Vehicle Ads now include ‘Sale Pricing’, does your dealership have a PPC strategy for Performance Max VLA?

By: Earl Brown, Autofusion (2024)

If you’re already a Google Vehicle Listing Ads (VLA) believer, as our dealer partners are, you’ll be excited to learn that Google has been working on a number of upgrades to the relatively new VLA platform, which will now be known simply as “Google Vehicle Ads”. Some of our dealer partners have been benefitting from a first-to-market VLA advantage all year. See this case study for more on our innovative strategy, and to see how we are still achieving big results reaching low-funnel shoppers with per-vehicle CPC’s as low as 12¢ and vastly improved on-page engagement.

If you’re not already familiar with and utilizing Vehicle Ads in your dealership’s PPC efforts, you should be. Vehicle Ads are a lead-focused and inventory-based advertising platform that puts low-funnel/high-intent shoppers in front of your VIN-specific units on the Google SERP, and then lands those shoppers on your website VDP to convert. These types of ads allow dealers like you to optimize your merchandising strategy for both online and offline conversion types (leads, phone calls, store visits etc).

The new ‘Sale Price’ feature allows dealers to create urgency and promotional resonance when offering discounted new vehicles online.

Go ahead and do a Google search for something like “2024 Ford F-150’s near me”. Notice anything a little different? When listing new vehicles on PMAX Vehicle Ads, the system previously only displayed the New Vehicle MSRP. One price, displayed in bold black typeface directly beneath the YMM title. After this recent update, shoppers will now see both the original MSRP (still in black) and a discounted “sale” price (in green), before even clicking through to your VDP.

With the proper optimization strategy, Performance Max and Vehicle Ads are an extremely efficient way of cultivating better qualified low-funnel leads, while improving product visibility for higher-funnel shoppers still in the research phase. This new ‘Sale pricing’ feature will help your Google inventory feed stand out even more when compared to local competitors by creating the same exciting visual effect for online shoppers as a traditional sale price hang-tag on your lot.

Using this new tool is as easy as adding a column for ‘sale price’ next to the MSRP column in your inventory feed, but keep in mind that it only (currently) works on new vehicle listings.

How does Autofusion use Google’s ‘Vehicle Listing Ads’ To Reach Car Shoppers Who Are Ready-To-Buy-Now?

We’ve got dealer partners in tough markets, who have been delivering high-intent shoppers directly from google to their vin-specific VDP’s, and averaging between 34-50¢ CPC on PMAX when the ads are optimized for website leads.

Our 25 years’ experience and developer-level understanding of the digital car shopping journey has allowed us to innovate the perfect strategy to make an impact on low-funnel, model-specific shoppers in Google’s Vehicle Ads platform.

Some of the ways our PPC and Vehicle Ad services stand out from the crowd:

Optimization 360º – we cross-test an array of common “macro” optimizations with a series of effective but ‘below-the-radar’ “micro” optimizations, which most advertisers overlook altogether.
Early Adopters – Our dedicated marketing experts and skilled software engineers stay well ahead of emerging technologies and are usually able to craft the ideal strategy that dealers can take to the pavement to earn an advantage in their market, before the other major ad agencies and website companies are even aware of the opportunity.
Fully Engaged Support – We have audited dealership advertising accounts for decades, and unfortunately, the “set it and forget it” advertising paradigm seems to be as alive and well as ever, but not with Autofusion. We constantly audit our strategy and report our findings to make sure you aren’t wasting your precious budget on bad ad spend.

We will continue to write about specific technologies and optimization strategies we’ve developed to help dealer’s dial in their own fully-optimized PPC and VLA advertising strategies. Checkout the Leif Johnson Auto Group PPC Case Study or shop our SEM and PPC Services to learn more about how we can dial in the perfect inventory advertising strategy for you.

If you’d like to schedule a consultation and PPC Audit (at no charge) with one of our digital marketing experts, please Click, Call 800-410-7354, or email sales@autofusion.com.