Monthly Updates - 2019

Highlights

• VIN stats in the dashboard

  We’ve rolled out an exciting new report which will allow you to view, filter and export all vehicle performance data right from within the dashboard.

• Call tracking onboarding in dashboard

  If you would like to enable call tracking for newly onboarded dealers (which we recommend) you can now enable it and select from the available numbers within the onboarding form.

• Ultimate in dashboard

  You can now onboard dealers to our Ultimate program within the dashboard.  To get started, choose "Ultimate" during onboarding.

• Exports

  You can now export leads, onboarding status, and vehicle performance within the dashboard. We’ll be working to ensure that all existing and new reports have export capabilities moving forward.

• Chatbot in Beta

  We’re pleased to release the first version of our Marketplace Chatbot. The program is in a limited beta and will be available for onboarding within the dashboard this quarter. Talk to your rep to see if you qualify for the program.

• The monitoring system in Beta

  We are now monitoring page access and ad account performance with new monitoring coming in the near future. Our support team is tending to the issues behind the scenes and we plan to expose monitoring data and alerts within the dashboard before EOY. 

Enhancements

• Budgeting allocations on Pro and Ultimate will now provision disabled campaigns but show them with the word “Disabled – “ to prevent accidental activation
• The start date on onboarding will now automatically set the start date for provisioned ad sets. Note that this still does not guarantee when onboarding will be finished. If onboarding lapses a start date the ad sets will start upon approval
• Newly provisioned ad accounts will automatically create custom conversions in the following actions. We are working on retroactively applying these to existing accounts over the next few weeks:
  • Phone Click
  • Email Click
  • Form Conversion
  • Page Conversion
  • Widget Conversion
  • VDP View
  • SRP View
  • Trade View
  • Financing View
  • Contact View
  • Hours & Directions View
  • Specials View
  • Phone Call
  • Text Message
• Chatbot customers can now set messaging defaults to control what the bot says for their reseller account and can override each dealer. This includes the ability to skip messages. A custom copy can include dynamic replacements for dealer and vehicle info (e.g. “Would you like more information on this {make} {model}?”). Contact your rep to learn more about the Chatbot and if you would like to implement a custom copy.
• All newly created Pro and Ultimate deployments now automatically comply with Facebook’s HEC (Housing Employment & Credit) guidelines. The API was only just released and given the importance of compliance we rolled this out just 2 days after the notice from our Facebook product reps.

Bug Fixes

• Some resellers noticed that the Marketplace metrics weren’t displaying. This was due to permissions and has been resolved. If you’re still having issues contact your rep.
• Marketplace stat reports weren’t processing for certain dealers with unknown characters in their names. We are now using dealer IDs to associate the data which should improve reporting consistency.
• Chatbot now properly detects non-standard email addresses (e.g. joe@some-strange.domain.co.uk)
• Some ad accounts were rolling out single image carousels on Pro and Ultimate. Standard deployments will now properly use full carousels.

Highlights

• The BuyerBridge dashboard is now officially out of beta!  To mark this occasion we have updated the logo shown within the UI.  While we are “rubber-stamping” all existing screens you will notice that new screens may now have the “BETA” tag along with a disclaimer shown on the first view ensuring that users are aware of the screen and its contents not being fully ready for production.  In these cases, we welcome your feedback, as always, and will update our release notes once we have taken the screen out of beta.
• The dashboard navigation has been completely redesigned making it easier to navigate between screens and access the dealer you’re currently working on.  This update is based on feedback from numerous users seeking a way to quickly jump back to the, now central, dealer dashboard.
• The Facebook Advertising report has been released within the dashboard to all resellers (in beta status).  Within this screen, you can quickly access stats across any campaigns within your Facebook ad account.  We’ve focused these screens on what matters to an automotive Facebook advertiser so we think you’ll find them much easier to use than Facebook’s own reports! ;)
• In addition to page status and ad account performance, we’re now also monitoring your dealer’s pixel health by evaluating when the percentage of matched VDP views drops below a certain threshold.  This is a critical metric in ensuring that retargeting within AIA is operating correctly. These reports are still internal but we are actively developing UIs to expose the data to you!
• The Facebook Advertising dashboard is here!  This is a full rollout but we’re releasing this new feature in a beta capacity so please be mindful that there may still be issues.  We are actively prioritizing any noted bugs and welcome your feedback! We plan to add new stats to this report throughout the remainder of the year.

Coming Soon

• Inventory monitoring UIs are in the works and should be released in a beta capacity to select resellers inside of November
• We’re extremely excited to announce that our VDP interstitials are nearing alpha release and will be piloted with select independent dealerships.  We’re currently targeting December for a full release. Please contact your representative to see if you are eligible for our pilot. 
• Leads and Interactions are now separated into different event categories within Google Analytics to make it easier to evaluate performance, create goals and compare Facebook data
• You can now opt your dealers out of Marketplace when onboarding them to Pro and Ultimate
• We’ve updated our entire platform to use Facebook’s Marketing API v4.0 ensuring that we’re in line with their product road board -- believe it or not, we’ll be updating to 5.0 very soon!
• We’ve backfilled all advertising metrics for all campaigns under managed accounts from Jan 1, 2019.  This will ensure you’re able to do more with our new Facebook Advertising reports!
• We are working diligently on creating a better automotive catalog and pixel through our EventFlow product.  Over the coming weeks, we will be releasing numerous enhancements that will massively differentiate automotive advertisers running the BuyerBridge EventFlow product.  More to come here!
• We continue to expand and tune our monitoring system to cover all critical aspects of BuyerBridge.  These data points are being closely watched by our account and support teams internally but we look forward to releasing the data into our dashboard in the coming weeks for better coverage and transparency in showing all of the many facets of the BuyerBridge ecosystem.
• Interstitials are heavy in production and looking awesome!  We’re nearing our pilot phase and anticipate a full release in December -- pending pilot results.
• We are planning on rolling out the custom conversion tracking system to currently managed accounts over the coming weeks (at the moment it only applies them to new dealers).  Keep an eye on our release notes for updates here.

Enhancements

• All newly onboarded dealers will be deployed with a new version of our ViewContent script to help Facebook’s matching algorithm in identifying a user’s purchasing profile.  We will be applying this update to existing dealers in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
• We have made major updates to our leads tracking script which should improve our ability to capture more click-to-call events which tend to be one of the highest drivers of web leads.
• You can now export all pages of inventory from the inventory screen!  Be mindful that it can take some time to export large quantities of inventory (e.g. 1000+ vehicles).

Bug Fixes & Improvements

• We’ve updated our dynamic number insertion script to ensure that it only evaluates displayed numbers and numbers within tel: and SMS: links to ensure consistency
• While trying to mitigate an issue with certain dealer names not being recognized in our marketplace stat collection process we made an update that caused the way we receive the stats from Facebook to be disjointed causing metrics to display lower numbers than actual results.  This started around 11/8 so we have applied a fix that aims to restore all data back to 11/8 and are actively monitoring/comparing metrics to ensure consistency with what we retrieve from Facebook.
• The leads screen will now export all pages of data.  Previously it was only exporting the first page.
• A previous update had broken resellers’ ability to select existing ad accounts and pixels during onboarding.  This issue is now resolved!
• We’ve made a number of overall stylistic improvements to the dashboard to ensure it accommodates various screen sizes.

Known Issues

• We continue to see a handful of Marketplace listings flagged for their content with no path to remediate from Facebook.  The Facebook Marketplace team has indicated that they have been diligently working to fix this issue. We are awaiting notice from them on an official process for remediation when the situation arises in the future.