There are a lot of sources for leads that auto dealerships can tap into. From third party websites to lead generation companies to Google advertising to email lists, everyone is trying to sell you “leads” that you can sell to.

The biggest concern: can you make money with those leads? What is your return on investment? 

You can look at a lot of statistics, like cost per lead, the number of leads, the quality of the leads, the clickthrough rate of your marketing efforts, and on and on. The real issue is ROI – how much did you make for what you spent?

Third Party Auto Sales Sites

For a while, the third party sites had control over the entire auto sales market. You couldn’t search for a car or even a car part without suddenly getting an ad from a third-party auto sales site.

That has relaxed a little as Google has realized that they aren’t doing the thousands of dealerships any favors by giving every search response to four or five third party sites. Facebook never had this problem since their ad service is much more geographically-based. 

Lead Generating Ads on Facebook for Dealerships

“Lots of people want to hear from your business, but filling out forms can be difficult on mobile. Facebook lead ads makes the lead generation process easy. People can simply tap your ad and a form pops up—it’s already pre-populated with their Facebook contact information and ready to be sent directly to you.” – https://www.facebook.com/business/ads/lead-ads

That’s the most powerful explanation that you can give for what makes Facebook lead generating ads so powerful. Since Facebook already has a user’s email address and probably their phone number, their ads can fill out a contact form for them.

The ad shows up in the user’s newsfeed. As they scroll through pictures from their friend’s birthday party and funny cat memes, there, in the middle, is a photo of a gorgeous car or truck. You can include the price, the monthly payment, and anything else that you want. 

When the user clicks the ad, it will take them to prefilled contact form. One more push of a button and a message is sent to your dealerships that someone is interested in that vehicle. 

This is a radical change from Google ads that require that you build a form, a landing page, or that you send them to your website. Everything is just two clicks away and you have a new lead. 

Because you only pay per lead, not per view, it can be a very low cost per sale. You’re only going to hear from people who are really interested in buying a car. 

A Little Too Good

There is a problem with these ads when they’re well-designed and well-placed: dealerships get overwhelmed with too many leads. 

That might sound like a fantasy, but there have been a number of dealerships that have found that the volume of leads exceeds their capacity to contact and handle everyone. In that case, you can dial back the amount your spending, thus the number of leads you get in a day or you can simply bring in some new staff to help.

Not a Saturated Market

Unlike Google ads, the Facebook lead generating advertisements aren’t saturated with dealerships. It has been a slow move among dealerships that are used to getting leads the old-fashioned ways, whether that’s newspaper ads or through Google, the new Yellow Pages. 

The idea that a social media website can generate quality leads organically is a bit hard for many advertising managers at dealerships to grasp. That’s good. That means that if you use these ads, and you’re among the first in your area, you’re going to end up with a lot of leads that your competitors are still sitting on Google looking for.

Advertise where people are

There are no billboards on the tops of mountains or the bottom of the ocean. Why not? There’s no one there. You want to put your ads where everyone is and where they go all the time. 

69% of US adults are on Facebook. – https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/16/facts-about-americans-and-facebook/

That means that nearly 70% of everyone you meet has a Facebook profile and everyone is checking it every day. That’s why you want to be advertising on Facebook. 

Using lead generation ads on Facebook for auto sales is a match made in heaven. Facebook even has a whole page dedicated to success stories of auto industry businesses and Facebook ads: https://www.facebook.com/business/success?categories[0]=automotive&categories[1]=lead-ads#

Make Facebook lead gen ads a major part of your business and you’ll see it grow fast.

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