As an automotive manufacturer or dealer, there are a number of important actions that take place on your website, many of which you'll want to track in order to report on the true impact of your advertising, build high-intent audiences of in-market shoppers and cost-effectively drive more of the actions that ultimately lead to vehicle or other types of sales. In order to enable these and other features to improve your advertising across the Facebook family of apps and services, you'll need to add the Facebook pixel to your website.

The Facebook pixel is a piece of code that you can add to your website header that serves as a tracking/analytics tool. When someone visits your website and takes an action (such as completing a lead), the Facebook pixel is triggered and reports this action. You can also use pixel data to:

• Leverage Facebook's advanced machine learning to make sure that your ads are shown to people who are most likely to take the desired action on your website.
• Build high-intent advertising audiences to retarget visitors as well as find new in-market shoppers.
• Set up dynamic ads for automotive (DAA) to automatically promote relevant vehicles from your inventory with unique creatives tailored to each person in your audience. Please use this setup guide to get started with DAA.

There are three basic steps to set up the Facebook pixel on your website:

• Step 1: Create a Facebook pixel (if you don't have one already)
• Step 2: Add the Facebook pixel base code to every page of your website
• Step 3: Track actions that matter to your business by adding standard event code to key pages (including parameters to pull in additional information about each event)

Follow this Facebook pixel setup guide for full implementation details and troubleshooting. If your developer is using the Marketing API to set up the pixel, please follow this guide on Facebook for Developers.

Keep reading to learn:

• Pixel setup and event tracking recommendations for automotive websites
• Recommended standard events and parameters for automotive websites
• Answers to frequently asked questions about setting up automotive standard events and parameters

Pixel setup and event tracking recommendations for automotive websites

While each automotive company may have slightly different goals or custom tracking needs on the website, we've provided some pixel setup recommendations in the table below based on the most common actions and KPIs associated with automotive websites. While you need to add the basic Facebook pixel code to every page of your website in order to unlock the benefits noted above, you'll also need to add some additional code to your pixel on key web pages in order to track important actions that people take on your website (for example, visits to model/vehicle pages, test drive appointment requests or vehicle inventory searches). We refer to these actions as "events".

• Standard events are actions that we recognise and support across ad products. This consistency in how we name and categorise key actions improves our ability to show your ads to the people in your audience who are most likely to take the actions that matter to your business. See the full list (there are currently nine) and best practices for standard events here.
• Custom events are other, usually less common, types of actions that do not currently align under one of the nine standard event names that we recognise and support. We don't recommend using custom events unless truly necessary, as they do not appear in ads reporting and cannot be used for optimisation by default, requiring an extra step (noted below).

• Parameters are subsets of an event that track additional information about each action. For example, if you are tracking a "view content" event on a vehicle detail page (VDP), you can use parameters to also capture information each time that VDP is viewed, such as the make, model and year of the vehicle. The more parameters you include, the more information you will be able to leverage for audience building/segmentation, machine learning-based optimisation and reporting insights.

  Note: While parameters are optional for general pixel setup, there are a few specific parameters required for dynamic ads for automotive (DAA), so we recommend adding those (at the very least) in order to make it easier to set up DAA now or in the future. For a full list of vehicle-related parameters and details/examples, please see our developer docs.

Recommended standard events and parameters for automotive websites

FAQs

What if I want to track actions that don't align with a standard event?

We understand that there are a few common automotive website actions that don't directly map to our current list of standard event names (for example, car configurator starts/completions). While we are working to expand our list of supported standard events in the coming months to account for some of these needs, in the meantime you may opt to add custom event code in order to track these actions. Please note, however, that custom events do not appear in ads reporting and cannot be used for optimisation, so in order to track/optimise for these actions, you'll first need to create a custom conversion based on your custom event (see guide here).

How can I track more than one type of standard event action (e.g. lead) separately?

To individually track multiple actions within a single standard event category (such as multiple types of lead events), or multi-step actions such as starting vs completing a vehicle configurator, you can use parameters to pull in the information that makes each action unique.

For this specific use case, you can add a parameter using the format 'eventname_type' (see the "Optional parameters" column in the table above for specific recommendations for each event). For example, if you want to track two different types of lead events separately (1. requests to book a test drive, and 2. requests for a personal finance quote), you could set up the lead event plus parameter for each action as follows:

1. Requests to book a test drive:

fbq('track', 'Lead', {
lead_type: 'Test Drive'});

2. Requests for a personal finance quote:

fbq('track', 'Lead', {
lead_type: 'Finance Quote'});

Once the parameters are set up and events are confirmed to be actively firing on the website, follow this guide to create a custom conversion from the event and add rules to include the desired parameter(s) and value to differentiate between them. Using the above example again (to track two different types of lead events), you would:

1. Create a custom conversion based on the lead event, selecting the 'lead type' parameter and value = 'Test Drive'.
2. Create a custom conversion based on the lead event, selecting the 'lead type' parameter and value = 'Finance Quote'.

How can I track and/or optimise towards a specific vehicle make or model?

You can also leverage events and parameters to track and/or optimise your ad delivery for actions related to a specific vehicle make or model. For example, if you wanted to track and optimise for views of the Acura MDX vehicle detail page (VDP), you would do the following:

1. Make sure that you include "make" and "model" parameters within your Facebook pixel ViewContent event code on all vehicle detail pages in order to capture these values.
2. Follow this guide to create a custom conversion based on the ViewContent event, selecting the 'model' parameter and value = 'MDX'. You can also add a second rule to specify and 'make' = 'Acura' if desired.
3. Once you've created (and named) your custom conversion, it should appear as a reporting column option when you "Customise columns" in ads reporting as well as when you select a conversion event to use for optimisation in the ad creation flow.
1. Please note that you can create a maximum of 100 custom conversions per ad account, so we recommend limiting this strategy to high-priority makes/models only.

I want to drive as many people as I can to web pages for a particular model (e.g. Nissan Sentra). How can I best achieve this?

Ensure that you have added the ViewContent event to each of the Sentra pages on the website, including the proper parameters (based on the table above).

• Make sure that you include the "model" parameter. Your web developer can set this code up so that the correct model name is pulled in as the model parameter's value. If done correctly, whenever someone lands on one of your Sentra model pages, the pixel will record a ViewContent event and also identify the model as being a Sentra.
• Another helpful parameter to include could be "viewcontent_type", where the value input for this parameter is "VDP" (vehicle detail page).

As the goal here is to drive as many people to these pages as possible, you'll also want to broaden your target audience and set up your campaign within the Conversions objective. In terms of which conversion event to select for optimisation, you can use the custom conversion that you just created for Sentra model page views or try the more general ViewContent event (if the former results in less delivery than desired).

Which events should I use for audience building vs reporting vs optimisation?

Choosing which events to leverage for each of these purposes ultimately comes down to your business' individual KPIs and priorities; however, we've included some guidance below based on common needs/KPIs across automotive websites.

Audience building:

• Retargeting: Create Custom Audiences from your website visitors to retarget based on people's actions and behaviours on your website (e.g. people who visit a particular model or vehicle page but do not submit a request to book a test drive).
• Prospecting: Create Lookalike Audiences to find new potential customers who are similar to people who have taken key actions on your website (e.g. people who have not visited your website but are highly similar to the people who have requested a test drive on your website in the last 30 days).

• Any standard event that you set up on your website will automatically be available for reporting. You can use the "Customise columns" feature in ads reporting to select which events you want to include results for in your reports. You can also pull in the "cost per result" for each event, if desired.

• You should choose the event(s) to optimise ad delivery for based on the actions that are most important to your business (and therefore, the actions that you want to get the most of). Examples may include requests to book a test drive or pre-registrations related a new model launch.

  Note: If the event that you care about most is rare (e.g. a vehicle or high-value part purchase), then you may want to optimise for an event that is somewhat more frequent (e.g. adds to basket). Otherwise, you are likely to experience under-delivery as our machine learning models require sufficient event conversion data to find people who are likely to take your desired action.

* Nguồn: Facebook