A Tale of 6 Pictures: Social Media Mini Case Study (and contest!)

A good social media advertising campaign (or any marketing campaign at all, for that matter) should be guided by science. Testing, monitoring, adjusting, and testing again are the cornerstones of a good marketing strategy.

Much of what we do in the car business comes with assumptions. We do things that we have known from past experience to be successful. Sometimes, we have to take those assumptions and adjust them to modern sentiment, trends, and technologies. Other times we have to take those assumptions and throw them out the window.

Below are 6 images. These images were built to plug into a single Facebook advertising campaign designed to drive traffic to the website. The wording of the ad was the same across the board. The budget was a strong one and the activity was left in the hands of the Facebook algorithm to serve the ads based upon activity and popularity.

Look at the images and come to a conclusion in your mind which one yielded the most clicks to the website. The orange section represents where the logo is. Keep in mind that the wording of the ad was generally geared towards Chevrolet - no model indicators were used in the ad other than the image. Given this limited amount of information, which do you think performed the best and yielded the most clicks to the inventory for the dealership?

1. Red Camaro

2. Tahoe

3. Black Camaro

4. Keys

5. Silverado

6. Corvette

Think you have the right answer? I'll tell you up front - it wasn't even close. The ad that performed the best had more than double the click-thru rate in the first few hours. After it started going, it ended up with more than 3 times the clicks of all of the other images combined.

If you have an answer, like this post and comment with which one you think performed the best in the ads. One name will be drawn from the correct answers before the end of the month. If you're a dealer, you'll get a cool prize in the form of some sort of service from Dealer Authority. If you're a vendor, we'll reward you with a contextual followed link to your website from a PageRank 5 site (great for SEO, and if a dealer wins and would prefer that, they can take it instead).

Who's up for the challenge?