As the lead product designer for the Autos team at Facebook, I spearheaded the development of features aimed at addressing the diverse pain points auto dealerships face in their advertising efforts on the platform. The culmination of this effort is the Automated Inventory Ads project, a response to the industry’s reliance on sales personnel for ad creation and the challenge of navigating the complex UI of Ads Manager.
The Challenge
After our successful CDK integration project, it became evident that many auto dealerships grappled with the intricate Ads Manager UI. Sales personnel, accustomed to seeing Facebook primarily as a social network, found it challenging to create ads at scale or tailor them to their ever-changing inventories. Bridging the gap between a social platform and a potent advertising tool became our primary objective.
User Groups
In the realm of auto dealerships utilizing Facebook ads, three distinct user groups emerge:
General Sales Staff, In-house Marketing Managers, and 3rd-party Agencies
General Sales Staff, occupied with the daily hustle of walk-ins and sales, adopt varied approaches to digital marketing, reflecting diverse education and comfort levels with Facebook’s potential value.
In-house Marketing Managers, multitasking across roles and media types, often rely on unsophisticated methods and gut feelings driven by what seems feasible and customer feedback.
3rd-party Agencies offer a spectrum of services, recommending tailored products to dealerships. Hired for their expertise when in-house resources are lacking, these agencies operate within limited budgets, strategically maximizing efficiencies for optimal returns on investment.
Product Theory
Auto dealerships in the US often struggle to recognize the value Facebook brings to their business due to high friction in campaign setup. This project aimed to cater to their varying levels of comfort and understanding of Facebook as a marketing tool. By offering tools appropriate to their growth, inventory, and needs, we sought to graduate them onto more effective strategies aligned with their dealership size and desire for measurable ROI.
The Solution
Our team embarked on designing a consumer-friendly UI within the familiar Facebook environment, tailored to the mindset of General Sales and Marketing Managers. They were comfortable with boosting posts and using marketplace features but often struggled to perceive Facebook beyond its social media facade. By seamlessly integrating our UI into existing dealership flows for boosting posts and garnering page likes, we created a pathway for non-technical users to embrace the advertising potential of Facebook.
UI was promoted in the same real estate that Boost Posts resides, a feature most dealerships were utilizing. 
In this expanded view, dealerships were giving limited ad setup options that were the most vital to their business model. 
The final ad that was dynamically generated with little effort from the dealership.
Bridging the Perception Gap
Our innovative approach not only simplified complex decisions but also automated the ad creation process. The focus shifted from generic PR and social interactions to creating highly targeted, dynamically generated ads. Through intuitive UX flows, I seamlessly directed sales personnel towards either integrating with CDK or, if already linked, effortlessly navigating the steps to create dynamically generated ads.
Results
In our pursuit of innovation, we strategically selected a specific segment of dealerships for UI testing – those already integrated with CDK. This targeted approach aimed to alleviate onboarding friction and provide measurable success metrics. Dealerships that engaged with our new flows experienced immediate results, seamlessly aligning with their monthly goals. The outcome? A surge in qualified leads flooding into dealerships, significantly contributing to their monthly sales quotas. Witness the transformative impact as we not only streamlined the process but also delivered tangible, bottom-line results for our dealership partners.