Automotive PPC Agency

Egochi runs paid search for automotive businesses: dealerships selling inventory, service centers filling bays, and parts sellers shipping orders. Each of those buyers searches differently, and each wastes budget differently. A dealer bleeds spend on shoppers three states away. A service center pays for DIY researchers who never book. A parts seller bids the same on low-margin and high-margin SKUs. We build campaigns around that split: vehicle inventory ads fed from your live stock, service-intent keywords tied to booking pages, and a negative-keyword list that filters tire-kickers before they cost a click. Paid buys the demand automotive SEO has not won yet, and hands budget back as rankings arrive. Plans start at $1,500 monthly, with pricing published before you sign. Start with a free audit of where your current spend leaks.

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What Dealers, Service Centers, and Parts Sellers Get Wrong

Four spend patterns we correct in almost every automotive account we take over.

Three buyer types, three different money leaks

A dealer's waste is geographic and model-level: paying metro click prices for shoppers outside a realistic selling radius, or for trims not on the lot. A service center's waste is intent: clicks from people researching a fix they plan to do themselves. A parts seller's waste is margin: bidding equally on a cheap gasket and an expensive turbo. One blended campaign hides all three leaks. Separated campaigns expose them.

Inventory ads fail on data, not bidding

Vehicle inventory campaigns run from your stock feed, and most underperformance traces back to that feed: missing photos, stale listings for sold units, prices that differ between the ad and the page. Google disapproves what it cannot verify. Before we touch bids, we audit the feed, because a clean feed at average bids beats aggressive bids on broken data.

Service keywords out-earn sales keywords at many stores

A brake-repair search costs a fraction of a new-SUV click and books a customer who returns for years of repair orders. Fixed operations carry the margin at most dealerships, yet the ad budget usually chases the showroom. If your bays have open capacity, service-intent campaigns are often the fastest payback in the whole account.

OEM rules shape what you can run

Franchise dealers operate inside manufacturer ad covenants: brand-term restrictions, co-op preapproval for reimbursed spend, pricing display rules. Ignore them and you lose co-op money or draw a compliance letter. Independent shops and parts sellers face none of this and should press the advantage on terms franchise stores cannot touch.

What's Inside an Automotive PPC Plan

Separate campaign structures for sales, service, and parts, each built for how its buyer searches.

Vehicle Inventory Ads

Feed-based campaigns that show your actual stock, with photos, price, and mileage, to nearby shoppers searching for that model. Includes feed setup and cleanup.
Service-Intent Campaigns

Paid search on repair and maintenance keywords inside your true service radius, landing on booking pages instead of the homepage.
Parts and Accessories Ads

Shopping campaigns with margin-aware bids, so budget follows the products that earn rather than the ones that get searched most.
Negative-Keyword Discipline

A maintained exclusion list per campaign: DIY research, out-of-area cities, careers queries, and junk searches filtered before they spend.
Landing Page Matching

Every ad lands on the page that answers it: the vehicle detail page, the service booking form, the exact part. No homepage dumping.
Cost-Per-Lead Reporting

Calls, forms, and direction requests tracked back to the keyword that produced them, with the management fee and ad spend shown side by side.

How We Rebuild an Automotive Ad Account

Leak audit

We read your search-term reports and geo data before touching anything, marking the spend going to DIY researchers, out-of-radius shoppers, and models you do not stock. The leaks are usually specific and fixable.
Feed and tracking check

For dealers, the inventory feed gets validated first: photos, prices, sold units. In parallel we wire call and form tracking so every later decision rests on real cost-per-lead numbers.
Campaign separation

Sales, service, and parts get their own campaigns with their own budgets, geographies, and negative lists, because three buyer types blended into one structure can only be managed to an average.
Launch and negative discipline

Campaigns go live with exclusion lists built from your market, and we review search terms every month to catch the junk queries that regrow like weeds.
Budget shifts by margin

Monthly reporting shows cost per lead by campaign, and budget moves toward what fills bays and moves units. If service outearns showroom clicks in your account, the spend follows.

Straight Answers on Automotive PPC

We tried Google Ads and it just burned money. Why would this be different?

Most burned automotive budgets share an autopsy: one campaign for everything, no negative keywords, clicks landing on the homepage, and no call tracking to show what worked. The channel gets blamed for the structure. Rebuilt with separated campaigns and tracked calls, the same spend usually reads very differently, and if it does not, we will say so with data.

Third-party listing sites already send us leads. Why buy our own clicks?

Listing platforms sell the same shopper to you and the store down the road, and their fees climb with your dependence. Your own campaigns put your inventory in front of the shopper first, at retail margin, with the lead in your CRM. Most stores need both for a while; the goal is shifting the mix toward traffic you control.

Can our internet manager run this in-house?

A sharp internet manager with ten spare hours a week can run a tight account, and some do. The honest checklist: search-term reviews monthly, feed maintenance weekly, negative lists per campaign, and bid changes justified by cost per lead. If those slip to quarterly, paying for management costs less than the drift.

What does realistic performance look like in the first quarter?

Weeks one to four go to tracking, feed cleanup, and restructure, so judge nothing yet. By month two the negative lists and geo boundaries show up as cheaper, closer clicks. By month three you should see a stable cost per lead by campaign and know which buyer type earns your next dollar. Anyone promising sold units in week one is guessing.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Bidding broad on brand and model terms with no radius discipline, paying metro prices for shoppers who will never visit.
Letting inventory ads run on a stale feed, so shoppers click a sold car and remember whose ad wasted their time.
Spending the whole budget on showroom terms while service bays with better margins sit half booked.
Sending every click to the homepage and asking a hot lead to navigate to the car themselves.
Ignoring OEM co-op preapproval rules and forfeiting manufacturer reimbursement on ad spend that would have qualified.

See How Egochi Works

A short look at how our team plans, builds, and reports on client work.

Is This Right for You?

This is for you if

You are a dealer with a live inventory feed, or willing to clean one up, and you want ads that show your actual stock.
You run a service center or fixed-ops department with open bay capacity and a defined service radius.
You sell parts or accessories online and know your margins well enough to bid by product.

This may not be the right fit if

You want PPC to compensate for a website that hides prices or loads slowly; fix the destination first or the clicks are wasted.
Your bays are booked out for weeks; paid service traffic would only pay for appointments you cannot take.

See the work: Automotive case studies · PPC case studies

What Clients Tell Us

Car dealerships are competitive online. Egochi helped us stand out with better local SEO and PPC campaigns that actually convert. Test drive appointments are through the roof.

James Harper June 2024

More client reviews

The Complete Automotive Program

This page is one part of a five-part program. Each piece works alone and works better together.

Common Questions About Automotive PPC

How much does automotive PPC management cost?

Egochi's automotive PPC management starts at $1,500 monthly, separate from the ad spend you pay Google. The fee and the spend both appear in your reporting, so you always see the true cost per lead. Spend levels depend on your market: metro dealer terms cost more per click than service or parts keywords.
What are vehicle inventory ads?

Vehicle inventory ads pull your live stock into Google, showing real cars with photos, prices, and mileage to shoppers searching for that model nearby. They run from a feed of your inventory data, so accuracy decides results: stale VINs, missing photos, or mismatched prices get ads disapproved or send shoppers to sold cars.
Should a dealership bid on its own name?

Usually yes, and cheaply. Competitors and third-party listing sites bid on dealership names to intercept your customers, and a branded campaign defends that traffic for a fraction of what generic terms cost. If nobody bids against your name in your market, we scale it back and move the budget into inventory and service campaigns.
How do you keep tire-kickers from draining the budget?

With negative keywords, reviewed every month. Searches containing free, DIY, manual, careers, and out-of-area city names burn spend without producing buyers. Each buyer type needs its own list: dealers exclude rental and repair queries, service centers exclude how-to research, and parts sellers exclude the part numbers that carry no margin.