RIP Facebook Marketplace for Car Dealers

[craigh]

We get several of those of course, but we have very good success with Marketplace. Especially since we have our chat connected to our FB page. I also thinks it helps that our salespeople handle all chats. In February and March Marketplace actually outperformed our 3rd Party Listing sites.

I saw a mix of results with dealers using Marketplace, but almost all of them saw a large overall volume of leads.
Part of the problem was that Facebook made it one click to say "I'm interested" in a car, which lead to countless leads where the customer never replied after the initial communication.


This move makes alot of sense to me up here in Canada. We used to have Kijiji (eBay Motors-ish) and it was the hottest place for consumer to consumer car deals. They saw the money and added dealerships too and made it too many steps to view only "private" listings. Once Facebook did the same, we really have no true consumer to consumer marketplaces left for cars.

I'm curious to see how running ads on the Marketplace through an inventory catalogue is going to work - I suspect the results will be vastly lower than real listings.

 

[Tallcool1]

I saw a mix of results with dealers using Marketplace, but almost all of them saw a large overall volume of leads.
Part of the problem was that Facebook made it one click to say "I'm interested" in a car, which lead to countless leads where the customer never replied after the initial communication.


This move makes alot of sense to me up here in Canada. We used to have Kijiji (eBay Motors-ish) and it was the hottest place for consumer to consumer car deals. They saw the money and added dealerships too and made it too many steps to view only "private" listings. Once Facebook did the same, we really have no true consumer to consumer marketplaces left for cars.

I'm curious to see how running ads on the Marketplace through an inventory catalogue is going to work - I suspect the results will be vastly lower than real listings.

I am going to start looking into the the Catalog. I have been using Dealers United for our Facebook Marketplace as well as Facebook Paid. I have reached out to them but really haven't gotten an answer in terms of what direction they are looking.

I agree with your assessment of Facebook making it too easy to click the button. Less leads is not a bad thing if the engagement is higher.

 

[BillKVMotorCo]

I saw a mix of results with dealers using Marketplace, but almost all of them saw a large overall volume of leads.
Part of the problem was that Facebook made it one click to say "I'm interested" in a car, which lead to countless leads where the customer never replied after the initial communication.

It being connected to our internal chat helps reduce the leads. If they never respond our people just don't push the lead.

 

[paulalanjones]

I think Carvana and the growing plethora of similar businesses that are listing their entire inventory in every city in America helped tip the scales. :/

 

[Ryan Everson]

I think Carvana and the growing plethora of similar businesses that are listing their entire inventory in every city in America helped tip the scales. :/

Good point, it certainly didn't help. Facebook should have instituted a 1 listing per VIN policy to prevent that particular issue from happening in the first place.

 

[John V.]

AIA with a catalog.

 

[Jeff Kershner]

I think Carvana and the growing plethora of similar businesses that are listing their entire inventory in every city in America helped tip the scales. :/

I'm sure it's didn't help. Heck, personally got tired of using Marketplace for that reason alone.

 

[James Grace]

I totally agree with Ryan's comparison to Craigslist here, both in terms of the evolution of the product offering and the fact that both became a lot less useful once they got flooded with stuff that wasn't "organic".

We've been doing our best (at AET) to stay on top of launching AIA ads from the platform (which, to be honest with you, isn't very easy given how often Facebook changes stuff in the API mostly without adequate notice or documentation...but that's another story I guess.)

Based on this change from Facebook, we just added the ability to have Facebook Marketplace as a destination for your ads.

I'm for sure biased, but my favorite part of our solution is that you can use our Creative Studio to make a leader card for the ad so you can advertise your dealership, or the offer / promotion / whatever in addition to the inventory. It's pretty slick.

 

[Ryan Everson]

I'm for sure biased, but my favorite part of our solution is that you can use our Creative Studio to make a leader card for the ad so you can advertise your dealership, or the offer / promotion / whatever in addition to the inventory. It's pretty slick.

This is a great tactic that we employ as well! It's the perfect way to advertise an attractive offer and follow it up with a carousel of inventory that the offer applies to.

 

[AlphaLead]

Bad news