most up-to-date and accurate information based on your inventory, both on your website and on the sales floor. It can be a complex process, and it is best to use the inventory feeds that power your inventory and Vehicle Description Pages. After your inventory feeds have been submitted to Google it may take several days for Google’s review of your feeds and the attributes required for each listing. The process could take up to a week.
4. You can also link your Google Ads profile and your Google Business profile with Google Merchant Center while you wait for the feeds to be approved. Google can then tailor your ads to local searches and feature your location in the ads. You can link your Google Business Profile to Google Merchant Center if you’re the owner or manager. These instructions. If you are the Admin for your Google Ads, you can also link that account to GMC using these instructions.
5. You’re now ready to launch your first vehicle advertising campaign. Create a new Google Ads campaign and choose the option to create Performance Max Campaign. If you are creating a new Performance Max Campaign, make sure that the feed is coming from your Google Merchant Center. You’ll be guided through creating your first ad and your vehicle listing ads are live on Google within minutes!
Google’s vehicle advertising policies and eligibility.
Vehicle ads are a relatively recent ad format for both Google Ads, and they are not available to all advertisers at this time.
- Google only allows US dealers to advertise vehicles. Canadian and Australian advertisers can apply to Google for a limited beta.
- Google allows you to only advertise non-commercial passenger cars, such as pickup trucks and cars. The ads are not permitted for larger vehicles such as RVs or trucks, buses, boats, planes, farm equipment, or commercial vehicles.
- Google Merchant Center has very strict image guidelines, which includes cars. Dealerships cannot include overlays, watermarks or text in their vehicle images. Also, vehicles with placeholder images for “coming soon” cars will not be approved. Since these practices are standard in the automotive industry it is a good idea for you to include a few additional image links to your inventory feed in order to increase your chances of Google accepting one of your images as a vehicle.
Here are a few examples of the numerous image guidelines available for VLAs.
Google Ads for Vehicles: Best Practices
Google vehicle ads offer you the opportunity to increase sales of cars and your visibility in SERP. Make sure you create these campaigns for success. Google Ads for Vehicles Tips:
1. Only track conversions that are meaningful from your vehicle detail page
It is possible to set a goal of viewing the vehicle detail page, but keep in mind that each click on your vehicle listing ads results in a VDP view. This makes VDP views a poor way to measure the success of your campaign. should instead track conversions that are more likely to be higher-intent, such as form fills and phone calls.
If you want to increase the number of conversions generated by your Performance Max campaign, make sure the data that you use to optimize is only from highly-valuable leads.
2. Budget for success
These fully automated campaigns require a large amount of data in order to be effective and consistent. Google suggests that local dealerships allocate $100 per day for vehicle ads campaigns, or $3,000 per month. Larger budgets will result in more reach, traffic and conversions. While you may be able spend less, it is foolish to budget for less than $1,000 per month for vehicle listing advertisements.
3. Optimize your feeds for inventory
Your inventory feeds contain almost all the data used to trigger and compile your Google vehicle ads. Continue to optimize these attributes. Google only requires a few attributes to run your feed, but these optional attributes help Google understand your inventory better and find relevant search terms to match it with.
You should always remember that without keywords, Google will match all of your ads with keywords from your feed. Use concise, relevant language to target users according to their search terms. On the description page of your car, avoid using verbose language or words that are not related to it.
WordStream’s free keyword tool can help you determine which terms to use for optimizing your Google ads.
4. Control your campaign structure
While this isn’t necessarily bad from Google’s perspective, it may be tempting for dealerships to run a single vehicle ad campaign that includes all their inventory within the same product category. This isn’t necessarily bad for Google, but it’s possible that you’ve got different goals or KPIs based on your inventory.
If you want to control the spend and performance of your vehicle listing ads, break them into separate campaigns based on attributes like new/used/CPO, make, model, or price. You can control the performance and spend of your vehicle listings ads by breaking them down into separate campaign. These campaigns are based on different attributes such as new/used/CPO or make, model or price. You can then control the budget allocated to each inventory group and optimize your account towards a cost-per-conversion that is profitable.
5. Both vehicle ads and search advertisements can help you dominate the SERP
The vehicle listing ads are a good way for car dealers in your area to show off their inventory. However, they don’t replace traditional search ads. Search ads will still appear alongside vehicle ads in the same SERP. However, text-based ads have a much wider reach and are more flexible.
Your vehicle ads will appear alongside regular Google ads when someone searches for “2017 Chevy cruise” but, if you wish to be visible to a searcher searching for “Chevrolet dealers near me”, you must have a strong search campaign in place to capture this high-intent query.
In this SERP example, you can see that CarGurus and Carfax both have vehicle ads as well as search ads.
Google your vehicle ads now to increase sales tomorrow
Google vehicle ads can be a powerful way for dealerships to reach local car buyers on and off of the SERP. With a good search campaign, dealers are able to reach a large number of relevant searches for their current inventory at low cost.
Here are some tips to get you started with Google Vehicle Ads:
- Only track meaningful actions in your VDPs
- Budget for success
- Optimize your feeds for inventory
- Control your campaign structure
- Use SERP ads with vehicle listing ads
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