Garages, dealers and vehicle services
The first sale is the cheap one. Everything a vehicle costs its owner over the next four years is where the business actually lives, and it is almost never measured.
Enquiries come through a portal, a phone and a form, and none of the three agree with each other. Nobody can say what a service booking costs to win or what a customer is worth after the first visit.
What we keep finding
Four things that are true across garages and forecourts.
Repeat work is the business and the first visit gets all the credit
An MOT at fifty five pounds is a loss leader that becomes four years of servicing, tyres and repairs. Measured as a fifty five pound conversion, it looks like the worst thing you sell and gets bid down accordingly.
Portals are treated as a cost of doing business rather than as a channel
Autotrader and its equivalents are rarely set against your own advertising on the same terms, because nobody has the cost per sold unit from each. The sums are usually possible and usually revealing.
Bay and forecourt capacity is never in the picture
Advertising that fills next Tuesday when Tuesday was already full is money spent to create a waiting list. Very few garages connect the diary to the budget, and it is a fast win when they do.
The reminder is the highest return marketing in the business and is run from memory
MOT due dates are known. Service intervals are known. A firm that treats those as a measured, automated channel outperforms one that sends a text when somebody remembers, and most are the second kind.
What changes
What the numbers look like once they are joined up.
- Cost per booked job, not per clickSplit by MOT, service, repair, tyres and diagnostics, because they have nothing in common except a bay.
- What a customer is worth over four yearsFed back into bidding, so an MOT is valued as the start of a relationship rather than as a small transaction.
- Which advertising fills the quiet daysDemand is not flat across a week. Budget shaped around capacity earns more than budget spread evenly across it.
- Portal against own channel, on the same termsCost per sold unit from each, side by side, so the renewal conversation is an arithmetic one.
A bay hour is the unit this business really sells. Almost no garage advertising is measured in it.
What we measure here
The numbers a workshop lives on.
- Bookings by job type, with a value on each, taken from your DMS rather than estimated
- Calls counted past a minimum duration and matched to the booking they produced
- Repeat rate and four year customer value, by how the customer first arrived
- Bay and ramp utilisation set against advertising spend by day of week
- MOT and service reminders measured as a channel, with their own return
- Portal enquiries and own channel enquiries compared on cost per sold unit
- Reviews tracked as an acquisition input, because in this trade they are one
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
Can you get data out of our DMS?
Usually. Most of the common systems will export completed jobs with a value and a date, which is all we need. Where a system genuinely will not, a weekly export by hand is a perfectly respectable answer and we will set it up that way rather than sell you a migration.
We are a used car dealer, not a workshop.
Then the numbers that matter are days in stock, cost per sold unit by source and part exchange rate, and the work is mostly about connecting your stock feed to the advertising properly. It is a different job from the workshop one and we would scope it as such.
Is it worth advertising an MOT at that price?
Only if you know what the customer is worth afterwards. With that number it is often one of the best purchases in the business. Without it, you are buying fifty five pound jobs at forty pounds a piece and calling it marketing.
Our bays are full already.
Then stop spending, or spend differently. A firm at capacity should be advertising for the work with the best margin rather than for more work, and that is a change to what you bid on rather than to how much. We would say that out loud in month one.
Proof
An Australian taxi company
More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.
Another vehicle business bought on phone calls, and the fix was the same: decide what a call worth having is before touching the advertising.
Read the case study- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
- average cost per click
$2.10
average cost per click
Where this usually starts
Two pieces of work, in this order.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Bring the number you do not trust.
30 minutes. Most of these conversations start with somebody describing a report they have stopped believing.