Out-of-stock vs. Pre-Order

Overview

With low or no inventory on your lot, AutoLeadStar can help dealers capture leads and engage shoppers with two features designed to make sure your dealership doesn't lose leads, sales, or co-op funds while inventory fluctuates. Advertising vehicles that are in-transit and out-of-stock, or models that have not yet been released, is now easier than ever with the Out-of-Stock feature and the Pre-Order feature. Review below to learn more about each and how they can be used to help meet your Dealership's marketing and sales needs.

Goals and Use Cases

Out-of-stock: Acquire inventory ads are tied to a dealerships' available inventory (via VDPs - or in some cases, a feed for Acquire Social). However, some dealerships would still like to capture and engage with the audience searching for / in market for vehicles that are not currently on the lot or not yet tied to a VDP. The out-of-stock inventory feature allows Acquire Social to direct ad-clicks to preset pages on your website so your Dealership can still engage shoppers with targeted advertising and capture leads.

Pre-Order: The Pre-Order Inventory feature allows AutoLeadStar to promote vehicle models that have not yet been released, but are available for pre-order. The Pre-Order Inventory feature is a platform level feature which enables Acquire to create advertising and Connect to offer engagements and retargeting around these vehicles.

Data Sources

Out-of-stock inventory uses an internal AutoLeadStar data source we label as CMM (condition, make, model) which pulls from a data repository of makes and models that are not tied to specific inventory (unlike the rest of our inventory-based ads, which are generated based only on what the dealers currently have available).

Pre-order is not inventory that you've run out of, rather, it is inventory that isn't available at all. For this, we leverage an AutoLeadStar back-end system where the Performance team manually adds models by client request. There are only a handful available at the moment, but we will continue to add more options to the drop-down as we see them announced from the OEMs or as they are requested by clients. It is important to note, once a pre-order vehicle has been added to our system, it becomes available for all other customers as well; in a sense we are crowd sourcing the first few vehicles from each brand.

Products Where Feature is Visible

Out-of-stock: The out-of-stock feature is an Acquire Social specific feature which enables the Acquire system to leverage out-of-stock vehicle inventory as a data source which can then be used to create ads for missing models. To learn more about exactly how this feature works and how you can add models, read here.

Pre-Order Inventory: The Pre-Order Inventory feature is a platform level feature which enables Acquire to create advertising and Connect to offer engagements and retargeting around these vehicles. To learn more about to enable this platform level feature and exactly what implications this has for each product, read here.

Enable/ Disable

Out-of-stock: To turn on this feature and advertise not-in-stock inventory, click on the Settings cog in the lower left hand corner of your Dashboard > Acquire > General Settings > Inventory tab. You must flip the radio switch to the ON position and continue to set up the models and backlinks. Read more on setting this up here. To disable this feature, you simply flip the same radio switch to the OFF position.

Pre-Order Inventory: This feature is OFF by default and may be activated in one of two ways:

1. Enabling the feature by turning the switch ON
2. Adding inventory to the Pre-Order Inventory List

This feature may be deactivated by turning it OFF in the Data Source > Inventory. Turning this OFF will pause the entire objective inside Acquire as well as remove the Pre-Order landing page module for onsite lead capture via Connect.  Please note: disabling the feature turns off BOTH the Acquire objective AND the Connect module, they cannot be separated.  Read more about enabling and disabling this feature here.

Examples (Images)

Pre-Order Inventory:

Ads may look like this:                           Lead form capture may look like this: