Client Success: Increasing Brand Awareness and Vehicle Volume for a Local Auto Repair Shop

When it comes to both automotive brands and auto repair shops, many consumers demonstrate strong loyalty to the car makers and service providers that have earned their trust. While this is great news for any automotive business seeking to retain its customers through a strong brand experience, it can pose a challenge to independent auto shops looking to expand their footprint and their customer base.

Although one 13-location auto repair chain attempted to grow its service volume through a local advertising strategy, the company’s advertising partner at the time delivered disappointing results that failed to achieve the company’s highest-priority goals.

Frustrated with their past ad performance, the company turned to Cox Media for help building an ad campaign that could deliver better results and drive revenue for each auto shop location.

The Goal

The local auto repair shop wanted an advertising campaign that would increase local awareness of its auto repair shops. With greater visibility and increased referrals—through a combination of website visits, phone calls, and foot traffic to its business locations—the company needed this awareness-level ad campaign to increase its overall vehicle volume, which in turn would lift its revenue.

Due to the poor communication and lack of transparency the client experienced with a prior advertising partner, the auto repair shop chain’s leadership also wanted Cox Media to provide regular updates regarding the performance of all ad campaigns.

The Solution

Despite the auto shop chain’s negative experience funding a paid search campaign with its previous advertising partner, Cox Media recommended a new-and-improved paid search campaign that promoted the full range of the company’s offerings—including general auto repair, oil changes, transmission repair and other key services—available at each of its 13 locations.

Over time, this expansive paid search campaign was optimized and localized to better serve each individual shop location, as well as each service ad group. Service-specific ads that were delivering poor results, for example, were phased out of the paid search campaign to allocate

more of the advertising budget to top-performing service ads. This optimized overall ad campaign performance over time, increasing the client’s potential ROI for its ad spending.

To keep the client in the loop, Cox Media provided weekly transparency updates and detailed the optimizations and changes being made to drive better results. Over an initial three-month campaign period, Cox Media’s experts also provided monthly recaps that highlighted key metrics demonstrating the effectiveness of the campaign.

The Results

The auto shop client was so pleased with the early returns on Cox Media’s paid search strategy that it opted to renew the three-month campaign for an additional three months. After five months of regular advertising and optimizing, the auto repair shop client reported the following results:

• More than 13,000 referrals to the company’s business website;
• A total of 834 Google Analytics goal completions (or conversions);
• A 619 percent increase in the company’s advertising conversion rate;
• 515 phone call referrals;
• 541 total in-store visits across all 13 locations.

In addition to extending the paid search ad campaign, the auto shop client also increased its pay-per-click budget by 77 percent to support enhanced keyword targeting, including contextual retargeting, search retargeting, and demographic targeting.

The owner of the auto repair chain was so pleased with Cox Media’s results that he enlisted Cox Media’s help as an advertising partner for his two other owned businesses.

No matter what your advertising goals may be, the right advertising partner can make all the difference. Find out how Cox Media can help your business reach its growth goals—contact us today.