Facebook plans to discontinue the distribution of vehicle, home rentals, and homes for sale listings from the partner catalog feeds. Listings provided to Facebook via partner catalogs will not be displayed on Marketplace, including the homepage, category pages, browse experience and search results.

Why Does This Matter?

Facebook is further syndicating its user experience and forcing companies to implement their inventory from their personal profile or business page.

Although this may sound like nothing too significant is changing, most dealerships in the automotive industry rely heavily on third party vendors to capture marketplace placement and leads.

The most obvious alternative to marketplace for listing inventory is to utilize Facebook's Automotive Inventory Ads to market your existing inventory. However, this is a paid media feature and requires your dealership to allocate budget to this specific catalog sales campaign objective.

Are Automotive Inventory Ads The Answer?

No doubt Facebook's intention with the recent update is to further amplify the use of Automotive Inventory Ads.

If you have never seen what this ad placement looks like check this example out here:

Automotive Inventory Ads have two very important objectives that we're confident most dealerships still do not understand.

1. Automotive Inventory Ads are important to get eyeballs on your existing inventory. Beyond simply getting leads from the vehicle detail page, this ad unit drives significant amounts of offline view-through conversion ROAS. (Measured via Facebook's offline event sets)
2. Automotive shoppers who are in-market for a vehicle will also get re-targeted based on the interaction with this inventory on-site. This makes for an extremely effective re-marketing experience for existing shoppers in your target market area.

Factors That Impact Market Price

When a new ad product or placement release is added on a platform such as Facebook or a competing social media platform, this adds a surplus of inventory into the market, leaving some time for demand to catch up. 

As advertisers utilize Automotive Inventory Ads for their business they have the opportunity to take advantage of early adoption and lower overall cost because of the natural advent of less overall competition. 

If you look at new placements CPMs over time you will see similar patterns across media channels. CPMs will naturally rise overtime. 

Facebook does a fantastic job of simplifying the factors that impact CPM leverage reach and frequency buying. 

Example CPM Delivery Cost

Qualified Audiences and Auction Dynamics Matter

It would be too obvious for us to say the more personalized and relevant your advertising is to the consumer, the more likely it will convert.

However, let's ask the real question here.

Are we really that sure dealers and agencies truly understand the implications of the costs associated with their ad dollars in auction?

Feel free to challenge us on this. Most agencies and accounts we audit are spending ad dollars inefficiently and thus not maximizing the dollars across their media plan.

So why should we care?

Facebook's change forces dealers and agencies to look more closely at their media plan and automotive inventory strategy to ensure they are maximizing their ad dollars and inventory visibility.

Furthermore, this change validates that vin-specific advertising continues to be a key focal point for dealerships looking to get eyeballs on their inventory.

The best part is, you don't have to only rely on Facebook for your vin-specific advertising.

At CognitionDigital.io we're building vin-specific advertising solutions that help dealers better target their audiences and qualify engagement never seen before on competing channels.