Welcome to Q4 2019 with the start of fall and the Halloween season! We’ve got some very important information to share with you this month: Facebook has pushed out new guidelines regarding how we target users on Facebook and its subsidiaries. This is VERY important for the automotive advertisers on Facebook, so please read this all the way through.
These new guidelines are in regards to any ads run on Facebook related to Housing, Employment, and Credit (HEC) opportunities. The HEC guidelines take into account the content of your website and the audiences being targeted. So, even if your ad doesn’t mention credit, Facebook still deems it to be related to credit opportunities since most VDPs have links to financing options or credit applications.
These guidelines require your ad accounts to identify as being in Facebook’s ‘Special Ads Category’ related to ‘Credit’ on the campaign level of any new and existing campaigns.
Due to the restrictions of the new guidelines, the following will be removed from your targeting options:
Facebook is rolling out these changes to ensure that their users don’t feel discriminated against by advertisers. Please feel free to reach out to your performance manager or anyone on the Dealer OMG team if you have any questions not addressed in this article about how this might pertain to any ads you are running on your own or through Dealer OMG.
While other dealers are stumbling with these changes, we are working around the clock to ensure that our dealership clients have a foothold on the market and are THE dealership that shoppers are seeing in their personal newsfeed.
These new guidelines are in regards to any ads run on Facebook related to Housing, Employment, and Credit (HEC) opportunities. The HEC guidelines take into account the content of your website and the audiences being targeted. So, even if your ad doesn’t mention credit, Facebook still deems it to be related to credit opportunities since most VDPs have links to financing options or credit applications.
These guidelines require your ad accounts to identify as being in Facebook’s ‘Special Ads Category’ related to ‘Credit’ on the campaign level of any new and existing campaigns.
Due to the restrictions of the new guidelines, the following will be removed from your targeting options:
- Age Groups
- Gender
- Race/Ethnicity
- Zip Code
- Income/Financial Status
- Facebook Interests Related to:
- Lifestyle(i.e. College grads, recently moved, new parents, etc.)
- Lifestyle(i.e. College grads, recently moved, new parents, etc.)
- Make, Model, & Body Style
- Ability to target under 15 mile radius
- Ability to exclude locations
- Access to saved audiences
- Through Dealer OMG’s agency partnership with Oracle Data Cloud and Facebook, we will still have access to information on in-market car buyers in your area. Including, but not limited to:
- In-market shopper behaviors for particular makes, models, body styles, and conditions of vehicles
- Income ranges of potential customers
- Credit score ranges of potential customers
- In-market tendencies for auto loans/financing
- In-market shopper behaviors for particular makes, models, body styles, and conditions of vehicles
- Lookalike audiences are now referred to as “‘Special Ad Audiences”. Special Ad audiences are essentially the same as lookalike audiences, but will more heavily take into account user behavior as opposed to demographic features.
- Special Ad Audiences have highly improved. Facebook’s automotive team and Dealer OMG have been running tests for months to determine the value of Facebook’s detailed targeting/interest categories compared to Special Ad audience technology. In almost all cases, the Special Ad audiences outperformed the detailed targeting categories in terms of quantity (i.e. VDP views, clicks, reach) and quality (i.e. cost per lead, cost per click, click-through rates). We will be able to build Special Ad Audiences based off of:
- Your CRM data. This can include, but is not limited to:
- Past customer history
- Leads not sold
- Customers overdue for service
- Email blast lists
- Your CRM data. This can include, but is not limited to:
- Your website traffic. This can include, but is not limited to:
- Your make, model, and body style specific website visitors
- Your general site traffic (i.e. trade-in offers, in-store community events)
- Your service and parts page visitors
- Your careers/employment opportunities page visitors
Facebook is rolling out these changes to ensure that their users don’t feel discriminated against by advertisers. Please feel free to reach out to your performance manager or anyone on the Dealer OMG team if you have any questions not addressed in this article about how this might pertain to any ads you are running on your own or through Dealer OMG.
While other dealers are stumbling with these changes, we are working around the clock to ensure that our dealership clients have a foothold on the market and are THE dealership that shoppers are seeing in their personal newsfeed.
