Performance Max with Vehicle Feeds (formerly known as Vehicle Listing Ads) is getting a major update to pricing that will be beneficial to auto dealership PPC marketing. We reported back in April that Google was testing and slowly rolling out Dealership Pricing on cars for sale sponsored ads.
Launching mid-September, the Dealership Pricing feature is now available to all dealerships in the US. Right now this price is displayed in green above the MSRP which showcases the discounts, while giving the consumer all the pricing information before they click on an ad.
Since vehicle listing ads are part of Google Shopping (a comparison shopping engine), pricing will play an integral role in performance - both from an awareness standpoint and engagement - as Google is more likely to show inventory at lower price points. This could result in a dip in impressions if your pricing isn’t competitive with other local dealerships, or if your feeds are not fully optimized.
What’s Next for Dealerships?
The first thing you will need to do is make sure you have the Dealership Pricing attribute included as a field in your shopping feeds so that the discounted pricing can be displayed. At Green Line, this is built into the feeds from day one for our automotive advertising clients.
Outside of pricing, you’ll need to ensure your vehicle data feeds are set up in a way that will improve your rankings and relevancy:
- Ensure your feeds have high-quality data by optimizing your titles & descriptions by providing as much detail as you can to help boost search relevance.
- Ensure the images you use in your feed are high-quality in not only resolution, but theme, and that the images match the rich descriptions you provided.
At Green Line, we ensure our clients' feeds are fully optimized for rankings by providing keyword-rich, unique and meaningful titles and descriptions that will influence visibility and drive performance. We also use additional feed attributes such as color, trim, etc. to provide additional product information to drive search query relevance.
In addition to optimizing titles and descriptions we also use high-quality images that showcase our client’s vehicles without the use of watermarks or busy backgrounds. If we are not provided with high-quality images, our team works with our clients and utilizes other resources - such as the Product Studio in the Merchant Center - to showcase the vehicles in ads in the way Google prefers.
We also perform robust competitor research and will work with our clients to improve their pricing/sale pricing models to be able to better compete with local competition if needed.
Performance Max & Green Line Automotive
Performance Max with Vehicle Listings can be a tricky campaign type to optimize for, and we do Performance Max differently for our clients to ensure high-quality leads at the lowest cost. Having great feeds and, now, highlighting dealership pricing will help performance moving forward. If you’re not sure if your ad feeds are optimized for Dealership Pricing, contact us for support.