The Challenge:

Some vehicles are often referred to by something different than the manufacturer-defined make and model names.  For example, Volkswagen may be referred to as “VW” and a Silverado 1500 might be referred to as simply “Silverado”.  Search campaign managers may want to include these alternate names in keywords to expand reach or in ads to manage character count restrictions.  “VW” will certainly fit more easily in a 30-character headline than “Volkswagen”.  But when automating the campaign building process across hundreds of models for potentially hundreds of dealers, these alternate names become extremely difficult to support.

The Solution:

Pre-build templates now support three additional variables that can be managed from the template libraries.  In addition to [make], [model], [trim], and [year], the templates will now support [make_alt], [model_alt], and [trim_alt] variables.

The alternate values for the three new variables are defined by you in a template library.  To add an alternate value, follow the steps below.

• Navigate to Campaign Builder in the left navigation and then Libraries at the top of the page.
• Click Edit for the library you would like to update.
• Locate the make, model, or trim value you would like to add an alternate for and click Edit.
• Enter your alternate value and then click Save.

Once the alternate value is entered and save, it will then populate the associated _alt variable when the template bulk sheet is downloaded.

If no alternate values have been setup in your template library, these variables will populate campaign structure with the associated make, model or trim for the alternate value.  (e.g. [model_alt] will be populated with “Civic” if no alternate value has been defined for the Honda Civic.)

Alternate values cannot be used with Auto Templates, since they pull values from a feed instead of from a library.  However, we are working on a solution to provide similar capabilities to auto templates in 2021.