Vehicle feeds on search ads allow you to supplement your existing search ads with inventory from your Google Merchant Center vehicle feed. You can use this feature to enrich your text ads with vehicle offers, such as car make, model, price and images, directly within the ad.
In this article, you’ll learn how vehicle feeds on search ads work, their benefits and how to manage them.
On this page
- Benefits
- How it works
- Requirements
- Cost and billing
- Manage your vehicle feeds on search ads
- Reporting
- Considerations around vehicle feeds on search ads
Benefits
- Richer ad experience: Showcase your inventory directly on the search results page, providing potential customers with visual information before they click.
- Qualified leads: Users who click on a specific vehicle offer have already viewed the car's details and price, indicating a higher intent to purchase.
- Seamless integration: This feature uses your existing Merchant Center feed and doesn’t require you to create new campaigns or complex targeting setups.
How it works
When you link your Google Merchant Center account containing with a vehicle feed to your Google Ads account, your search campaigns become eligible to display vehicle offers.
- Matching: Google's system dynamically selects relevant vehicles from your feed to display based on the user's search query, the ad's relevance and other factors.
- Display: Vehicle offers may appear as a list or carousel below or alongside your standard text ad components such as, headline, description and sitelinks.
- User interaction: If a user clicks on a specific vehicle image or link, they are taken directly to the vehicle details page (VDP) on your website. If they click the ad headline, they are taken to the landing page defined in your text ad.
Requirements
To use vehicle feeds on search ads, you should ensure that you:
- Google Ads account has active search campaign(s).
- Google Merchant Center account has a valid vehicle feed.
- Google Merchant Center account and Google Ads account are linked.
Cost and billing
Clicks on vehicle offers are charged on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. A click on a vehicle offer costs the same as a click on your ad’s headline. While these offers provide more opportunities for interaction, you won’t be charged for more than two clicks per ad impression.
Manage your vehicle feeds on search ads
If your account meets the requirements, your search campaigns are automatically eligible to show these offers. If you wish to opt out a specific campaign from showing vehicle feeds, follow the steps below.
Opt out instructions
- Go to Campaigns within the Campaigns menu
.
- Select the specific search campaign that you want to modify.
- Select the Settings tab.
- Expand the Merchant Center section.
- Untick the box next to the vehicle feed or select 'x' to remove the linked feed.
- Select Save.
.Reporting
You can track the performance of your vehicle feeds within your search campaigns with the 'Click type' segment.
- Go to Campaigns within the Campaigns menu
- Select the segment icon
in the toolbar above the statistics table.
- Select Click type.
- Look for the row labelled Vehicle asset to view metrics such as impressions and clicks specific to the vehicle offers.
Considerations around vehicle feeds on search ads
- Unlike vehicle feeds, vehicle ads are a visual-first format that appear in a stand-alone carousel placement on the search results page, managed through Performance Max campaigns and standard Shopping campaigns. Vehicle feeds on search ads are assets attached to your standard text ads in search campaigns and enhance your text ad with inventory data.
- You can't choose the specific vehicles to be shown on the ads. Google's system automatically selects the most relevant vehicles from your feed based on the user's intent, device, ad position, relevance and other factors. Ensure that your feed is up to date to show the best inventory.
- Vehicle offers can appear alongside other assets like sitelinks, callouts and location assets. The system will optimise the combination of assets shown to drive the best performance for each auction.
- While the format is eligible to show, it isn't guaranteed that your vehicle offers are shown in every search. Factors such as your ad rank, the user's device, the specificity of the search query and the quality of your feed data influence whether the vehicle offers are displayed.