Vehicle ads (formerly known as Vehicle Listing Ads, or VLAs) allow automotive advertisers to promote their entire inventory to customers shopping for vehicles on Google. This format shows customers an image of the vehicle and information such as make, model, price, mileage, and advertiser name. Vehicle ads drive sales by optimizing for both leads and store visits.
Initial configuration
A one-time configuration requiring assistance from the Fluency team.
Contact your Advertising Engineer to set up the initial feed configuration. Use a common inventory source you've provided for all accounts and the Fluency team will reformat your feeds for Google Merchant Center (GMC).
The Fluency team enables the Google Vehicle Ads Readiness Checklist for your portfolio (Under Tools dropdown in your account). Use the checklist as a guide to identify which steps need attention to get your campaigns ready for launch.
Link Google Ads, Google Merchant Center, and Google My Business and confirm they are linked to the Fluency platform. Any team member with admin access can visit backpack.fluencyinc.co/setup to authenticate the connections.
Navigate to Settings & Tools > Accounts.
Manually link GMC and GMB if not already—GMB isn’t required to be linked to Fluency in order to run VA; clients can externally link GMC and GMB accounts.
Blueprint setup
Creating scalable vehicle ad strategies via Blueprints.
Create a Performance Max campaign.
Open the Product Filters section, and input Google Vehicles in the Catalog Template field.
Open the Miscellaneous section, and add a Product Filter, such as Condition is New or Used.
Add an ad group product division, if desired. This should be different from your campaign-level filter and is what dictates the asset groups. An example would be Condition. Note: Product Divisions are not required if you already have configured a product Filter at the campaign level
Add a Performance Max creative. Note: Creative asset fields are not required for Vehicle Ads
Add feature flags to the campaign or ad groups' valid when statements, if desired.
Create different variations of your Performance Max campaigns as needed. Note: You can segment different campaigns based on various product filters, such as Condition being New or Used. You can also use tags in product filters.
Account setup
Prepping accounts for vehicle ad launches.
Before setting up an account for vehicle ads in Fluency, make sure that your end client has verified and claimed the website (GMC provides HTML code to place on the site) and the account has been enrolled in the Vehicle Ads program in GMC.
Once the account has been ingested into Fluency, navigate to Settings & Tools, select accounts, and confirm that your account is properly linked to Google Merchant Center (GMC) and Google My Business (GMB). Note: GMB isn’t required to be linked to Fluency in order to run VA; clients can externally link GMC and GMB accounts.
Add the Google Store Code from GMB to the your ingestion sheet.
Column Header: Google Store Code
Code cannot begin with a zero.
The Google Store Code can be found in GMB. If the field is blank, it can be added manually.
Navigate to Settings & Tools and then Account Ingest to reprocess your feed and pull in your Google Store Code.
Fluency will then automatically push an inventory feed to GMC based on the account’s inventory data. Note: It may take up to 24 hours for the system to recognize that everything has been connected and to automatically send the feeds.
You can view the feeds in GMC. To track the status of the approvals, navigate to the Products tab and then go to Diagnostics and filter by Vehicle Ads.
Review diagnostics and look for any disapprovals.
Resolve any issues with missing vehicle attributes, store codes, etc., from your feed.
All products will initially have a “Pending initial policy review for vehicle ads” error—this is standard and usually takes 24–48 hours for Google to approve but can sometimes take more than a week. You may also see the “missing inventory data” error which should also be resolved after Google’s initial policy review is approved.
To re-process the feed at GMC, you can navigate to the Google Vehicle Ads Readiness Checklist and click Resubmit. This forces an inventory update even if there have been no changes.
Account launch
Launching new vehicle ad campaigns.
Once the previous sections have been completed, you’ll be ready to launch new vehicle ad campaigns:
In Launch, stage your account with the Blueprint that contains your Performance Max campaigns for vehicle ads.
Toggle on/off any feature flags, as needed.
Click review and confirm that the correct campaigns and ad groups are generating.
Keep in mind:
The landing page URLs will look like they’re directing to your account’s homepage, but don’t worry—once the campaigns push to Google, Fluency will use the URLs specific to each model in your inventory feed.
The ads look blank but that is to expected. Fluency pushes an empty shell of a creative over to the partner so you won’t be able to preview the ad until it connects to the feed at Google.
There will be a warning for “too few headlines and descriptions.” This is also expected as these assets are not required for vehicle ad creatives.
Click Launch to create the campaigns and asset groups in Google Ads.