VIN Specific Ads Show to Be a Key Player for Tier 3 Dealerships’ Advertising Strategy
OVERVIEW
The Operations Team at Orbee Auto worked closely with our developers to automate VIN Specific Ads. VIN Specific Advertising is search ads that highlight each unique Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) in a dealership’s inventory. This automation enables us to land consumers on a targeted Vehicle Description Page (VDP) rather than an Search Results Page (SRP), allowing for a more personal experience for the consumer.
OBJECTIVES
- Using data feed to control the creation, edit, and deactivation
- Creating 1,000s of vehicle-specific ads once a client signs up
HOW IT WORKS
Uploading & Updating VIN Specific Ads Automatically
With the inventory feed setup and template selected, our advertising automation can simply be activated with the press of a button. As new vehicles appear in the inventory feed, Orbee’s system will detect that there is something new and will automatically push a new ad in the next update cycle. Similarly, updates are also pushed as variables such as price in the inventory feeds change.
Pausing Ads for Sold Vehicles
Due to the specificity of the ads, we utilize a tagging system so that our API knows which ads to pause when any vehicles go out of stock. This technique ensures that the ad with the sold vehicle will not be eligible to show.
Keywords & Targeting
In the chart below, you can see that there are a few key differences in the way that we target and tweak the VIN Specific Ads to make them as targeted as possible. This is beneficial because we are only capturing the people who we know are looking for a specific car we are advertising.
KEY CASE STUDY
One of our current clients had huge success with their VIN Specific Ads. Below are some key stats for their Used VIN Specific campaign for the month of January.
Google Ads Key Metrics:
Orbee Auto Key Metrics:
Maybe you are looking at the above table and wondering, “is it really better?” The answer is in the returning stats. Below you can see that returning visits show to be very intent-driven. For the month of January, the VIN Specific campaign got 7% of visitors to convert, whereas 0 of the Used Vehicles did. VIN Specific also had visitors, who visited 3 VDPs and 7.7 total pages on average.
Orbee Auto Key Returning Metrics:
Looking at VIN Specific Used Vehicle campaign compared to a normal Used Vehicle campaign, you can see that VIN Specific had a higher visit count. The average number of pages is less for VIN Specific due to the landing page. With VIN Specific, we land them on the exact vehicle, whereas the Used Vehicles campaign lands on an SRP — allowing the visitor to see multiple cars in one scroll. The conversion rate is not far behind that of the Used Vehicle campaign, however.
CONCLUSION
We believe that VIN Specific Ads are a crucial campaign to have as a Tier 3 Dealership. Selling used cars is difficult, but making sure that each used car on your lot has time to shine online is a huge help. With Orbee’s expertise, dealerships can launch 1,000s of VIN Specific Ads, sit back, and sell cars. VIN Specific Ads may be comparable to SRP Ads on the initial visit, but we have seen that returning stats are where the VIN Specific Ads shine, continuing to drive traffic that has more intent to the site.
