It is often said that 50% of marketing works, you just don’t know which 50%. When it comes to Facebook ads, nothing could be further from the truth. Facebook ads can be measured down to which specific ad generated a specific lead or sale. For automotive dealers, attribution is essential to make decisions on how to spend budget on Facebook ads.
The average American spends over 50 minutes a day on Facebook properties, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, so it is no longer optional for automotive dealers to use Facebook ads. If your dealership or marketing team isn’t skilled at Facebook ads, it’s time to learn (and my conference breakout sessions could help).
Unfortunately, most automotive marketers have no idea how their ads are performing, so they stop running them or are afraid to even start. In the State of Automotive Marketing, 9 Clouds surveyed over 100 automotive dealers throughout North America. The number one challenge these marketers identified was measuring ROI:
Setting Up Facebook Ad Attribution on Google Analytics
Fortunately, setting up attribution for Facebook ads is a simple three step process.
Step 1: Set Goals in Google Analytics
Every dealer wants web visitors to do something. It may be to request a quote, chat with a sales rep on the web chat or call the dealership. The goals of a website should be measured so marketing gets credit not for traffic, but instead, the right traffic.
The easy way to measure these goals is with Google Analytics goals.
This article will walk you through setup, but the basics are this: Click on the admin section of Google Analytics, click on goals, and tell Google what you want someone to do on your website. Often, the easiest way to set-up goals is to create a thank you page so when someone fills out a form, they are redirected to the thank you page. Every visitor to that thank you page is thus a conversion and can be measured by Google Analytics.
Step 2: Add Tracking to Facebook Ads
Google Analytics will track who visits your site from a Facebook ad. With your goal, you can even see how many people from Facebook ads clicked a form or requested financing.
It’s not helpful to decide if Facebook is working based on the average of all the ads. Instead, you should attribute success or failure to specific ads and campaigns. This can be easily done when creating your Facebook ad.
After creating your ad text and choosing your image, the final section of your ad set up is Tracking. Here you can tell Facebook how to label your traffic:
You will always use the following format: utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=yourcampaign
The only text that changes is the campaign name. Here you can put a different name for each ad campaign. By doing this, Google will divide your traffic, including the data on goal conversion, by campaign. Now, you can quickly see what is working and what is not working so you can shut off the ads that are not generating revenue for your dealership.
Step 3: Create a Facebook Ads Dashboard
With your goals and tracking in place, you can quickly view the success of your Facebook ads at a moment’s glance.
Heck, you don’t even have to set it up. We did it for you. You can login to Google Analytics and import this Google dashboard and it will automatically pull in the most important stats onto a single dashboard that can easily be emailed to your general manager or marketing team on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Or, you can choose to make your own.
Now, everyone on your team will know what works and what doesn’t work. For even more insight, estimate the value of a customer and add a dollar value to each goal. Adding in financial information will allow Google Analytics to do the entire ROI calculation for you.
Master Facebook Ads and Attribution
Facebook is now a must-use technique for automotive dealers. You can target using Polk data, conquest new customers and even appear on everyone’s mobile screens at live events.
To make sure your team is trained on the best practices and staying up to date on the latest tactics, take the Facebook Bootcamp. Your team will enjoy step-by-step training and even receive examples of ads and attributions to use as a starting point for your Facebook ad efforts.
To finalize your mastery, attend CBT March 7-9th. Join me at my session, “Advanced Facebook Marketing”, to learn first hand how Facebook can supercharge your marketing efforts in a measurable way.
Scott Meyer is the brofounder of 9 Clouds (brother+cofounder).
