North Dakota Ford Dealer Finds Success with Facebook Lookalike Audiences

Eide Ford

The Challenge

In March 2018, Facebook announced a (temporary) end to Partner Categories data targeting. Eide Ford in North Dakota was one of many North American dealerships that relied on this third-party data in its Facebook advertising efforts.

Our team quickly sprang into action to find an effective alternative to reaching qualified leads with Facebook ads for our automotive clients, including Eide Ford.

The Solution

The 9 Clouds team began testing the use of Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences feature. By pulling the following data from a client’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, we are able to target people who are similar to those contacts:

  • Name
  • Email
  • Phone
  • City
  • State
  • Postal Code
  • Birthdate

Facebook uses this information to match these CRM contacts to users on its platform and then create a new “Lookalike Audience” of people with similar demographics and interests. Voilá — a new target audience!

The Results

The results we’ve achieved for our clients have been fantastic all across the board, but some of Eide Ford’s campaigns shined the brightest. In this case study, we’ll look at just one specific example that reflects how the Bismarck dealership saw impressive results using Lookalike Audiences. ↓

For a Facebook ad campaign promoting a clearance on Super Duty trucks, we exported a list from Eide Ford’s CRM, including everyone who had purchased a Super Duty truck in the past five years. After creating a Lookalike Audience from this data and letting the campaign run for a month, the results across the three ads in the campaign were absolutely worth celebrating:

  • Reach – 12,088, 24,456, and 1,248
  • Relevance score – 9, 10, and 8
  • Cost-per-click (CPC) – $0.05, $0.06, and $0.09
  • Click-through rate (CTR) – 6.85%, 5.64%, and 3.4%
  • Link clicks – 688, 2,532, and 52

These results — particularly those high relevance scores, unbelievably low CPCs, and solid CTRs — are some of the best Facebook ad metrics our team has ever seen.

And remember, those 3,000+ link clicks are all opportunities for shoppers to visit a vehicle description page (VDP) and consequently be shown an Eide Ford dynamic retargeting ad.

Our inbound marketing efforts for each client are part of a comprehensive strategy, with each piece working together to nurture the relationship with a potential customer. In this case, that relationship begins with a Lookalike Audience.

Want to Learn More?

Instead of just telling you what we can do, we like to start by showing you where you can improve your own online efforts today! Sign up for a free digital audit from our marketing experts.

You can also read other marketing case studies, learn more about what we believe in our manifesto, or see the latest need-to-know information on our digital marketing blog.

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