A regional vehicle dealership competes on a field tilted against it. Metropolitan dealers outspend it, manufacturer campaigns push buyers toward city showrooms, and the catchment is geographically wide but thinly populated — there is no volume to waste. The buying journey is also stubbornly offline at the decisive moment: people research a ute online for weeks, then ring the dealership or drive in. That makes the click a means, not an end, and makes anything measured purely in traffic misleading. The dealership needed to be the obvious local answer for its models, and it needed the enquiry to arrive by phone or in person, attributed properly.
We built the account around commercial intent rather than reach. Search campaigns are split between demand capture for people already shopping the models the dealership stocks, and dynamic search that catches the long tail of model, variant and service queries no manual keyword list would cover. Geography is tight — the campaign serves the catchment the dealership can realistically sell and service into, so nothing is spent on a buyer who will always go elsewhere. Alongside the paid work we manage the Google Business Profile as a primary channel in its own right: it is where a regional buyer checks hours, reads reviews, gets directions and calls. Ads and profile are managed together, because in a regional market they are the same shopfront.
Google Ads search with split demand-capture and dynamic-search structure · catchment-level geo-targeting · call tracking and call-extension reporting · Google Business Profile management including posts, hours, imagery and review response · negative-keyword governance · combined paid and profile reporting.
Dynamic search ad groups use automated query matching against site content to cover model and variant searches that shift with new releases, with negative-keyword governance set by our team so it never drifts into unrelated traffic. Phone-call and direction-request data is read alongside click data so the campaign optimises toward the actions that actually precede a sale rather than the cheapest click. Review sentiment is monitored so service issues surface as an operational signal rather than an unanswered public complaint.
Tighter attribution between profile interactions, phone calls and showroom visits, so the dealership can see the full path from a local search to a vehicle sold rather than inferring it. Assisted first-response drafting for reviews, with every reply approved by the dealership before it publishes.