#177 - Facebookalypse is Coming w/ Andrew Street

Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Independent Dealer Podcast brought to you by Buckeye dealership Consultant. What we got going on today, Jeff, this is awesome.

We have Andrew street with us from Dealer. Omg. Guys, this episode is chock full of great marketing stuff. Facebook, Instagram, we are going to cover some of the iOS changes to iOS 14, 14.5 in the coming 15. We talk about leveraging your own data, first party, second party, third party data.

And we're.

And we also talk about the KPIs that you need to be asking your vendors about how to know if your vendor is a good vendor. Right, Andrew? And you're one of the good ones, right?

That's correct, Yeah, I am the good one.

Yes, Andrew. We caught him in the middle of Iraq. He's being held hostage. But he does get out of this in time for the tiada Convention, the 25th, 6th, 7th down in round Rock. So we're going to talk a little bit about his upcoming session, so stay tuned. Here we go.

Welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson, a podcast by Dealers for dealers. Here we go.

All I do is I help car dealers buy and sell vehicles through Facebook and Instagram. Used to work for Facebook for a number of years, branched out, launched a firm that's specifically within Facebook and Instagram for car dealers.

You said the word buy and sell and I was always under the impression you were just selling sell. Because I've been to some of your sessions in the past. And props to Andrew, guys, if you haven't been to one of his sessions, you're obviously going to go to the upcoming one in Texas. But he doesn't sell. It's not a pitch. I was the whole time I knew what company he owned and ran, but he never tried to sell me on his services. He just gave information and gave information and gave information. So props to Andrew for doing that and being here today. Andrew, talk to us. Obviously my big, big concern and I haven't been into my Facebook ads manager in a long time, but explain to us layman folk what does all this iPhone, privacy setting, Facebook lawsuit. How does all these changes affect our campaigns and what we think we've been running?

Jeff, the good news for me is it scared a lot of people who are trying to run their own ad campaigns to reach out for help. Other thing is like we work super closely with Facebook. Facebook obviously was devastated by this news of the. I imagine you're talking about the iOS 14.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then iOS 15, which is going to be a little bit more strict. It wasn't as terrible for car dealers as it was hyped up by vendors, especially was hyped up by Facebook. It's worse for E commerce. E commerce got hammered. Okay. That's all online transactions.

And what did it do though? Explain to me what it did. So it's like I'm that dumb.

Okay. No, that's cool. That's a good question. So a way to think about it, like, it's just your iPhones and iPads. People have the option to not let mobile apps track them. So there's that Facebook Pixel you put on there. So it's still your MacBook Pro. You can be tracked on all your Android and Samsung and Pixel devices and your desktop and laptops. All that's still trackable. But from the hundreds and hundreds of dealerships that we work with, I've got some insight to all of their website traffic. That's maybe 30 at most. 40% of your website traffic that's gonna.

Be affected is an iPhone or an iPad.

That's a lot.

Yeah, mine's pretty strong. If I look at my, I think my website breaks it down and it's, it's a high amount of people. And what you're saying is now before, if I was, if I was shopping on a car dealer website or if I was doing some car shopping thing, Facebook would trigger me as an in market buyer and then I could, then that dealership could run ads knowing that Jeff was shopping for a car. And you're saying they can't do that anymore.

Exactly. They can. It's still working. What I've lost so far is we're seeing this across the board is some of our, a lot of our reporting attribution isn't as strong where we used to be able to see, okay, it cost me a dollar on average to get somebody to the dealership's vehicle detail page. From there, I lose insight on Facebook's end to see if they click to call, if they filled out a credit app, if they clicked on the directions, we kind of lose some of that insight. But the good news is the playing field is completely level.

So Andrew, Andrew, is this gonna cost us more money to advertise because we can't pinpoint everything. Does that mean, is that the end game here?

So far it's costing a little bit less as E commerce is slowing down so that real estate for advertising inventory is more available.

So as they get scared and they jump out, the guys that are advertising, you know, shorts and whatever else in my feedback, they're maybe spending less because they can't give it the attribution that they did makes it a little bit.

Better for us, but it's not.

But my thinking is, okay, maybe the supply and demand is out of whack a little bit right now, but we can't get the exact data that we used. Could. To pinpoint the people used. Could. That's a South Carolina word, Jeff. Probably a Texas word too. But so the data is just not as good as it used to be. And so it just takes a little more time, right or no.

Right. Yeah, so. And it's a lot of capabilities that really downstream advertisers lost that most dealers, whether it's, you know, an independent store selling five cars or a franchise store selling a thousand, the dealers typically didn't have set up. It is sort of customizing the pixel which is just a way for Facebook to know who's coming by the website, what they're doing to where the advertising that the dealer is doing is going to be more prescriptive to them saying okay, this person's come by. They've looked at Silverados and Tundras. I'm going to assume that they're looking at pickups. Let's start feeding them our pickups, our financing opportunities, our credit score, forgiveness, whatever it is to identify that person and what they're looking at and be able to say how many vehicles is the average person looking at when they're coming by our website for 99% of independent stores, that's not really data that we take action on. It's cool to know. Okay, cool. That guy ended up calling but at the end it's like is that going to change our strategy at all?

Yeah. So you're telling me Andrew, like if I'm a big, big new car store and you find out that that person shopping for an suv it's very easy for me to then hit them with every single SUV that I have because they looked at a, you know, whatever, an equinox and I'm just going to hit them with all my equinoxes. But for us independents, we don't drill down that far. I mean if you visited my website, I don't really care if you're looking at. I'm just going to probably don't have that with a look alike or a.

We probably don't have the, the inventory to do. So is the best.

Yeah, we're not, we're not running specific ads on.

Yeah, right. I mean changes so much Carmax. It Makes sense. If I've got 50, 80, 20 cars on my lot, it doesn't really matter. I want to express to you why to buy from us. I want you to refer your friends to us. If you've purchased from us, I want to know that we can get you approved. You're gonna have a low down payment, a low monthly. You know, all this stuff that makes us a great store. It's not gonna matter necessarily how prescriptive that inventory I'm putting in front of you is. It's that I'm getting in front of you. I'm coming through your personal newsfeed on your phone. I'm taking up a lot of space. And if you like what we're saying, you can like it, you can comment, you can share, you can tap through to our marketplace listings or to our website or fill out a lead form from Facebook instead of doing that super iOS 14.5 stuff that is scaring people and it's going to unfold more over the next six months. Google's doing a similar thing, but they pushed it back another two years. But the iOS 14.5, we still have a lot of rich data from previous months.

If we're a dealership and we made it through the. What was it, three or four years ago where they let us. They made us stop targeting people based on demographic and credit. If you know that. That seemed like the biggest hit to us all of a sudden. Now I can't create an audience based on income or location because I'm advertising credit. That. That was a kick in the pants. And I think a lot of dealers are still trying to figure out what they can post and can't post. But if we made it through that situation, this is definitely.

Yeah, I mean, it's the same with, you know, 2008. There's been all these big hurdles that dealers have had to overcome. Now it's the inventory squeeze, but it's finding ways as a small store, like, we can be more nimble, we can be more creative, lighter on our feet than some of the behemoths where that, you know, the. What was it, the income credit or the house hec. It was the housing, employment or credit. If you're. It was a few years ago, if you're advertising with any of those things where automotive, they're saying, is always going to be credit. So now we can't be specific with who we're targeting because of some lawsuit where Facebook lost $5 billion. But it's. So that was Facebook buying into Oracle and IHS market to get TransUnion market data. So now it's allowed me to be able to say, okay, don't worry about that Facebook. So I can go directly to TransUnion and buy the data to be able to credit Target because you're in the same boat as every other dealer where I don't want to just carpet bomb the market over and over with our message because that's going to get really expensive really fast. I want to be more precise with who we're getting in front of maybe because so, so what's working for us right now is to suppress people with high income, suppress people with great credit scores and go after everybody else who we think are shopping for vehicles that don't fit that mold because a lot of times they don't have a lot of data on that type of audience because maybe they don't have a lot of credit and that's who we can get into a vehicle. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yeah. So talk to me about that. Andrew, I think you, everyone's going to go to your session in two weeks down there in Austin. But you know everything about that first party data and third party data, right? And a lot of guys talk about, hey, if you're just built, if you only have a Facebook website and you don't have your own website, not a good idea. If you're not getting people's personal data into your CRM where you own the data and you control their name, address, email and you can build lists to remarket, you're, you're absolutely crazy. Right? You're building your house on someone else's land. Not a good idea, Right? So talk to us about that. How important is that, that we find a way to bring these people in and all this information in from Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and TikTok and our website and bring it into our own, you know, our own little purse.

You are asking the right quote, like we're hiring, by the way, you're speaking my language. On the dealer side. There's a lot of misconceptions right now in the independent dealer space and it's so hard for them to be staffed appropriately, to be able to have, you know, a digital marketing director and some of these nice things that big, big stores have. But for them to now need to be able to rely on their vendors to tell them what's working and ultimately, you know, signing up for products that might be developed more for franchise stores or they look shiny to the dealer, they're $999, which is a lot, but it's not gonna break the bank maybe. And then they're dependent on the vendor telling them how many cars they sold. And I've seen a lot of this and it's hard for them to look at the analytics and the clicks and the whatever and say, is this money well spent? How many people do we reach? How many people came on my website? How many people filled out their credit app? How many people came in and drove off the lot? What data are they using? So a lot of our conversation is going to be like you mentioned about the difference with data sources. I think the huge, huge, huge play that's going to separate independent dealers from other independent dealers is their ability, if they've been around for more than a year, their ability to leverage their first party data, their own data. That's going to be their CRM, it's going to be their customer database and that's going to be their website traffic. To be able to own that niche, you can pay your mortgage for the rest of your life if you can just own your customer base and not defect them to other stores and let their friends go all over the place, but really start to hone in on that customer list. And so it can be just from phone calls to email marketing to the next step with that first party data is going to be uploading that list into Facebook to where now instead of I live in Austin, I've got 1.9 million people in a 50 mile radius of my office that are on Facebook every day. It would cost me about $19,000 to reach everybody once. No, like if I've got my CRM as a thousand people, that's Gonna cost me $10 to reach them once. Okay, let's get in front of them 10 times. Okay, that's a $100 ad campaign and I'm going through that person's phone every time they're getting on Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat or whatever to where we're really starting to hone in on our own customer base. If their lease is coming up or you know, if we've got a referral program, things like that, to start to own those relationships. So we'll talk about that in the first party data, the second party data, that's like the platform data, that'll be Facebook's data and Google's data, the third party data. That's where they're starting to make it more easy again for dealers. But it's still a little complicated to reach out and start a relationship with Oracle or ihs, but it's the DMV records, it's credit score. So we can start to refine that 1.9 million people down to an audience of, call it 5,000 people that we're going to just own. We're going to cater to them because they're a good fit for our store.

Andrew, I hadn't even thought about the first. I mean, I think about first party data all the time, about how we can mine our CRM. But to take that the extra step and to create the audience inside Facebook and all these other social media platforms, that's something that most dealers really wouldn't have an idea to do. And honestly I didn't even think about that being part of my first first party data strategy. I didn't think about that. Is that something that's fairly new or is that something you're.

It is, man. We've been able to do it for nine years. Maybe it's just underutilized because they don't make it super easy, which is great. It keeps me employed. But you tell me like I'm still putting together the presentation, just updating everything for Texas Independent Auto Dealers association conference in Round Rock. Yep. You know, July. Would it help you think if I just quickly showed people how to do that?

Man, I tell you, that would be. That'd be awesome. And you know what I tell people a lot of times you can show people how to do so many things and the chances they actually do it are very, very little. Right. That's just something that's interesting to me because that could be your ad campaign. Right. You don't need much more ad campaign than that. And, and someone like me who's been in business for 35 years, we have way more than 1,000 people. So we could even take and start saying, all right, the people who've done business with us in the last 10 years and defining that data and it's not going to cost much to advertise that data, is it, Andrew?

No, it's going to be the most cost effective advertising you can do, period. Because it's going to cost probably a penny per person to reach them. And you share a lot more pennies, you reach more people, you reaching more times.

Yeah.

Instead of kind of relying on just these shotgun approaches that maybe you get some likes and comments and maybe you asked somebody who came in, purchased where they saw it, maybe they said social media for you to have a better strategy in place. And congrats, by the way, on 35 years. Thank you. The first 35 years are the hardest in business.

Number 35 has been pretty tough.

Oh, Lord. Anyway, and telling from your end, you guys are both on the right side of the desk for me to be asking questions too as well. Are you guys, have you guys seen any successes come out of Facebook Marketplace for your stores?

I don't touch Facebook Marketplace. Another interesting thing, Another interesting thing I that you said earlier is that, you know, it's. It's my store is a why buy for me store. Okay.

Right.

It's not. Here's our inventory. This is what you should buy. And I believe that so many independent dealers get that wrong because you only have one piece of product typically that that customer wants. So, you know, marketing that way doesn't. Doesn't make sense to me. So I'm not a Facebook Marketplace person. I'm a brand person. I'm a why you buy from me person. So, Jeff, have you done anything on Marketplace?

Yeah, I mean, obviously we have all of our cars listed on Marketplace. As far as pushing promotions to market or advertising specifically inside of Marketplace, I think I might have a small campaign that runs only, you know, my only thought is, hey, these people are looking for cars. I want to be in that feed. As far as me putting my cars up against the marketplace nonsense, which is just full of a scams b carvana and then my cars are buried somewhere down like page 50, you know. Yeah, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

It's been a super challenging platform for all of my independent dealers especially, and especially if we're more of a buy here, pay here because they're continually changing compliance rules within Facebook to where and pricing is not my value for the pricing of our vehicles. If they want to put the KBB value and compare it to the market, that's not my customer data. Like, if my customers are looking for the cheapest vehicle, it's not us, but they're not going to qualify for that vehicle. Does that make sense? And did you have those issues, Jeff?

Yeah, it was absolutely ridiculous. I hate the KBB thing. I tried everything to go around it. That's super frustrating. The biggest, and it's a larger discussion. It's probably not worth going down. But the saddest thing to me is right now that is the go to for car shoppers. I don't know. I mean, sure, There's CarGurus and Cars.com and some of these other ones, and they have their own issues and whatever, but it still seems like in a small town like this, we have one other kind of statewide website that's fairly popular for classified ads. But there's no Craigslist anymore. You know, there's, there's not some of these free listing places where people go shop. Facebook had such a great opportunity to have a great platform that could be so beneficial to both us and the consumer. And yet they're running it like a, like a frigging cheap jack in the box. And it's just a complete mess, you know, with the scams and the, and the weird listings and why do these people get to show up in my area? And it's crazy.

Yeah. I mean, just to shed a little light on it, the good news is kind of the bad news. And it's going away. Marketplace is completely going away for people like me because we've got API access where I can just take all the dealer's inventory, pump it into Facebook and for, you know, subprime stores, we'd be advertising the down payment or the monthly payment. Then people would be confused on, okay, this car is only a thousand bucks. And it was just, you know, it was super challenging to really capitalize on and a lot of times labor intensive for the dealer to be responding. But it's going away completely. Facebook's shutting down everybody's access to being able to put inventory on there through non manual resources.

Let me, let me ask that, Andrew. Let's dig into that then. So like, great. I'm so glad I have you here because this has been bugging me. I do have a third party site of company that I pay $99 a month to and they grab the stuff off my CRM and they shove it over in a marketplace. You're saying that is not going to happen as of some date.

Don't quote me, I think it's October.

So all of a sudden I cannot automatically put things into Marketplace via API. Is that for everybody or is it just the little guys? And Carvana and Broom can still do it, so I can post still to Marketplace, but I got to start doing it one at a time.

Right. Which is okay. So I'm surprised Facebook did it this way instead of the way Craigslist did it, where all of a sudden if you're doing a certain number of listings, it's five bucks a listing, something like that. But instead they just pull the plug. So it's like me and 20 other people who have access to be able to put inventory on there.

Yeah.

An email just saying it's done. Which I'm not. You know, I don't make money on it. It's just a way for me to provide value to stores. But I have zero out of 250 stores that are getting home runs out of Marketplace.

Right.

But something to have on your radar.

So would that be better then? So let's go down that road. If everyone's being kicked off in October, the big stores are not going to be posting there.

Right.

They're just going to abandon the platform because they don't physically have the ability to post all 200 cars. But me, if I've got 50 cars in stock, I could employ someone that now is manually posting each car individually. Is that something where we just have to wait and see whether Marketplace implodes on itself? Or is that a strategy where now all of a sudden, great, I'm one of only two dealers doing it in town now.

I'd go, I'd do that.

Or the wait and see.

Or me and the three of us go into business together and open up a sweatshop in the Middle east, someplace overseas where we can. They're just punching cars into Facebook, but why not? You know, I'll get the exact date of when it's getting shut down, and let's be ready to start posting our inventory manually. Whether it's me doing it or you doing it, and just putting, you know, 10 cars on manually and seeing what the landscape looks like once the dust settles.

Interesting. Hey, guys and girls, thank you so much for listening to the podcast this week and thank you for the support of the podcast man. The growth has been great. Thank you for everyone. That leaves us a review. We love it. And thank you, of course, to Buckeye Dealership Consulting for the sponsorship. Luke, if you do not have Buckeye, you should reach out to them about your reinsurance.

Sure. Buckeye Dealership consultant is a great person coming to deal with their reinsurance has everything you need. Vsi, psi, your warranty, everything's there. They are very specialized. They understand what you're going through and they can help us in any way possible.

For sure.

Yeah. And they have added some unique products which I can give them props for in the reinsurance space, which is great. We love to see those companies innovating. And they're also making some pretty strategic hires. So these guys, they've probably got some stuff up their sleeves coming. So it sounds like if you're going to ride the wave of somebody, these guys are definitely going a direction. You know, I don't know which direction, but they're going a general direction.

No, I know that the guys at dealership Buckeye Dealership consultant are super involved in our industry. They want everybody to get better and I think that's the way they're going. So hopefully we'll hear more about that soon. Jeff.

Yeah. Yeah.

Awesome. Back to the episode.

Yeah, I think that's a, you know, back in the day with, with Craigslist and posting that. I don't know if you ever really sold any cars off there. So this. I'm not gonna do that. I'll leave that to y'.

All. Same with ebay, it's like, you know, it's these little glimpses of time. It's like how can we get a foothold and move a lot of units while the sun's shining here? Right.

So the, the third party data is interesting to me and I think honestly that's where subprime buy here, pay here stores can really, really benefit by using that alternative data or the real data from TransUnion Equifax, however you can get it. Let's talk about that. What can we do to make sure that as a subprime dealer, as buy here, pay your dealer, maybe even a high end retail dealer, how can we use that data to hone in on a good marketing campaign?

It's not as easy as it was three and a half years ago when it was right there in your ads manager. The unfortunate thing is you need to probably go through a vendor who has relationships and is tied in with TransUnion and IHS Market and DMV Records right now. A lot of it does not work as good as just letting Facebook do its own thing with Facebook's data. Cause Facebook has their pixel on everybody's website and it's still collecting data about who's shopping. So those audiences are better in my opinion than trying to pay third party data to get intenders and things like that. The two audiences that are working really well for stores like yours is going to be, well the one it's going to be, it's going to be transunion to not necessarily target people that have low credit, but to suppress, not targeting people who have high credit or high net wealth. Those people are really, they have a lot of data out there that are easy to identify and just say we don't want to target these people. Let's start to cater to people who are shopping other websites for vehicles who we know don't have a lot of net wealth or high credit scores.

So it's discriminatory if I go after people with low credit or low net income, but it's non discriminatory If I just exclude the people with high income, it's redlock.

It's essentially, I mean, it's essentially red light.

Yeah, there's constant workarounds and who knows what the world's going to look like in digital marketing in one year. You know, it was easy and it was always the same silver bullet recipe. I. Well, for one, I wouldn't have a job. But also, you know, it'd be way for people to set it up, go after. Okay, I want, you know, people in a five mile radius who are credit challenged. That's an easy lawsuit for Facebook to lose. Again.

That's what's so interesting and frustrating about all this is I do feel like three to four years ago I really had my thumb on Marketplace and Facebook ads and I was listening to all the guys and the podcasts and doing all this stuff and then I got distracted with some other things and all of a sudden I don't know anything and I don't even know where to start. And I look at the ads campaign and there's like 50 different objections objectives and like these audiences are all over the place and it's like, man, all of a sudden it went from being like some pretty simple stuff to like, this is. You need like a doctorate degree to understand how to run ads manager.

You know, I think. And I think that's where Andrew and people who have companies like Andrew really help out. Because for an independent dealer who has, you know, 10 to 20 employees, it's impossible to stay on top of this thing. So I think sometimes we just waste money on advertising. Andrew, you see that a lot.

It's the dude that takes a picture of the car, puts it on his Facebook page and then boosts the crap out of it and to generic audience and is like pissed. Well, Facebook ads don't work. I didn't get a single message or a single comment and it's like, okay.

Well, yeah, it sounds like you both are more involved on the marketing side than most of the dealer owners I talk to. As far as getting. What's that?

I said we're little guys, we have to be.

Yeah, no, but you know, even in your shoes, a lot of people just like, I'm paying a vendor, I think it's going to well, but you got to know, right?

Because you have to know the questions to ask the vendor. And that's what I think. These as dealers, unfortunately you got to be like 50%, 70% competent in everything. Because like you said, Andrew, what if this vendor's just feeding you stats and Numbers saying you're getting all these attribution leads and you're like, wait a minute. And I, you know, you gotta know enough to ask the right questions. So.

And I've been that guy, Andrew. I've been the guy paying somebody for something that didn't work. So let's go, let's go down that rabbit hole a second. So if you're talking to a dealer, what is the things he should be hearing from his advertising consultant? What should we be asking advertisers like yourself? Companies that matter if clicks don't matter, if visits to my website don't matter.

Now this is good. These are great questions. This is actually helping me craft a little bit more about what I'm going to put in the presentation at the aea. But you know, what questions can you be equipped with? Like, what ammunitions can you have with the vendor? And a lot of it's just going to be, you know, I'd ask them how they're going to measure success. You know, what does success look like to the vendor? And you know, is it going to be a cost per click? Is it going to be a cost per BDP view? Is it going to be a cost per sale? Does it go, you know, to see what direction they want to see success in and what would look like failure? And if things are failing, how, you know, how can the dealer or how can the vendor fix it? And if it's succeeding, can we scale it and do more of it? You know, maybe just see what they're budgeting and what they would do with that budget, you know, if that makes sense to where, what audiences are going to go after and how, you know, how much money are they going to apply towards that audience? Because if I know if I've got an audience of a thousand people, it's going to cost me, you know, again, about $10 to reach them. Factor in maybe $20, reach them just to say, like, you know, what's their strategy with, with pricing, with budgeting? And then on your end, what can you look at to measure their success, to measure their results? Is it going to be in your CRM and your dms? Is it going to be in your Google Analytics? Because that way you'll know simply just like. And have them hold your hand and walk you through, okay, in Google Analytics, where do I see your traffic? Because it's going to be a simple way for me as a dealer to look at red flags and say, okay, here's all the shoppers coming by my website. Here's the Sources they're coming from. I have a concern about the email marketing. It's coming by in a large volume, but it doesn't stay for more than five seconds. Let's not lose our minds, but let's reach out to the email vendor and say, hey, I got some concerns. What's going on here? Or look at the Facebook traffic. Hey, it doesn't seem to be going to any second pages. Maybe there's a pop up that's preventing people from getting there. Maybe it's, you know, bot traffic. There's a lot of vendors right now that are disguising traffic coming from Facebook as something else because it's cheap. It's cheap to get traffic and shoppers to your website from Facebook, but they basically are redirecting it through their platform to make it look like it's coming from them when it's actually not. That's a long way to answer. Like, I've got some thoughts about what to put together for this presentation about, you know, equipping you guys with ways to have a more fruitful conversation with vendors. That, with marketing vendors is, is the.

Only way for a dealer to, to say, hey, my advertising is working is by the amount of cars sold. Is, I mean, is that the ultimate what we're looking at?

Yes. Yes. And now at the beginning, you know, if it, it's easy to say we're going to look at clicks and blips and switches and all the stuff that digital marketers look at, whatever it is, but the tail end, we need to move vehicles.

So is this something we should give our ads a month to do, three months to do?

Yeah, I'd give it, I'd give it 90 days to really get underway. But there's two ways that digital advertisers can measure your sales from their efforts. And they're all the best damn substitution possible for measuring the roi. Because at the end of the day, we need to get belly to belly with the customer and sell them a car. But up front, we can use what's called offline tracking, where we just take your last 30 days of sales. We can upload it or we can do it real time if we're connected to your CRM and see which people are seeing ads before they purchase.

I didn't think about that.

Yes, these people are purchasing, these ads are not making purchases. And then it's an easy conversation for me and you to put our heads together and just say, do you mind if I push this budget over into the audiences that are working? So that's One way, and then the second way is inventory advertised versus inventory sold. So one is looking at the customers who purchased, one's looking at the vehicles that we're promoting and which ones sell. And say, this one got a million eyeballs on it and sold. I'll think we took some credit because we had so many leads come through. That one vehicle where this vehicle sold that only had five people see it. No clicks, no leads. I'm not going to say that we helped sell that.

The thing. The only drawback I have on that is that if I have the right car, it's going to sell no matter if I promote it or not. You know, so.

And you always want to promote the ones that are awesome and, you know, we're going to sell.

Unfortunately. Yeah, that's who I want to advertise. Because all of a sudden, my cost per car sold goes down to $20 per car sold. But that's not what's. There's a sweet spot that I'm finding where I don't want to advertise these cars that are rot. They're lot rot. They're going to be on my lot because they're just not that vehicle. And I don't want to advertise that lifted pickup that's, you know, got miles. But it's going to sell.

Mm.

Because maybe instead of you selling that in three days, I can sell it in two days by advertising it. But it's gonna sell. Let's advertise this sweet spot of vehicles in the middle that are priced fairly. They're in the market. We're competing with other stores for those vehicles to sell.

Mm. What's. Luke said something really interesting earlier is there's so many vendors out there that want to just advertise more leads. Hey, we're gonna get you two times more leads with this new thing or fangled contraption. It's like, guys, I don't want more leads. You know, like, if I was just trying to drive leads, sure, I could. I could push my Facebook leads off the charts. But what I want is sales. So, yeah, we do have to remember there's a big difference between quantity and quality. And then the other thing I struggle with, Andrew, is the cause and causation type situation. Or it's like, I'll put in some new Facebook marketing campaign. And I don't know whether it was successful because of the campaign or whether it was because, you know, we came out of COVID or did I sign up with an advertising vendor and nothing happened and I didn't get any bump in sales. But oh yeah, it's 112 degrees out every single day in the month of July. So of course nobody came out and bought a car. You know, like, I have such a hard time with all these other aspects to have patience with these campaigns.

You know, it's proven in times where like other advertisers are pulling back to be able to keep your foot on the gas, if not double down. Like a lot of times, like when we're having with 80% of our dealers right now, we're advertising trades. I'm going after people driving specific name plates, specific years, telling them their vehicles never been worth more to look at. You know, instead of constantly pushing sales, there is that opportunity to try to.

Get trades, ride the wave of the economy. You're saying like, right.

And you know, if things are going to be slow because of your inventory, because of unforeseen or uncontrollable events at the store, really maybe to start pushing your referral programs. This is just an idea.

What's I want to just run down. You're going to be talking about, I guess Jeff mentioned earlier you have a way for people to help buy cars off the street. You just kind of mentioned that. And luckily at Tiada Conference, Jeff and I are actually having a recording live podcast discussing that thing about buying cars, sourcing inventory. Do you have a campaign that people can put together to really go after buying cars off the street? Is that something that really works well now?

Yes, yes, it's hit and miss. The problem right now is a lot of bigger players are doing it too.

Yeah, yeah, I see it everywhere. That's my don't want to do it is because everyone's got it out there.

Yeah, it's. If we're looking for specific types of vehicles, that's where we can be a little bit more prescriptive with what we're going after. Instead of saying, hey, we want to buy your car, we are going up against everybody, including Carvana, you know, all the big, all the big online sellers. But if we want higher mileage, you know, 10 year old vehicles, that's where we can start to say, let's go after. Based on nameplates, people who are driving, you know, this 2005 through 2010s that we can say, have over 100,000 miles in your vehicle. Question mark. We want to buy, you know, something that makes me stop in my newsfeed and being like, okay, I do have a lot of miles on my car and I have been thinking about selling It.

So Andrew, are you saying, do you have the ability to find out who those people are? They're driving older cars.

Yeah, that's DMV records typically, right?

That's exactly.

And you can get that and put it into a Facebook campaign?

Yes.

Oh, that's cool.

Yes, that's third how, how I've done it. It's not going to be an easy thing for a dealer to start doing, but something maybe they could push onto their marketers to say, hey, can we buy into the MV records? They're going to need to reach out through like IHS market or through Oracle to get it interesting. If it's their job, they should be able to figure that out.

Very cool, Andrew. So to wrap this up, obviously everyone's going to come see you. Give us what, where do we need to be putting our focus from a platform standpoint? I just want to get your input on. Is it still Facebook feeds, campaigns, is it video, is it Instagram video or still? Do we need to be having a TikTok channel? Do we need to be having, you know, like where are the eyeballs going in your opinion?

I mean there, there's a different conversation if we want to get like third party marketplaces and auto trader and those things. Cause there's plays within that arena that I'd like to hear some of your thoughts on. But as far as like really my lens that I look at the independent car dealer space through which is Facebook and Instagram advertising, which is super specific.

Okay.

I think a lot of dealers can be looking at it more as a funnel where people who are not shopping my website right now, they've not been engaging with my ads, they've not engaged with my inventory, they've not bought a vehicle from me, which is going to be a large percentage of the people we're targeting. Let's tell them about us. Let's tell them about why buy from us. I'm not worried about them filling up my credit apps, I'm not worried about them filling out my lead forms, calling me, even coming to my website. I just want them to see my video or my image and why to buy from us. That's it. And that's how I'm going to gauge success. Everybody who started to engage with my ads or they've purchased from me or they've come by my website, let's start that conversation with them by getting them to fill out that lead form or by coming by my vehicle detail pages. So that's just kind of catering to customers based on their relationship with my lot and not trying to force everybody to give me a lead form like you're talking about. And then something that's working well for a lot of our independent stores right now is the automotive inventory ads that a lot of people are running that has your inventory in a carousel. But now when they tap it, instead of coming to my website, which I'm not super proud of, my website maybe, but it'll pull up a listing and marketplace where we control it. And as Facebook marketplace disappears, my thought is these are going to be basically vehicle detail pages within Facebook that you can't organically find. You got to get there through an ad and then most people are going to start a message conversation with the dealer. So that's where we're seeing our lowest cost per car sold. Lead forms come in with cheap leads. There's not a lot of dealers that are equipped to be able to handle a huge volume of leads and qualifying them. But if we can get people that are lower down the funnel, meaning they're not random people that don't even know they're filling out lead forms. But these are people who've engaged with my ads or come by my website to get them to start with messenger or with the lead form is still working. And then the trick is, you know, again, trying to increase that cost per lead while dramatically increasing the quality so our salespeople don't just lose their minds and stop working our leads.

Yeah, yeah. You start hitting them with like a fire hose and a teacup. It is a lot of stuff. Andrew, this has been super insightful. How do dealers get ahold of you if they want to learn more, pick your brains more.

I'm on LinkedIn. It's Andrew street and my company is Dealer OMG. It's on the marketing group. Or you can email me just andrewealer omg.com and then you can see me out. I'll be in Round Rock for Texas Independent Auto Dealers Association. We've got a presentation called why Aren't we Doing this? The low hanging fruit of digital marketing where you can take notes, but I'll have a one sheet for everybody to download where they can print it out and help them kind of structure their, their advertising strategy and set it up in a way where they own a lot of the data, opposed to the vendor owning all the data. Cool.

Thank you, Andrew. Look forward to seeing you in Texas.

Yeah.

Jeff, Luke, love what you guys are doing here with the podcast man. Keep it up.

So glad you joined us. Please take a minute to leave us a review and share this podcast with a friend. The independent dealer Podcast Dealers Helping Dealers.

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