CASE STUDY
Google Ads Lead Generation: Auto Body Shop
Gross & Son Paint & Body opened as a body shop in 1947. As a veteran-owned business, they provide excellent service boasting almost 500 Google reviews and a rating of 4.7 stars. Gross & Son has expanded its service offering due to demand. They recently built a new alignment shop and offer collision repair, towing, and motorcycle repair to the citizens of Pensacola, FL.
Result Highlight:
Over 1,000 qualified leads from 1,700 total calls and form submissions in 2023.
What it means:
Our client received a steady stream of incoming leads to fuel their business growth.
Challenge
As Gross & Son has grown their business, we have developed digital marketing strategies to support their expansion of service offerings.
With the rollout of their towing and alignment primary services and the specialized services for high-end cars like Tesla and Maserati, they were looking to increase qualified leads to support this growth and fill their pipeline. We faced the following challenges:
- Word of mouth leads only
- No consistent flow of leads
- No leads for new primary & specialized services
- Competitive market in Pensacola
According to IBIS World, there are 87,237 car body shops in the US with the second highest amount by state in Florida at 5,840 in 2023.
Solution
To meet the challenges presented, we have created and continuously optimized Google Ad campaigns for these new services.
Here are some of the optimization strategies we have implemented to drive down the cost per lead and get our client more leads for less money.
- Campaign Restructure: Reorganizing campaigns to better match search queries with ad content and landing page experience increasing Google quality score, lowering cost per click, and ultimately contributing to a lower cost per lead.
- Conversion Tracking: Ensured all generated leads were tracked accurately in the Google Ads backend allowing better optimized campaign spend towards keywords that were converting into paying customers and reducing spend on keywords generating less cost-effective leads.
- Negative Keywords: Closely monitoring queries triggering campaigns over time, to refine the quality of clicks the budget was spent on.
- Bidding Strategies: Testing out a variety of bid strategies over time, comparing results, and allocating budget to higher performing strategies while phasing out the lower performing strategies.
- Ad Group Segmentation: Breaking down the ad group segmentation by service type and adjusting bids and landing page experience to cater to the keyword groups. Our ‘towing’ keyword group converted clicks into warm leads at a 51% conversion rate in 2023.
Results
By all metrics, this Google Ads campaign has been a great success. Prior to these campaigns, our client was only receiving leads by word of mouth. Now, they are receiving a consistent flow of leads that support business growth for all service categories of their autobody shop.
Here are the key metrics:
- Cost per lead = $9.28
- Total new leads = over 1,000
- 1,700 total calls and form submissions
- 34% of clicks converted into warm leads