Worried that the latest changes to Facebook Marketplace will affect you and your business? Fret not as the TRFFK team’s here to help. No doubt, the pace at which new changes are being announced by Facebook can look daunting to several dealers and agencies alike but TRFFK team’s always on top of preparing clients for oncoming changes and is helping hundreds of dealer-clients coast-to-coast with working out better strategies that help deliver real results.
Facebook, this September, is going ahead with removing dealers’ ability to feed inventory automatically to Facebook Marketplace. They will still be able to list their inventory manually from a personal or business Facebook page.
“While it doesn’t look like a big change, it will impact the speed of uploads and the exposure dealers need to give to their inventory as soon as a vehicle hits their lots. It’s an effort by the advertising behemoth to focus on driving engagement on the platform and gather as much data about user activity as possible,†says Benoit Laforce, General Manager – TRFFK.
As Facebook asks advertisers to adapt to post-iOS14.5 changes, there are new strategies you need to adopt for minimal impact on dealers’ campaign performance. Over the next few years, the industry is heading into a cookie-less world and first party data from those in-market for vehicles will be key for Facebook’s continued success.
The latest announcement comes after other changes to Facebook’s advertising policies in recent months that have impacted dealers’ usual strategies around audience targeting and performance of paid ad campaigns.
As Facebook deals with its own challenges of audience segmentation and capturing of intent and other signals in post-click traffic on the iOS14.5 platform, it’s realizing that the need to keep audiences engaged on the platform as much as possible and not lead them to go on to a dealer’s website.
“While there has been no official reason for the change to FB Marketplace, we’ve always advised dealers to use Facebook’s Automotive Inventory Ads (AIA). As always, you can use the full FB ecosystem including Marketplace to place your paid ads wherever our clients like.
“This also helps our dealer-clients in building custom website and FB page audiences and retarget them on FB as well as on other digital channels. It also allows them to track post-click website activity on Google Analytics using TAdvantage setup,†adds Laforce.
Do AIA work better than Marketplace listings?
As FB monetizes its platform, it prioritizes paid ads over organic listings. Once the latest change goes through, the TRFFK team expects Marketplace listings to decrease considerably. By launching your AIA campaigns before the mid-September change rolls out, dealers will improve their ability to capture in-market audiences and lead the traffic on their websites to continue business as usual.
– Sparsh Sharma – Digital Strategist Manager, TRFFK