The world of car sales has changed a lot, and digital advertising is now the main way to get new customers. In 2025, car dealerships need to know how to use Google Vehicle Ads (GVA) and Performance Max campaigns to stay in business in a market that is becoming more competitive.
Getting to Know the Current Situation
Google Vehicle Ads have grown into a powerful tool that connects car dealerships directly with people who are looking to buy a car. These tools, along with Performance Max campaigns, give you access to Google’s entire advertising ecosystem, from Search and Shopping to YouTube, Display, and Discover.
In 2025, the use of AI-driven automation has reached new heights. This makes it easier for dealerships of all sizes and advertising budgets to compete. But success takes more than just starting campaigns; it also requires careful planning and constant improvement.
The Foundation: Vehicle Inventory Feeds
Your vehicle inventory feed is what makes your Vehicle Ads campaigns work. Think of it as your online showroom. If the information is old, missing, or poorly organized, people who might be interested will just drive by.
Making a Good Feed
Make sure that your feed has complete and correct information for every vehicle. In addition to the basics like make, model, year, and VIN, you should also include more specific information like trim levels, exterior and interior colors, mileage, and all the features that come with the car. You must have high-resolution pictures from different angles. Cars with 10 or more pictures always do better than those with fewer pictures.
It is very important to be clear about prices. Put your best prices in the feed, along with any special deals or offers you have. In 2025, people who want to buy something will expect to see real, useful pricing information before they even call your dealership.
How often you update is very important. Your feed should refresh at least once a day, but more than once a day is better. You need to take down your ads right away when a car sells. Nothing hurts trust more than when a customer falls in love with a car online only to find out it’s already been sold.
How to Set Up Performance Max Campaigns for Dealerships
Performance Max campaigns use Google’s automation to show your products on all of Google’s sites at the same time. Giving the AI the right signals and creative assets to work with is the most important thing.
The Structure of the Campaign
Instead of running one big Performance Max campaign for all of your inventory, break it up into smaller groups. Make two separate campaigns: one for new cars and one for used cars. This is because these two groups have different intent signals and conversion patterns. Think about breaking up your luxury cars, trucks, and SUVs, or certified pre-owned inventory even more based on what your dealership does best.
Each campaign needs to have clear goals for conversions. Most dealerships’ main conversions are when people fill out forms, call them, or ask for directions. Secondary conversions could be metrics that show how much time people spend on your website and how serious they are about shopping.
Asset Groups: Your Creative Tools
Asset groups in Performance Max let you show off your dealership’s unique selling point along with the cars you have for sale. Create multiple asset groups to test different messaging angles.
Your headlines should talk directly to what your customers want and what makes them unhappy. Combine specific deals with emotional appeals and useful benefits. “Test Drive Any Vehicle Today,” “Best Prices Guaranteed in [City],” “No-Pressure Sales Experience,” and “Same-Day Financing Approval” are all examples.
The description lines should add to your value proposition by pointing out what makes your dealership unique. This is where you talk about your awards for customer service, long warranties, great service departments, or one-of-a-kind shopping experiences.
Don’t forget about video assets. Performance Max can use short videos of your inventory, dealership, or happy customers to get placements on YouTube and other video partners. If they are real and well-lit, even simple videos on a smartphone can work.
Advanced strategies for optimization
To be successful in 2025, you need to stop managing campaigns like they’re set-it-and-forget-it. Dealerships that actively improve based on performance data are the ones that do well in this area.
Refining Audience Signals
Performance Max uses automation, but giving it strong audience signals helps it find your best customers. Start with the data you already have, like visitors to your website, past customers, and people who have signed up for your email list. Add custom segments based on how people shop for cars and people who are looking for certain types of cars.
Pay close attention to which groups of people are actually buying. You can start to see patterns after 30 days of data. If some signals always do poorly, you might want to get rid of them so the algorithm can focus its budget on better ones.
Changes in inventory and the seasons
There are clear seasonal patterns in the car market. You need to change your campaigns for new model year launches, holiday sales, and pushes at the end of the quarter. During times of high intent, raise your budgets and update your creative assets to match the current deals.
If certain vehicles aren’t moving, you might want to leave them out of Performance Max and run targeted Search campaigns with lower prices or more persuasive messages. On the other hand, if you have a lot of high-demand inventory, make sure Performance Max pushes those vehicles harder by making sure they are easy to find in your asset groups.
Geographic Accuracy
Most dealerships get customers from a certain area around them. Use location targeting and bid changes to put your money where it will do the most good. By 2025, location data will be so advanced that you will be able to find not only ZIP codes but also specific neighborhoods with higher conversion rates.
Also think about how people travel. Someone who is looking for a job in the city might live in the suburbs where your dealership is. To include these situations, broaden your targeting and change your bids based on how far away they are from your lot.
Combining with Vehicle Listing Ads
Vehicle Listing Ads (VLAs) work with Performance Max to get the attention of shoppers who are actively looking for certain cars. When someone types in “used Honda Accord near me” or something similar, these show up at the top of the Google Search results. Being specific is the key to VLA’s success. If you have more than one of the same model, make sure to clearly tell them apart by trim, color, and features. Instead of giving a general list, help customers understand what makes each car special.
It’s important to think carefully about the pricing strategy for VLAs. You need to be competitive enough to get clicks, but not so low that you lose money. Keep an eye on your competitors’ prices and position yourself wisely. You don’t have to be the cheapest, but you should offer the best value.
Tracking Conversions and Giving Credit
It’s very important to keep track of conversions accurately. This means using hashed customer data to provide more accurate attribution while still following privacy rules in 2025.
Set up conversion values that show how much money different actions could actually make. A phone call from someone who wants to buy a luxury car should be worth more than a request for general information. This helps Performance Max get the best results for you.
Don’t forget about assisted conversions. The process of buying a car usually involves a lot of different steps over the course of several days or weeks. Someone might first see your ad on YouTube, then look up your dealership by name, and finally buy something by going to your website directly. Knowing this path helps you correctly assess how well your upper-funnel campaigns are doing.
Bidding and Budgeting
In 2025, the most successful dealerships spend 60–70% of their Google ad budget on a mix of Vehicle Ads and Performance Max. The rest of the budget goes to branded Search, conquest campaigns, and remarketing.
Give your new Performance Max campaigns a learning budget that lets you get at least 30 conversions in 30 days. This gives the algorithm enough information to work well. Once the campaign has been running for a while, you can adjust the budgets based on ROAS (return on ad spend) and profit metrics.
Don’t let your budget change all the time. Performance Max works best when budgets are stable and predictable, which lets the AI plan its bidding strategy. Unless you need to respond to specific business needs, make changes every month instead of every week.
Best Creative Practices for 2025
The creative parts of your campaigns have grown beyond just taking pictures of products. Today’s successful car ads tell a story and make people feel something.
Standards for the Look
Every picture of a car should be taken or edited by a professional to meet high standards. Consistent backgrounds, good lighting, and pictures of the whole car (outside from all angles, inside, trunk, and engine bay) help people trust you and make the buying process go more smoothly.
Lifestyle images that show people using cars—families loading up camping gear, commuters driving on highways, and adventure shots in beautiful places—help potential buyers picture themselves owning a car. Add these contextual images to your clean inventory photos.
Messages That Work
Your ad copy should talk about more than just the car; it should talk about the whole buying process. People who buy cars today are worried about how to pay for them, how much their trade-in is worth, how hard it is to negotiate, and how much time it will take. Talk about these issues directly in your messages.
Realness is more important than hype. Try “Transparent pricing and no-pressure experience” instead of “Amazing deals!” Instead of saying “Huge selection!” say “Over 200 vehicles, with detailed online information so you can shop at your own pace.”
How to Measure Success Beyond Clicks
When it comes to dealership advertising, click-through rates and impressions aren’t the only numbers that matter. Pay attention to numbers that have a direct effect on sales and traffic in the showroom.
Keep track of the cost per qualified lead by looking at not only form fills but also leads that turn into appointments or visits to the lot. Use call tracking with conversation analytics to keep an eye on the quality of phone calls. Find out how many requests for directions through Google Maps lead to visits to the dealership.
Most importantly, make sure that digital ads lead to real sales. When someone buys a car, look through your CRM to see which campaigns helped that customer get there. This attribution lets you figure out the real ROAS and focus on the campaigns that bring in money, not just activity.
Things to Stay Away From
Even people who have been doing Vehicle Ads and Performance Max for a long time make mistakes. Not having enough creative variety is one of the most common problems. To test and improve, Performance Max needs a lot of different headlines, descriptions, and images. Giving the algorithm only a few assets makes it harder for it to find winning combinations.
Another common mistake is not paying attention to negative keywords and placement exclusions. Even though Performance Max does most of the work for you, you still need to keep an eye on search terms and block traffic that isn’t relevant. If your luxury dealership keeps showing up for “cheap cars under $5000,” you’re wasting money on people who don’t want to buy a car from you.
Don’t forget to make your site mobile-friendly. Most people look for cars on their phones, but many dealership websites don’t work well on phones. To turn the traffic your ads bring in into customers, your site needs to load quickly, have buttons that are easy to tap, and forms that work on mobile devices.
Looking Forward
Automotive advertising is moving toward more automation, but the human element is still very important. Dealerships that will do well are those that use Google’s AI in a smart way, are very creative, and know their local market inside and out.
As Google keeps improving its advertising tools, stay up to date on new features and beta testing opportunities. People who are quick to adopt new features often get short-term benefits before the rest of the market catches up.
The basics, on the other hand, stay the same. Keep your inventory data up to date, write interesting marketing messages, give great customer service, and let technology help you do all of these things. If you master these things, your dealership will be in a great position to take over your market in 2025 and beyond.
