Auto Mechanic PPC Agency

What is Paid Ads Management for Auto Repair Shops?

Auto Mechanic PPC management consists of creating and optimizing paid advertisement campaigns for auto repair shops. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let's dive a little deeper.

To provide professional PPC management, a paid ads company for auto mechanics should get to know you and your goals. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach paid advertising for a local auto repair shop is much different from how you'd handle it for nationwide auto mechanic ecommerce site.

Local auto repair shops, for example, are often only looking for contact form submissions or calls. Through paid ads, traffic can be driven to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. We recommend Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those pages/funnels don't exist or need to be reworked.

In contrast, ecommerce-focused auto repair shops are most likely to be interested in online sales. Pay-per-click advertising can be used to drive traffic to an optimized product or category page. In some cases, it might even make sense to include Google Shopping Campaigns in your strategy. We've even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.

To optimize and scale auto mechanic paid ads campaigns, it's important to understand what metrics will be used. For some auto repair shops, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

To be successful with paid advertising, your auto repair shop should utilize multiple advertising strategies and marketing tools. Pay-per-click campaigns for auto mechanics should include tactics like:

• Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
• Make money online or through qualified leads for your auto repair shop.
• Utilize third-party attribution software to better understand ad attribution.
• Provide social proof with case studies, white papers, video testimonials, etc.
• Build and nurture relationships through user generated content, story creation, and email address collection.
• Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.

Types of Paid Ads for Auto Repair Shops

For auto repair shops, there are many ways to run paid advertising. Let's discuss some of the most common PPC advertising being run for auto repair shops.

1.) Local Marketing

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run nearby ads for your auto repair shop. One platform may be more effective for your local auto repair shop than another. You should try out every option available to see which suits you best. Now let's discuss some nearby advertising options.

Google is going to offer two options.

In the first case, you can run traditional Google Ads, possibly using the newer Performance Max campaign type. This is a very dynamic ad campaign type which utilizes multiple headlines, images, videos, and service locations to allow the Google algorithm to find the best combination of assets to bring you customers. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.

Google's second option for qualifying businesses is their Local Service Ads. The Google Local Service Ads offers a pay-per-lead model, which means you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform provides you. Home service contractors, such as plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers, frequently use Google Local Service Ads.

You can also use Facebook Ads to target people in your local area. The process is a little simpler since it just requires setting up a campaign with ad sets with geographic restrictions to ZIP codes in the target area. For all types of auto repair shops, we often use Facebook Ads.

2.) Social Media Advertising

A social ad is pretty much any online advertisement you see on a social networking site.

It's important to keep the ad creatives fresh when running social ads. If you don't rotate out ad creatives every few weeks your campaign performance will slowly decrease. For higher spending ad campaigns, you might need to look at weekly ad creative edits.

One of the best things about social media advertising is that you can target audiences who aren't yet aware of your product or service. When running search advertising, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively searching for what your auto repair shop offers.

However, this benefit can also be a curse, since conversion rates are typically lower when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Ads

You'll want to invest in search engine ads if you know people are searching online for the products you offer.

Some people refer to this as auto mechanic Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. There are different ways to explain search ads (not to be confused with SEO), which are advertisements displayed on search engines' search results pages.

You might consider copying your Google Ads campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform if you've had success with Google Ads. According to a StatCounter study from October 2022, about 3.57% of online users use Bing as their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local area news stations), gossip websites, and more.

Bing Ads and Google Ads both offer these.

To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image sizes. Both ad platforms have algorithms that help you generate results from your ad spend if you have an understanding of your target audience.

5.) Retargeting Ads

There is a good chance that not everyone will convert during their first experience with your auto repair shop website, landing page, or sales funnel.

Retargeting ads are almost always recommended to help bring people back to your website after they have weighed their options.

You can run retargeting ads on Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and many other platforms.

6.) Shopping Ads

Google Shopping Campaigns popularized this type of search ad.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your auto repair shop.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. Using that information, they can determine what types of search queries to display your products at the top of search results.

7.) Video Ads

Social networking websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram allow you to advertise with video.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

Facebook Ads is required if you want to run video ads on Facebook or Instagram.

The conversion potential of video ads is excellent on both platforms. It's not unusual for us to use video ads for product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

Your auto repair shop paid advertising campaigns should definitely incorporate video creatives if you have the budget to support them.

Tips for Managing Paid Ads for Auto Mechanics

Our team of paid advertising specialists is knowledgeable in the latest PPC trends for auto mechanics and other industries.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

In the context of paid advertising, you'll find keyword research for auto mechanics mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, Bing and Google only show ads based on what people search for that your auto repair shop is targeting.

If you are searching for a auto repair shop in your city, you might search "nearby auto mechanic" on Google. It wouldn't be necessary to conduct extensive keyword research to target that exact phrase.

However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the auto repair shop needs to expand their advertising reach? Researching keywords would be necessary for the solution.

The next steps might involve the paid advertising manager discussing with the auto repair shop about what types of products / services they want to target more often and within what geographic areas. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.

Suppose the PPC manager discovers that there is high traffic volume for "nearby auto repair shops" or even "auto mechanic services." The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. In the second phrase, a service is being targeted, which might result in a more lucrative conversion opportunity.

You can also benefit from keyword research when building out negative keyword lists. You can use negative keywords to prevent your paid advertising from showing up in search queries that you know are not likely to result in more customers.

For example, a person looking for "free services from auto repair shops" or "how to advertise to auto mechanics" is unlikely to convert with you. Your paid advertising may appear if you use broad keyword targeting without negative keywords such as "free" or "advertise".

Even if your keyword research needs are obvious when you start building out your campaign, they become more complex as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

2.) Audience Research Tips

When you hear audience research talked about for auto repair shop paid ads campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social media ads on Facebook and Instagram. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.

We'll review some audience research and targeting history within Facebook Ads.

In years past, auto mechanic-focused paid advertising managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. In fact, one of Facebook Ads' most attractive features was the ability to collect data on users, which advertisers for auto repair shops eagerly took advantage of.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

In the iOS 14.5 update, Apple included a pop-up message that allowed users to opt out of tracking for personalized ads. As a result, Facebook had difficulty tracking mobile device behavior. Even ad attribution reporting was affected.

Following that, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most advertising companies for auto mechanics. By choosing your own interest-based targeting, you tend to do more harm than good because their algorithm often understands your ideal audience better than you do.

While there will still be plenty of auto repair shop paid ads agencies relying on custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it in every upgrade within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

Interested in another take on audience targeting? Social Media Examiner's blog article does a good job of explaining recent changes.

This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. The targeting options within auto mechanic ad campaigns will likely always be manageable to boost performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

It is important to focus on a high quality landing page when running paid advertisements for auto mechanics.

Our first step when managing paid advertising campaigns for auto repair shops involves reviewing the landing pages for best practices. Our review takes into account the following factors:

• Does the headline focus on benefits?
• Do you have any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Can you easily identify the call to action?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is social proof present?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

Quality landing pages are the result of many factors. Here is a great write-up about what makes a high converting landing page.

Make sure your landing page follows best practices before you spend money on paid ads! If you want to create an effective landing page, you should never consider it finished. You can refine your sales pitch by running A/B tests on the landing page every few months.

4.) Sales Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their online advertising we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your auto repair shop isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from PPC advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most auto repair shops, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid ads company to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your PPC advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for auto mechanics, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out attractive ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a great ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your PPC Tactics

We'd love to partner with your auto mechanics on paid advertising! As a full-service PPC management firm helping auto mechanics, we have multiple internal teams focused on search engine marketing, social media advertising, sales funnel development, and ad creative testing. Auto mechanic-focused PPC management firms don't all operate this way, since most only have one person in charge of everything. For those auto repair shop PPC companies, campaign optimizations and original ideas might not be tested often enough to bring about the results you need.

Choosing a paid ad agency for your auto repair shop is not an easy task. Having over 20 years of experience, you can trust our PPC plans and strategies for auto repair shops. As a lead generation company, we often use similar PPC strategies.

Auto repair shops should choose our PPC advertising firm because they feel confident we are the right team. Consider our paid ads experts for the following reasons:

• We have been in business since 2004, which means we have more than 20 years of experience.
• We rely heavily on sales funnels and paid advertising to shore up our organic search placements.
• Our internal advertising team handles all auto mechanic-targeted website advertising packages, such as PPC management, sales funnel development, and ad creatives.
• If you call us during normal business hours, you will likely get an answer from one of our teammates within a few rings.

Get in touch with our paid ads consultants to discuss what we can do for your auto repair shop! We often provide complete paid ads management plans to auto mechanic-related small businesses, but we can also augment the marketing department of larger auto repair shops to fill in missing skill sets.

We hope you consider our company when looking for a PPC advertising company for your auto repair shop. To start a discussion with the helpful staff at our PPC agency, send us an email or give us a call if you have any follow-up questions.

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