Measuring the Success of Facebook Ads: Are They Effective?

Is advertising on Facebook worth it? Are those ads converting to sales? We think they can, and there is easy way determine the effectiveness of your ads.

Larger dealership groups are reducing budgets to appease stockholders and owners. This creates an opportunity for the mid-to-small sized dealers to run ads without having to spend thousands of dollars.

Unfortunately, most dealerships are not likely tracking offline sales. You could be spending a significant amount and only measuring success off impressions, clicks and website activity but not actual sales. That’s not good data.

Where do you start if you’d like to change up your process?

A company we’ve worked with closely, AutoSweet, sees regular challenges in this bad data scenario. So, what’s good data? For example, good data matches up a customer email address and Facebook heavily relies on this so a match exists between the sales record with a user profile.

First, realize the limitation of just boosting posts. While it’s a great place to start with Facebook marketing, it can be challenging to track the effectiveness of those boosts. When you boost a post you can’t define where the ads will appear and what audience will see them. It’s a general way to advertise through a few different pre-selected categories. You may see a lot of clicks when you boost a post, but that doesn’t equal customers in your showroom or to your website.

Using the dealership first-party customer data from the Dealership Management System (DMS) is the best way to measure Facebook ad success. A member of your staff or a trusted partner like AutoSweet can download the sales records from the DMS and then set up a Facebook Manager account if you don’t have one already. Once they’ve set up the account, they then will go through the process of what Facebook calls “Uploading Offline Event Data.” Click here for more information.

Most people don’t realize that Facebook looks back for seven days when matching your data against the people who interacted with your ad. Some vendors only manually match once a month, and that means they’re missing the previous three weeks of data.

Effective software platforms are here to help.

Effective software platforms like AutoSweet uploads the sales data daily to ensure the most accurate dashboards. After a data upload occurs, Facebook provides an aggregated report of the number of buyers who clicked or viewed the ads. AutoSweet takes that data display and compares it against the respective revenue from each category.

Most dealers want to know specifically who purchased a vehicle or product, what they purchased and from which ad. The AutoSweet platform uses offline sales upload functionality to pair seamlessly with Facebook and to reveal specific results using AutoSweet’s proprietary algorithm.

This reporting technology leads the industry and shares the level of detail that a dealership needs for effective online sales: data that is available nearly real-time on their dashboard.

Bottom line, a successful Facebook campaign will generate hundreds of Messenger or CRM leads per month. How does yours compare?