The Dirty Secret Behind VLA Ads

Remember when running Vehicle Listing Ads (VLAs) meant you were just running VLAs? For those who did not notice, Google Ads quietly (or not so quietly, for those who work on this every day) moved VLAs from Shopping campaigns into Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. What is the difference? With PMax, your VLA campaigns are no longer just VLAs. It is not the most intuitive thing to spot, but look through your asset groups. The first hint is these icons under “Preview ads”:

PMax turns a VLA campaign into a much broader campaign

That means while you think you are running Vehicle Listing Ads, you are really running a PMax campaign with ads across YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, Display and Discover. That might sound harmless, but Google has steadily increased the share of your VLA campaign spend that goes outside core VLAs. That includes auto-generated ad text that may not meet dealership compliance requirements and ads on websites that are not appropriate for your brand. PMax campaigns also often bid on your own brand name unless you set up brand exclusions, so you can end up paying for traffic you would have gotten anyway.

Most PMax spend for dealerships can land outside the VLA product

Our analysis of data from hundreds of dealerships running VLAs in late 2024 showed that only a small share of clicks, roughly 8%, came from the core Vehicle Listing Ads product. In other words, you hand Google a feed of specific cars, expecting those cars to be what gets advertised, and they account for only a sliver of where your ad budget goes. Because PMax reports are so aggregated, it is also hard to see how much of your spend actually supports your inventory, and hard to separate those results from the other places Google serves non-VLA ads.

182% Increase in leadsBMW Dealership Boosts Conversions by 5xSee the case study →

Google now offers controls that put VLAs back at the center

The good news is that Google has added controls that give dealerships much more say over where VLA budget goes. Here are the three that matter most:

Add negative keywords and brand exclusions to your PMax campaign

In the past, this was only possible through brand exclusions and by manually submitting a form to Google, which was mostly provided to specific agencies. Without exclusions, most VLA campaigns serve search (non-VLA) ads to people searching for your brand name, competitor names (which can itself be a compliance violation) and many other unrelated terms. The lowest-hanging fruit is to review the search terms report for your campaign and add brand, competitor and other negatives right away.

Run campaigns that serve only VLAs

You can now give Google a feed of cars to run VLA ads and have them run as just VLA ads. In the early results we have seen from implementing this, efficiency improves. Raw conversions often go down, because PMax did what it was built to do: generate as many cheap conversions as possible. But a conversion from a vague display ad on a third-party website will never compare to someone converting from a true VLA. These ads show the shopper the exact car, color, mileage, price and more. In other words, you are getting higher-value conversions.

There is also a bonus improvement for VLAs. If you are discounting cars off MSRP (specifically new cars), you can now highlight the discount off MSRP in a different color in your listing. We have been testing this and have seen meaningful lifts in conversions.

Rebuild your VLA campaigns to show your inventory at the top of the results

If you are running VLAs, now is the time to revamp your campaigns so they are far more efficient. Applying the fixes in this article can help you consistently show your inventory at the top of the VLA results.

Here is an example from a Nissan dealership in Hillside, NJ, where we applied these fixes:

If you are not running VLAs, they remain one of the most effective ways for car dealerships to advertise their inventory. We have seen many dealerships give up third-party platforms in favor of going direct to consumers with their own inventory feed. Now that you can once again run VLAs as true VLAs, they are more relevant than before.

You can and should also run vehicle inventory ads on Microsoft Ads. The volume is smaller than Google, but you want to be in as many relevant places as you can while keeping a close eye on efficiency.