How to Set Up Meta Automotive Inventory Ads (AIA)

Meta Automotive Inventory Ads (AIA) allow car dealers to advertise individual vehicles from their inventory automatically across Meta's platforms. Instead of creating car dealer ads one by one, dealerships can connect their vehicle catalog and dynamically promote relevant stock to potential buyers.

For dealerships managing hundreds or even thousands of vehicles, that makes automotive inventory advertising much easier to scale.

In this guide, we'll explain how Meta AIA works, how to set up Automotive Inventory Ads, where video fits into the format, and how to get more from your campaigns.

What are Meta Automotive Inventory Ads (AIA)?

Meta Automotive Inventory Ads are dynamic car dealer ads built using a dealership's vehicle catalog. Rather than manually creating an ad for every car, dealers connect their inventory feed to Meta so available vehicles can be promoted automatically.

Each vehicle can include information such as make, model, year, mileage, price, and imagery. Meta then uses its targeting technology to match relevant vehicles with potential buyers based on signals such as their interests and location.

When a shopper clicks an Automotive Inventory Ad, they can be directed to the relevant Vehicle Detail Page (VDP), giving them a direct route from the ad to the individual vehicle.

Why use Automotive Inventory Ads for car dealer advertising?

Traditional car dealer ads often require dealerships to choose which vehicles to promote and create the corresponding creative manually. That becomes difficult when inventory is constantly changing.

Automotive Inventory Ads take a catalog-based approach. Your inventory feed provides Meta with the vehicles currently available, allowing ads to be generated and served dynamically rather than built one at a time.

This makes the format particularly useful for dealerships that want to advertise a large inventory while keeping campaigns connected to the vehicles they actually have in stock.

Can Meta Automotive Inventory Ads use video?

Traditionally, Meta’s AIAs were limited to still-image ads. However, as of January 2024, they’ve expanded to include videos with the launch of Product Level Video (PLV). 

This is great news because video is more dynamic and engaging, and it helps with differentiating ad creatives. Rather than being served the same still-image ad repeatedly, Meta will now serve an image or a video depending on what is most likely to convert.

Internal studies have demonstrated that this mixed approach can grow conversions by more than 48% compared to ads with images alone.

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How can car dealers create Automotive Inventory Ads at scale?

Being able to advertise your entire car catalog on Meta sounds wonderful, but how can you actually produce that many ads? And what about video, which is extra costly and time-consuming?

The short answer is AI and automation.

Phyron AI turns your existing data into studio-quality ads (including video) for the price of a cappuccino per car. For each vehicle, we’ll create 4 video variants for 18 placements, including Meta’s Watch, Reels, and Stories. Below is an example of one of our clients' AIAs on Meta's Reels.

How to set up Meta Automotive Inventory Ads (AIA)

By this point, you already know what Meta AIAs are and why they’re a powerful tool for car dealers. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how to actually set them up.

Step 1: Create your Meta vehicle catalog

The first step is to navigate to your Commerce Manager space in Meta and to create a new catalog by pressing the “Add Catalog” button.

Step 2: Select your automotive catalog type

Next, you’ll want to select “Auto” as the catalog type and choose “Vehicles”.

Step 3: Name your vehicle catalog

Add a name to your catalog, and then click “Create”.

Step 4: Connect your vehicle inventory feed

The next step is to navigate to the Catalog tab on the left and then click on “Data sources” from the dropdown menu. This is where you’ll need to upload your car inventory feed.

There are two options here – you can either upload a URL from your server, hosting website or Google spreadsheet; or you can upload a file of your feed from your computer. If you’re a Phyron Paid Ads customer, we’ll provide the URL for you.

Step 5: Create vehicle sets

After the upload is complete, go to “Sets” in the same dropdown menu and create how you’d like to group your vehicles. For example, you can group according to location, make, model, price range, etc.

Step 6: Set up your Automotive Inventory Ads campaign

The final step is to navigate to your Ads Manager and set up your campaign. Choose the settings you’d like to use (same as for regular automotive inventory ads).

On the ad level of the campaign, go to “Advantage+ creative” and select “Edit”. In the pop-up window, make sure “Dynamic Media” is selected. This will ensure that both still images and video are used for your campaign, based on what is most likely to convert.

Campaign setup recommendations

The video and image assets are free to use however you like. However, below are our recommendations of what we’ve seen work the best in terms of lowering cost per landing page view and conversions.

1. Create a prospecting campaign with our optimized images in a carousel. For a cold audience, our finding is that the optimized image generates the lowest cost per landing page view (or cost per link click, depending on the campaign setup).

This has been A/B tested with our clients' previous creatives and generated significant improvements in click-through rate, cost per landing page view, and cost per link click.

2. Create a remarketing campaign with a mixture of video ads and optimized images in a carousel. Alternatively, run single ads with only our video ads.

By using a Meta pixel, it’s possible to retarget users from your website. From our findings, this is where the video has its highest effect and increases conversions

Automotive Inventory Ads in action: Ken Garff Automotive Group

What does this approach look like in practice? Ken Garff Automotive Group used Phyron to automate video for its Meta Automotive Inventory Ads across a large vehicle inventory.

With nearly 70 dealerships and thousands of active vehicles, manually producing individual videos for every vehicle wasn't realistic—even with an in-house creative team.

The group piloted Phyron's automated video ads across eight dealerships. The results included a 32.2% increase in click-through rate and up to a 22.9% reduction in cost per lead, with CPL decreasing by an average of 4.69% across the pilot stores.

The results show how video can become part of Automotive Inventory Ads at scale without requiring dealerships to manually produce creative for every vehicle.

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Scale Automotive Inventory Ads with Phyron

Managing Automotive Inventory Ads across hundreds of vehicles shouldn’t mean creating hundreds of individual ads.

Phyron turns existing vehicle photography and inventory data into automated video and imagery for Meta Automotive Inventory Ads, helping dealerships keep creative production moving as inventory changes.

Want to see what that could look like across your inventory? Book a demo with Phyron.