Vehicle Listing Ads For My Dealership? Here is the ultimate guide:
If you’re an auto dealer, you have probably heard of Vehicle Listing Ads, or VLAs. Discover the secrets to creating irresistible vehicle listing ads that drive more leads and sales for your car dealership. Master the art of SEO-optimized content
What are vehicle Ads?
Similar to Google’s Product Listing Ads (PLAs), vehicle ads will help auto sellers and dealers promote their entire vehicle inventory to potential buyers in a carousel format. As with all sorts of products and services, most users have been browsing the internet to find and purchase cars in recent years.
Google states that about 89% of users looking to buy a new car search for their new vehicle online before purchasing one. To align with this trend of search behaviour, Google will display cars available for sale – by way of car ads – in proximity to the user and connect them with vendors directly through search results.
VLAs are a very new and unique campaign type when it comes to listing your inventory for sale. They can be very beneficial in terms of results, but why does it take so long for your agency to get them setup and turned on? The short answer is GOOGLE.
When setting up VLAs there is a lot of “Hurry Up And Wait.” The following paragraphs will detail each step to setting up VLAs and the time it takes to wait on Google.
First, the whole process can’t be done without a Merchant Center account. Merchant Center has been around for years and is utilized by E-Commerce companies as a way to help sell their products. Basically, this is the account that will feed Google Ads. But in order to feed Google Ads, you have to first set up the Merchant Center correctly.
After you create the account, you will notice that Vehicle Listing Ads is not a product that is available. Vehicle Listing Ads is not available to every Merchant Center account thus it’s not an option. To get this as an option you will have to contact Google support. There are several ways to do so, the most common being filling out the VLA request form. This is the first waiting period. It can Google up to 2 weeks to approve your request through this form. I have found a loophole in this process by contacting them directly via their Chat solution instead of filling out this form.
How will these car dealership ads help?
To begin with, Google advertising of this nature is sure to increase awareness about your enterprise and your offers among internet users across all devices using text-based searches or voice searches. Google states that 95% of vehicle buyers use digital as a source of information and that twice as many start their research online versus at a dealer.
As vehicles ads reply to queries with a high shopping intent, they are most likely to capture leads and convert customers at the bottom of the conversion funnel. These prospects are very close to selecting a specific vehicle of a particular configuration or dealer.
Google Ads also provides ways to measure the performance of your ad campaigns and confirms that advertisers who enhanced their existing Search campaigns by creating and publishing vehicle ads experienced a +25% average increase in conversions during beta testing.
To sum up, this new advertising tool will help you drive more traffic to your vehicle pages and help you optimize lead conversions, whether at the store or online.
why droptop social for your vlaS ads?
Expertise with the Google Merchant Center process: Droptop Social has extensive experience navigating the nuances of setting up a Merchant Center account and getting VLAs approved. They can help you get through the initial approval process much faster than trying to do it yourself or relying on an agency that is less familiar with the requirements.
Feed creation and optimization: Creating the vehicle inventory feed that needs to be imported into Merchant Center can be a complex task. Droptop Social can ensure your feed is formatted correctly and contains all the necessary information to avoid delays in Google's approval process.
Monitoring for algorithm issues: As mentioned in the article, there are sometimes bugs in Google's algorithms that can cause delays in getting feeds approved. Droptop Social stays on top of these issues and can proactively work with Google to resolve any problems, rather than just waiting for the bug to be fixed.
Dedicated account management: Having a dedicated team managing your VLA setup and campaign can make a big difference, versus relying on a general agency that may not prioritize this newer ad format. Droptop Social can provide hands-on support and guidance throughout the entire process.
The key advantage Droptop Social offers is our specialized expertise in the vehicle listing ad space. This allows them to navigate the Google approval process much more efficiently than a typical digital marketing agency. If your current agency is taking too long to get your VLAs set up, reaching out to a provider like Droptop Social may be a good solution.