Acquire FAQ: What's the difference between Automotive Inventory Ads and Dynamic Inventory Ads?

Automotive Inventory Ads

Question: I have Acquire Social, are you guys using Automotive Inventory Ads or Dynamic Inventory Ads? And what's the difference?

Short Answer: Yes. Acquire Social uses Automotive Inventory Ads for ad placements on Facebook and Instagram.

The Extended Answer:

There's two things to keep in mind when discussing ads that appear on Facebook: 1) The pixel and 2) The catalogue.

The Pixel

Facebook enables dealership advertisers to insert a pixel, a tiny bit of JavaScript code on their website which helps to track which vehicles shoppers are looking at while they are on site. Then, when that shopper is on Facebook or Instagram, they can be retargeted with relevant advertising. The pixel helps to measure, optimize and build audiences for advertising campaigns.

When someone visits your website and takes an action (for example, browsing a specific vehicle something), the Facebook pixel is triggered and reports this action. This way, you'll know when a customer took an action after seeing your Facebook ad. 

Lucky for AutoLeadStar clients, the Facebook pixel, and the Google pixel, are wrapped inside of the AutoLeadStar pixel so no additional work or effort is needed. Once the AutoLeadStar code is on site, you are set up for success on any channel you choose.

The Catalogue

A catalog is a container that holds information about the items you want to advertise or sell across Facebook and Instagram. You can create catalogs for different types of inventory, like vehicles.

Dynamic ads automatically show relevant vehicles from your catalog to people who've shown an interest in them online. Dynamic ads match items from your catalog with events from a Facebook pixel or SDK, a piece of code installed on your website or app.

The automotive inventory ads catalog has a different set of required vehicle and dealer specific fields than e-commerce based dynamic ads product catalogs.

Some of the key differences between vehicle catalog vs regular ecommerce product catalog:

• 1. Instead of “id”, the auto catalog requires “vehicle_id”.
• 2. The accepted values for “condition” are different: automotive inventory ads may only use condition listed as “excellent”, “good”, “fair”, “poor” or “other” for automotive catalog.
• 3. You can dynamically insert certain vehicle-specific details into the ad creatives (e.g. make, model, year, price, mileage), which is an important reason to include complete data for all required fields.
  Certain required and optional fields can be leveraged as filters to create different vehicle sets (e.g. body style, transmission, drivetrain).

Some of the key differences between automotive inventory ads and dynamic inventory ads :

• 1. Firstly, important to note that AIA (automotive inventory ads) ads are dynamic - it's not two different things. We leverage the dealerships inventory as the catalogue Facebook uses to create these ads.
• 2. For automotive inventory ads, the event parameter “content_type” needs to be “vehicle” (instead of “product”).
• 3. Automotive inventory ads supports the following standard events to be used for optimization: Search, ViewContent, AddToWishlist and Lead.
• 4. Requirements for parameters for the Standard Events for automotive inventory ads differ slightly from the e-commerce-based dynamic Ads requirements (which are Search, ViewContent, AddToCart and Purchase), so while you may already be tracking Search and ViewContent events on your website, you will still need to add the required automotive-specific parameters to both of these events.

Lucky for AutoLeadStar clients, the Facebook pixel, catalogue, and therefore the ad structure are set up as Automotive specific from launch and automatically implemented. No action or additional effort is needed.