A car detailing and paint protection film business that needed paid media judged on booked jobs rather than reach. I ran paid search to catch drivers actively looking for the work, paid social to build recognition inside the workshop's catchment, and reporting that followed each enquiry back to its source.
Advertising that filled the workshop diary, and a way to see which campaign each booking came from.
Detailing and paint protection film are bought the way most local services are bought: someone decides they want it, looks for a workshop that can do it, asks about price and availability, and books whoever answers convincingly. The window between deciding and booking is short, so a campaign that appears at the moment of the search is worth far more than one that reaches a large audience slowly — provided the enquiry it produces is answered quickly and can be traced afterwards.
The brief was to build both halves of that. Search had to capture people already looking, at a service level specific enough that a PPF quote and an interior clean were never competing for the same budget. Social had to make the workshop familiar to drivers in the surrounding area, so the name meant something before the search ever happened. And both had to be answerable to the same question: did this produce work in the diary?
That gave the engagement four jobs, and the rest of this page describes how each one was handled. It is a description of scope and method, not of outcomes: the enquiry and booking figures in this client's account belong to the client, and none of them are published here.
Someone searching for detailing or paint protection film usually wants it done soon and nearby. That demand is immediate and short-lived, so search had to be there for it rather than arrive a week later.
A workshop can only serve the cars that can reach it. Social was there to build recognition inside that radius, not to accumulate an audience spread across the region.
Impressions and video views tell a service business almost nothing. The account had to be judged on enquiries that turned into work in the diary.
People asking about detailing want a price, a date and a location. The routes into contact had to suit that — a call or a message, not a form that reads like an application.
High-intent search, local social around it, and the tracking that connects an enquiry to the job it became.
Search was built service by service rather than as one campaign for the workshop. Paint protection film is a considered, higher-value decision made mostly by people with a new or recently bought car; a detailing booking is a smaller, more frequent purchase with different urgency and a different price expectation. Collapsed into one campaign, the two average each other out and neither can be judged. Kept apart, each is held to its own standard and funded on evidence rather than assumption.
The geography mattered as much as the keywords. A workshop serves the cars that can reach it, so targeting was drawn around the distance drivers will actually travel rather than around an emirate on a map. Paid social then worked inside that same boundary, using the workshop's own finished work instead of stock automotive photography — in a trade where the whole product is a visible finish, showing someone else's car is both dishonest and less persuasive than showing your own.
Detailing, paint protection film and the individual treatments kept apart, because someone pricing PPF for a new car is a different enquiry from someone booking a wash and interior clean.
Targeting set around the distance drivers will realistically travel to a workshop, so budget was not spent on people in emirates who were never going to make the trip.
Ongoing exclusion of DIY searches, product and equipment shopping, supplier and wholesale queries, training courses and job seekers — the traffic this category attracts and cannot use.
Call and message extensions alongside a short booking enquiry, so a driver could ask about price and availability in the way they were already inclined to ask.
Social campaigns built from the workshop's own finished work rather than stock automotive imagery, aimed at the same catchment the search campaigns served.
Calls, messages and form enquiries tracked and tagged consistently, so each one could be traced back to the campaign, the service and the search that produced it.
The unit was a booked job, agreed before launch — so nobody could quietly redefine success later.
An enquiry counted when a real person asked about real work — a call answered, a message sent, a booking request submitted. Not an impression, not a video view, not a click. From there the useful question is which of those enquiries reached the diary, so bookings were recorded back against the campaign and service that produced them. Consistent tagging is what makes that possible — dull work, and the difference between a report that explains what happened and one that asserts it.
Local service case studies are usually decorated with call volumes and pipeline figures nobody can verify, and I am not adding to that pile. I would rather show the reasoning, and walk you through live accounts in a conversation, than publish a number you have no way to check. How I approach measurement generally is set out on performance marketing.
Four phases. The first two are finite; the last two are what the work looks like month after month.
I started with the workshop rather than the ad account: which services actually make money, how long each one occupies a bay, and which of them the business genuinely wanted more of. A detailing operation has finite capacity, and advertising a service you cannot schedule is a way of buying complaints. Alongside that I looked at how enquiries were arriving and who answered them, because in this category the reply time is part of the conversion.
Search campaigns were built around what people type when they want the work done — service by service, with location targeting set to the catchment the workshop can realistically serve, and negative keywords seeded before launch rather than added after the waste appeared. Call, message and enquiry tracking went in at the same time, so no budget was spent while enquiries were still untraceable.
Paid social ran alongside search to build local familiarity, using the workshop's own finished work rather than generic automotive stock. Day to day the job was unglamorous: reading search terms, excluding the ones producing noise, refreshing creative as it aged, and moving budget toward the services that were producing enquiries the workshop actually wanted. Where a service was drawing interest the diary could not absorb, the honest answer was to slow it down rather than keep spending.
Reporting was written for the people running the workshop, not for another marketer. It set out where enquiries came from, which of them turned into booked work, what that cost against the budget, and what I intended to change next — with the underlying accounts open to the client throughout, because a report nobody can check against the source is just an assertion.
The three services this engagement is assembled from — and the rest of the client work is on work.
The search side of this engagement — service-level campaign structure, local targeting, negative keyword work and call tracking that survives contact with reality.
Explore Google AdsThe paid social side: local awareness campaigns built from real work, aimed at the catchment a workshop can actually serve.
Explore Meta AdsThe measurement layer under both channels: agreed definitions, consistent tagging and reporting that follows an enquiry through to a booking.
Explore performance marketing