6,868 clicks to live VINs at $0.21 each.
Here's the fine print.

Correct. It's per link click. Meta counts a link click the moment the tap leaves the app, and some of those never finish loading the page. Anywhere on this site that says "VDP click" means a link click to a VDP URL, and the $0.21 is per link click. We don't call them VDP views.

The number that settles this is landed sessions in the dealer's own Google Analytics, matched to the Meta campaign. GA4 landed-session data for August is being pulled now. This paragraph will show link clicks next to landed VDP sessions and the real cost per landed session.

For scale: dealers on DealerRefresh report paying listing sites $0.54 to $1.38 per VDP view. Even if half of these clicks never landed, the cost per landed VDP would be about $0.28.

7.1% is link CTR, not Meta's default CTR column. Meta's "CTR (all)" counts likes, photo taps, and profile visits and runs higher on this account. We quote link CTR everywhere because it's the stricter number. The first five days of the campaign ran at a 4.7% link CTR, and the month settled at 7.1% as the account learned.

Placement breakdown for August (Feed, Reels, Stories versus Audience Network) is being exported from Ads Manager and will be published here.

Whatever the split shows, this is your call: Audience Network is a checkbox in the campaign, and any dealer can have it turned off. Every campaign runs in your ad account, so you can check the placement report yourself without asking us.

Yes, the 65+ bracket clicked most, at an 8.48% link CTR, and we don't yet know how those clicks behaved on the site. We're not going to argue that older shoppers fill out forms at the same rate. We also won't pretend they aren't buyers. Plenty of new-car buyers at a franchise store are over 65, and they're more likely to pick up a phone than submit a form.

Engagement by age bracket from GA4 (landed sessions, time on VDP, and call or form events) will be posted here when the August export is in.

Two things you get regardless. Every monthly report shows CTR by age bracket, so you can see it, not dig for it. And if you want a bracket excluded or de-weighted, that's a targeting setting, and we'll change it.

The benchmark is real, and the comparison is fair on targeting. The 0.8% to 1.7% range is LocaliQ's 2025 Facebook Ads benchmark for the automotive vertical, which is the standard reference for paid social. This ad set was cold prospecting only. No website visitors, no CRM lists, no lookalikes. If any of those had been in the set, we'd have said so, and we'd expect the CTR to be higher still.

On the "inventory video out-clicks static brand ads" point: agreed, and that is the whole argument. The same store ran a lifestyle-audience brand ad set on Meta the same month. It came in about 75% below the automotive benchmark while the per-VIN video ads ran multiples above it. Same store, same platform, same month, same budget owner. The variable is the car in the creative.

Exact targeting parameters for this campaign are available to any dealer who asks, and every ad is public in the Meta Ad Library.

We don't claim these clicks sold cars, and we won't. We don't believe a single ad sells a car. A buyer spends about 14 hours shopping, 7 of them online, and walks into about two stores. The job of these ads is to make sure your lot is one of the two, at a cost per VDP that beats what you pay the listing sites for the same thing.

That said, a traffic report should still show what the traffic did. Bounce rate, time on VDP, and on-site events (form, call, chat) for the August ad traffic, compared against the store's organic and search traffic, are being pulled from GA4 now.

Matched sales are a different matter. Matching CRM sales back to Meta impressions is your data and your call, and we'll help you set it up. We won't grade our own homework on it.