How To Set Up Vehicle Shopping Ads

Create Vehicle Ads For Your Dealership

To kick us off, let me just say that the benefits to doing your own Vehicle Ads in-house are many. Get these set up for your dealership, and pray that your competition keeps using a vendor so you can kick everyone’s ass.

Vehicle ads can be a big help in getting your inventory noticed and generating more leads. If you’re curious about doing this in-house, you’ve come to the right place. After completing a few steps, you’ll be on your way to running your own vehicle ads and saving a lot of money in the process.  We’ll go over how much you could be saving by doing this in-house at the end of this post. 

First step, you need to create a Google Merchant Center Account.  Once you’ve created an account for your business, Merchant Center will try to send you down the path of creating “free listings.”  You’ll need to cancel this process before you begin to apply for the vehicle listing ads. If you apply for the vehicle listing ads and the free product listings are in set up status, you’ll be denied for vehicle ads until you cancel setup for the free product listings. Just go into the setting of the free product listings and cancel the setup.  Do a little research if you’re having trouble.  You can even contact their help services and someone from Google should be able to help walk you through the steps, or even do it for you.

 All right, once you’ve canceled the setup for the free product listings you can now apply for the vehicle ads program.  This turnaround can take a few days, and if for some reason it takes longer, reach out to support and put some pressure on them. We need to be proactive because we’re losing opportunities here. Once you’re accepted into the vehicle ads program, you’ll see the Vehicle Ads card available in the “manage programs” tab on the left and you can get started.  You’ll need to verify your website and link your Google Business Profile. Once this is complete we get to the fun part.  We need to create a feed.  

If you’re using an inventory aggregator like Vauto or HomeNet, reach out to support and have them set up an SFTP link that includes a username and password. I’m sure other inventory services can easily set this up as well since this is literally what they do. You may be able to do this with your CRM provider as well if they handle inventory. It’s also worth seeing if your website provider can do this as well. But most likely, whatever service sends inventory to your website should be able to set you up. Keep at it because sometimes you have to keep smiling and dialing until you talk to the right person. We’re sales people, never take the first no for an answer…at least in this context. Here’s the most important part of this whole setup.  The file they create needs to match your store code in your Google Business Profile. To find your store code, log into your Google My Business profile, and look at the store code for your dealership.  If you don’t see one, you’ll need to create one.  To do this, go to your listing on Google, hit those three little dots to the right, go to business settings, and then click on “advanced settings”.  Scroll down and you’ll see the option to type in your store code.  This can be any code you would like. Numbers, letters, or a combination of both.  Once you have your store code you’ll need to give that to your inventory provider for their setup.  The file that they create, which Google will fetch through the SFTP link, HAS to match the store code.  If your store code is 1234, then the file that they provide you needs to be named, 1234.csv. 

Keep pushing through, you’re almost there. Once the SFTP link is created with the proper filename, you need to go to the feed option in Google Merchant Center and create your feed.  Walk through the steps such as naming your feed, and once you get to the part where it asks you what kind of feed you’re setting up, click on the “Schedule Fetch” option.  Input the information your inventory provider gave you (SFTP link info, username, password, filename), schedule your fetch time and frequency, and away we go!  It can take around a week or so for Google to approve your vehicle feed.  But once you do that, you can start creating your ads.  If your vehicle ads get disapproved, you’ll have to do some troubleshooting and figure out what happen.  If it says “invalid country” or something along those lines, chances are that the feed isn’t formatted correctly from your provider, or your store code doesn’t match the file name.  Again, work with support, they should be able to help you troubleshoot and point you in the right direction.

Once your feed is approved you’re ready to start running your ads.  Make sure your Google Ads account is linked to your Google Merchant Center account.  You’ll need to do this in order to start running ads.  Once the accounts are linked, go into your Google Ads account and start a shopping campaign. Everything should be pretty easy from this point on moving forward.  Set your budget, and your location targeting, and follow the other steps to begin running your vehicle ads. Within 24 hours your ads should be up and running.

Now that the hard part is over, here comes the fun part.  Monitoring your ad performance.  If you’ve used a vendor previously, you should see the difference right away. Your cost per click, impression share, and pretty much everything should be a lot better on a lighter budget.  You have to be careful with some vendors.  Anytime a vendor comes in and says how their tool is better because of their data partners and blah blah blah, I automatically think they’re full of shit.  They just don’t want you running the services yourself because then you’ll see how full of shit they really are.  Flashy dashboards and backends are nice, but I can’t help but think about how they’re manipulating those numbers.  

Anywho, keep an eye on your budget and impression share.  Adjust your budget as needed, and make sure your merchandising is on point. Stock images and poor photos are just going to hurt you. 

Now, let me tell you why I said what I said about vendors in this space.  We hired a big company to help us out with this initially. I won’t name them, but they suck. How badly did they suck? Well to start off, they said in order to get started, we needed a minimum spend of $2500.   I could never get a straight answer as to how much was going into their pocket, and how much was going toward my ads.  However, when we brought this in-house, I was able to get a pretty clear picture.  Here are a couple of examples.  Our vendor reports showed an avg. cost per click of around $2.50.  My cost per click doing it in-house currently sits at 45 cents. Was this company making $2.00 per click? It looks a hell of a lot like it! That’s infuriating. Also, our click-through rate with the vendor was around .45%. Our click-through rate doing it in-house is .95%.  We’re getting better performance, more impressions, and more clicks on half of the budget.

My recommendation is to do this in-house or be very careful with whom you partner with on these ads. There are many other ways to set up your Vehicle Ads yourself, as I only went over one way in order to get this done.  If you don’t have an inventory provider that can do this, then you’ll have to hire another service that can format your inventory and set you up with a link or an API.  Feel free to reach out of you have any questions.