Facebook’s head of automotive strategy Kass Dawson says a study it commissioned through digital analytics company, shows the true effectiveness of automotive advertising in social media.
The Action Lift Study reported that campaigns on Facebook can influence people on the brands and vehicles being pushed online while sapping consideration for competing manufacturers.
During the recent Automotive News World Congress Dawson says the automotive industry can leverage Facebook to reach the audiences that matter to them on the social network, which has more than 1.19 billion users.
Dawson who formerly worked for Mercedes-Benz says automotive marketers can target the exact people most likely to respond to their messaging and that there is no “prime time” to reach audiences.
Prime time, he says, is all the time in the digital space.
“It’s not just that those people are there, it’s the fact we are understanding what it is they’re talking about [and] what their interests are [that] ultimately helps us make sure we are putting campaigns in front of the right people so that message is getting across and you’re getting your message in front of people that are going to act,” says Dawson.
The Action Lift study found that brand website visits increased 37% during the campaigns, with search traffic on engines such as Google and Yahoo rising 11%. Visits to brand-affiliated model pages jumped 50%.
In contrast, brand Web searches for competitors fell 3% while searches for specific models dropped by 14%.
The research looked at five major automotive campaigns on the social network between May and August 2013.
Autotalk previously reported the company hired Michelle Morris, most recently the managing director of automotive for Google, to lead Facebook’s automotive unit.
