Online shopping has become more appealing and prevalent in the past few years, to the point that people are even buying cars online instead of in person at dealerships. For car dealers, this means amping up your online ad campaigns as a dealership to reach people who prefer to look at vehicles online instead of in-person now.
Luckily, Google’s new vehicle ads are out of beta and available for dealers to use in the United States. Here you can find out everything you need to know about vehicle ads and what they can do to help your dealership reach new customers for your new and used cars.
What are Vehicle Ads? How do they Work?
According to the Google Merchant Center, vehicle ads are a performance-focused, lower-funnel ad format designed to promote new and used cars from a dealership’s available inventory to customers who are car shopping via Google’s search function.
Vehicle ads work by auto-targeting that matches specific search queries to vehicles in your inventory that you’ve put in the Merchant Center. Ads promote online and offline conversions and give more qualified leads by allowing ads to show specific information about vehicles like make, model, and color before the searcher even clicks on the ad to be brought to the dealer page.
For those concerned about how well these new vehicle ads work, beta testing results showed an average 25% increase in conversions when vehicle ads supplemented existing ad campaigns for retailers like Carmax and Asbury Automotive Group. Vehicle ads have proven to be an amazing tool for growing your customer base and conversions that should be taken advantage of now that it’s out of the beta stage.
How to Start Using Google Vehicle Ads
Before using vehicle ads, it’s important to note that not everyone can use them, nor can all vehicle inventory be used. The Google Merchant Center specifies that vehicle ads can only be used by dealer or retailer stock; private sellers and auto brokers can’t use them. In addition, only non-commercial vehicles like cars and pickup trucks can be promoted with vehicle ads.
To start using vehicle ads, you must have a Smart Shopping campaign on your Google Ads account and link that account to both a Merchant Center account and a Google Business Profile. From there, upload a vehicle data feed with information about each vehicle that includes make, model, mileage, color, price, and any other important ad information to the Merchant Center.
The Google Merchant Center has guides that can walk you through the process of creating a feed and enabling vehicle ads.
Now is the best time to start taking advantage of online shopping convenience to grow your customer base – why not use Google’s new vehicle ads to promote your new and used cars to a wide range of new possible customers? Google has made it easier than ever to reach new customers with their Google Ads campaigns, and now their new vehicle ads can grow your business even more if you take the time to learn about and implement them.
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