How to Advertise a Car Dealership on Facebook

Driving lot traffic solely with traditional newspaper ads and radio spots is a thing of the past. To sell cars today, your dealership needs to meet buyers where they are - and that's on Facebook. This guide will walk you through setting up, targeting, and running effective Facebook ad campaigns that connect you with local, in-market car shoppers.

First Things First: Your Facebook Page is Your Digital Showroom

Before you spend a single dollar on ads, your Facebook Business Page needs to look professional and trustworthy. Think of it as your digital showroom. If it’s messy, empty, or outdated, potential customers will drive right past. A little prep work here goes a long way.

• Profile Picture & Cover Photo: Use a high-resolution dealership logo for your profile picture. Your cover photo is prime real estate - use it to showcase your best-selling models, your friendly sales team, a video of your showroom, or a current promotion.
• Fill Out Your Profile Completely: Don't skip any sections. Add your address, phone number, website, and business hours. In the "About" section, share your dealership's story and what makes you different from the competition down the street.
• Choose a Strong CTA Button: Below your cover photo is a Call-to-Action (CTA) button. Customize it to align with your business goals. "Send Message" is good for inquiries, "Call Now" works great for mobile users, and "Visit Website" can drive shoppers to your online inventory.
• Pin a Top Post: Have a great monthly special, a glowing customer review, or an introduction video? Pin it to the top of your page so it's the first thing visitors see. This sets the tone and immediately offers value.

Choosing the Right Ad Objective for Your Goal

When you create a campaign in Meta Ads Manager, the first thing you have to do is choose an objective. This decision tells Meta what you want to achieve, and its algorithm will optimize your ad delivery to get you that result. For dealerships, a few objectives are most effective.

Top-of-Funnel: Reaching New People

• Awareness: The goal here is simple: reach as many people as possible in your local area for the lowest cost. Use this objective to build brand recognition, announce a dealership event, or establish yourself as the go-to Ford or Toyota dealer in your county.
• Traffic: Want to send people directly to your Vehicle Detail Pages (VDPs) or a special landing page on your website? The Traffic objective is your best bet. Meta will show your ad to people most likely to click the link.

Middle-of-Funnel: Capturing Interest

• Engagement: This objective is perfect for "social proof." Use it to get more likes, comments, and shares on a post. Running an ad on a walkaround video of a new model or a contest giveaway using the Engagement objective can build a lot of positive buzz.
• Leads: This is a powerful objective for dealerships. It opens a pre-filled form right inside Facebook, making it incredibly easy for users to submit their name, email, and phone number. It is the absolute best objective for "Schedule a Test Drive," "Get Pre-Approved," or "Value Your Trade" campaigns because it eliminates the friction of sending users to an external website.

Bottom-of-Funnel: Driving Sales

• Sales (Using Automotive Inventory Ads): This is the most advanced and effective objective for dealerships. By connecting your inventory catalog to Facebook, you can run dynamic ads that automatically show specific vehicles to people who have viewed them on your website. Someone browsed a 2023 Honda CR-V? This objective lets you show them an ad for that *exact* car in their Facebook feed later that day. We'll touch more on this below.

Targeting Perfection: How to Find In-Market Car Buyers

The real power of Facebook Ads is its targeting capability. You can move beyond broadcasting your message and start narrowcasting it to people who are actively shopping for a vehicle. Here's how.

1. Geographic Targeting

This is the most basic, but most important, layer. Don’t waste money advertising to people three states away unless you run a specialty dealership. Focus your ad spend on a specific radius around your location (e.g., 25 miles) or target specific ZIP codes where you know your customers live.

2. Detailed Targeting (Demographics, Interests & Behaviors)

This is where you zero in on potential buyers. You can mix and match options to build the perfect audience profile.

• Behaviors: Meta has powerful third-party data that can identify users who are "in-market" for a vehicle. In the Detailed Targeting section, search for behaviors like "In market for: SUVs" or "In market for: Trucks." You can even get as specific as "Likely to purchase households with 1 new car in next 6 months" in some data sets.
• Interests: Target people who have shown an interest in specific brands (like "Ford Mustang" or "Honda"), automotive publications ("MotorTrend," "Car and Driver"), or even competing dealerships.

3. Custom & Lookalike Audiences

This is where things get truly powerful. Instead of asking Facebook to find your customers, you can bring your own data to the table.

• Custom Audiences from a Customer List: Export a list of past customers from your CRM (with names, emails, and phone numbers). You can upload this list to Facebook, and it will find their profiles. You can then target these people with "We want your trade!" offers or service reminders. This is a goldmine for your fixed ops department.
• Custom Audiences from Your Website Traffic: By installing the Meta Pixel (a small piece of code) on your website, you can create audiences of people who visited specific pages. You can retarget everyone who visited your used inventory pages in the last 30 days or, more specifically, people who viewed a financing application page but didn't submit it.
• Lookalike Audiences: Once you have a high-quality Custom Audience (like your best customers), you can ask Facebook to create a "Lookalike" audience. Its algorithm will analyze the common attributes of the people in your source audience and find millions of new users who share those same characteristics. A 1% Lookalike of your best Customers list is one of the most powerful prospecting audiences a dealership can build.

The Best Ad Formats to Showcase Your Inventory

Your targeting can be perfect, but you still need compelling creative to stop the scroll. For dealerships, visual formats are king.

Automotive Inventory Ads (AIA)

If you set up only one campaign type, make it this one. AIA connects your dealership’s inventory management system (like vAuto, CDK, etc.) to Facebook. Once linked, it automatically creates ads for every car on your lot, pulling in the photo, year, make, model, trim, and price. These ads dynamically retarget users, showing them the right car at the right time. They're complex to set up but are unmatched in performance for moving metal.

Carousel Ads

This format allows you to show multiple images or videos in a single, swipeable ad. Carousels are perfect for several use cases:

• Showcasing 5-10 different vehicles under a single theme, like "This Week's Fresh Trades" or "Fuel-Efficient Sedans."
• Highlighting multiple features of a single hero vehicle (one card for the exterior, one for the interior, one for the tech package).
• Telling a story, like walking a customer through the car-buying process at your dealership.

Video Ads (Especially Reels)

Video is a must. It builds trust and gives shoppers a much better feel for a vehicle than static photos. Keep your videos short, engaging, and designed for silent viewing (use on-screen text or captions).

• Walkarounds: A 30-60 second walkaround of a hot new model or a unique used car performs amazingly well.
• POV Test Drives: Give users a sense of what it’s like to be behind the wheel.
• Meet the Team: Short videos introducing your sales manager, a friendly technician, or the finance director can humanize your dealership and build incredible trust.

Lead Ads

As mentioned before, Lead Ads are fantastic for capturing intent without making the user leave Facebook or Instagram. Run a campaign offering a free trade appraisal, a special financing rate, or a chance to book a test drive for an upcoming new model. Because the form is pre-filled with their profile information, conversion rates are typically much higher than sending them to a landing page.

Final Thoughts

Advertising a car dealership on Facebook isn’t about just boosting a post and hoping for the best. It's about using a strategic combination of precise audience targeting, conversion-focused objectives, and engaging ad formats to guide a local car shopper from awareness right through to your showroom door. It takes thoughtful setup, but the result is a powerful and predictable pipeline of qualified leads.

Juggling the constant creation of engaging videos and daily posts for all your social platforms while also managing sophisticated ad campaigns can be overwhelming. As you work on building your campaigns in Ads Manager, we can help streamline the organic side of your strategy. With Postbase, you can plan your content calendar, schedule Reels and posts across all your pages at once, and see what’s working from one clean dashboard. It’s designed to save you hours each week, giving you more time to focus on engaging with customers and selling more cars.