If you can stomach the waste, then yes by all means. If you care to look at it as such.

meh

Ryan Everson said:

Alex, you're going to get waste with any advertising source.

Your tv commercial plays while someone is in the bathroom...

Your email campaign gets flagged as spam...

Your YouTube ad is played on a minimized and muted browser window...

Your organic search result is shown to a user 1,000 miles away...

With your mentality, dealers shouldn't advertise anywhere...

I'm going to evaluate my advertising on the KPI's available and make the most informed decision possible. With that being said, I will take Facebook's $2.84 cost per lead and $65 cost per sale any day of the week.

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Waste yes (of course), but not bot-driven, non-anthropogenic or native fraudulent traffic. Definitely not that at the overall 50% rate. All of this (as you know) comes down to cost / lead, ultimately cost / sale, so evaluate accordingly (we agree there). As I just said, what works in one demographic might not in another. It's always continuous testing, but for my money... I'm placing the majority of my ad spend in other channels. I don't trust Zuckerberg as far as I can throw him. I never said not to advertise.

Ryan Everson said:

Alex, you should know from my DealerRefresh posts that I practice what I preach and always have data to backup my claims. I don't BS.

With that being said, here's data from one of my Facebook ad accounts. I'd be happy to share any account or date range to show I'm not cherry-picking the best data. All of my campaigns perform similarly well.

$4,162 Facebook Ad Spend

• 1,463 leads for $2.84 each with name, email, phone number
• 64 car sales at a cost per sale of $65
• $127,731 total gross profit

For every dollar I spend on Facebook, I generate $31 in profit.

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That's fantastic, but you'd generate A LOT more and SHOULD if 50% of their traffic wasn't bogus. How much is wasted? That is the entire point. I don't think anyone can truly answer that, as they're pissing on advertisers' legs, while telling them it's raining. Furthermore, my question stays to him. You ARE at the dealer level, it makes the pulling and pushing of data from your sales numbers into FB, etc., much easier. It's not an easy task for a 3rd party to do such things for dealers (access the worst challenge). I know, I did it at the 3rd party attribution level and it's extremely difficult to scale.

Additionally, you must be pulling some magic tricks across your FB ads, I've never witnessed a top's or group's cost that low in FB and that's a sample size of ~750 dealers (it's generally much higher, so kudos to you). Granted, I'd be defying my own logic as what works in one demographic might not in another. There's that.

Ryan Everson said:

Yes, the Facebook ads I run without a doubt generate leads and sell cars at the lowest cost per lead/unit of all our advertising sources.

I hope all of my competitors listen to your 50% fake traffic stat and get scared away from advertising on Facebook while I eat their lunch.

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And I think you're totally full of shit and probably wasting a ton of your dealer's money.

Joe Friedrichsen said:

Hi Jacques! This article is largely meant for dealers already advertising on social media. Specifically, Facebook and Instagram.

The article is meant to help dealers dial in their efforts and maximize the money they're ALREADY spending on advertising.

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Yeah but, if they are advertising on FB and Insta and the half of their traffic is bogus and botgenic WTF does that do for them? No offense.

@joe.pistell always says, DISC as in Does It Sell Cars? What type of sales attribution are you placing on it?

I see:

• Cost per lead
• Purchases (sales measured with Facebook’s offline conversion measurement tool)
• Cost per purchase (cost per purchase with Facebook’s offline conversion measurement tool)

How are you doing this? Using 3rd party attribution tools or your own? FB conversion measurement tools are pretty bad actually and not set up for auto very well, online and offline (are you pulling data from dealerships' (sales) and pushing that back into FB?). I get that you're attempting to market yourselves with a branded thread (good on you), but there are loads of threads on much of this. Ping them and educate.

Considering half of Facebook and I would presume Instagram traffic is fake, I would say they probably should shy away from spending too much there. Gee... let me guess, you're pitching FB and Instagram advertising?

@ChrisR best I can determine, it is in Google's hands to make those connections. We have found that about 10-20% of our customers have this turned on, they all have at least 3 GMB (sales, service, parts, body shop), and are very active GMB content publishers.

Great comments Jeff. I know AutoNation has been using a Clorox thing in service for a while you can check it out on their website. I really believe things are going to have to change in our processes and procedures to ensure employee and public safety. Interesting time to be alive for sure. Stay safe.

We haven't seen any notifications yet. My gut says it will be applied to the next dollars spent vs the billing method. We provide a breakdown end of month (its live in dashboard) with all charges so I don't expect we have to to do anything special.

From one of the accounts that I man:

How can I find out if I’m receiving ad credits?
Advertisers receiving ad credits will be notified in the coming months. We are in the process of building these specialized credits into Google Ads accounts, therefore notifications will not show immediately. We appreciate your patience.

Who is eligible for the ad credits?
The ad credits will be available to small and medium businesses, who advertise directly with us or through partners, around the world with active accounts since the beginning of 2019. Credits will be provided to SMB advertisers that have been active advertisers since Jan 1, 2019 and comply with all Google Ads T&Cs.

How and when will eligible customers receive the ad credits?
Small and medium businesses worldwide that have been active advertisers since the beginning of 2019 will be informed in the coming months through notifications within their Google Ads account.

How long are the ad credits valid for?
This Google Ads credit can be used at any point throughout the year and will expire on 31st Dec 2020. Any unused portion will be removed from Google Ads accounts.

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Steve,

Your thoughts about "during bad times" dealers create better process, stuck a cord. During the past weeks I have been advising....time to Develop a REAL ecommerce strategy, starting with home delivery.

During these crazy times I keep thinking a Napoleon Hill quote, “Every adversity has the seed for an equal or greater benefit for those who maintain a positive attitude.”

Maybe is will force dealers to, “walk the walk,” that, “we like to talk….”

What do I mean?

Well for the past 10 years almost every car dealer advertises, promises, and/or touts, “Buy a car from the comfort of your home”, “We’ll bring it or ship it to you…”, “Complete your transaction and never step foot in the showroom.” While some dealers live by those words, I found for most it’s more of “marketing campaign” or “me too”, than a solid ecommerce strategy. "Get 'em in here" is still the advise from most managers.

It’s 20-20, a paradigm shift was inevitable and maybe this global health crisis is the tipping point. Maybe we are forced to figure out how to make ecommerce work. We might look back 20 years from now and say, “well the Corona Virus forced us to figure this ecommerce thing out for real.

Link to a related video...https://youtu.be/rAgatMd7dBA

What are your thoughts on this topic?

Here's what we've been seeing.

We have quite a few dealers in Pennsylvania and California who are definitely down, but things seem to be holding steady overall into April.

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Can’t wait to see how this plays out through April.

Here's all of March for FRIKINtech.

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Any updates on this?

We saw a small dip on the 23rd, but engagement in the illumiQUOTE product is encouraging!

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Can you refresh me on what size the data sample is that provides this? I know we are watching the search trends too and this is compelling data to stay the course.

Keep in mind Saturday sales always lag a bit and get added on Monday. Reports are dynamic and will back fill accordingly.

john.quinn said:

How's it look after the weekend?

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As you know, Driven Data and FRIKINtech don't share every client, but the trends continue to grow for digital. Based on Jon's numbers this morning (he shared on Facebook) we are seeing the same thing. Here are pure FRIKINtech illumiQUOTE visits:

View attachment 4715

How's it look after the weekend?

What an unprecedented time to be tracking automotive stats. During this time of uncertainty we want to help by providing some real metrics on what is actually happening in dealerships today. I designed a data command center to track everything we can see across all of our integrations.

nduplantis said:

We were seeing this and I think we figured out a work around. It's been 45 days but we've seen our connection % double. What we do is use a tracking number for outbound calls and change this number every 30 days to give us a fresh start every month. Like I said small sample but it seems to be working.

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Good to hear you are finding success!

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