Free: 96 PPC tools + my AI Playbook book
Google Ads management for car dealerships - new, used, service and parts campaigns, local targeting that stays local, and tracking that follows the lead all the way to the floor.
Dealership PPC fails the same way everywhere: one campaign, every model, a 50-mile radius, and a monthly report full of clicks nobody in the showroom has ever seen. The manufacturer outbids you on the make. The aggregators outbid you on “used cars”. And the service department - the most profitable keywords you own - gets no budget at all.
Co-op money makes it worse before it makes it better. OEM programs reimburse ad spend, but the rules attached push every enrolled dealer toward the same approved keywords, the same approved copy, the same campaign shape. Take the funding without a plan of your own and you end up running the identical campaign as the dealer across town, in the same auctions, at the same hours. Compliance is a rulebook, not a strategy, and a rulebook does not win auctions.
Then there is the bidding itself. On broad make and model terms, a single-location dealer sits in the auction against the manufacturer’s national campaigns and the aggregators, and both can outspend any local store indefinitely. The searches a dealership can actually win look different: city and neighborhood modifiers, trade-in intent, and the service and parts queries most competitors ignore.
Location targeting done loosely compounds the waste. A radius set wide “to be safe” pays for shoppers who would have to drive past three closer dealerships to reach yours, and, left on default settings, for people three states away researching a model they will buy somewhere else.
The measurement problem sits under all of it. Most dealership accounts count a lead the moment a form is filled, and nothing after that. If the report says the month went well and the showroom floor disagrees, believe the floor: the tracking is counting the wrong thing, and every bidding decision built on it inherits the error.
None of this shows up in the dashboard Google hands you. It shows up in search term reports, location reports and the gap between counted leads and the desk log, which is exactly where our free audit starts.
We structure the account like the dealership: new, used, service, parts. Four businesses, four cost-per-lead targets. Service keywords cost a fraction of car-buyer keywords and feed the department with the best margins - most agencies never touch them.
Every engagement opens with an audit of the account you already have: where the spend went, which search terms actually triggered your ads, and what happened after the click. Then tracking gets rebuilt around the actions a dealership counts - calls and lead forms - fed back into Google Ads so the account learns what a real buyer looks like instead of optimizing for whoever clicks. Where your CRM allows it, we wire the two together, so lead quality shapes the bidding, not just lead volume.
Targeting stays local because your buyers are local. We build the geography around where your customers actually come from rather than a round number on a map, and we bid on the competitor searches worth conquesting while leaving the ego battles alone. Negative keywords do constant work in automotive: research-only queries, DIY repairs, rentals, manuals and job seekers all click like buyers and buy nothing. We prune them continuously, not once at launch.
Ad copy gets written per department and A/B tested against real search behavior, because the ad that sells a certified pre-owned SUV is not the ad that books a brake job. Bidding strategy runs on the same split: each department gets targets that match what its leads are worth, so budget flows to the business you want more of.
A good click deserves a page built to convert it, so we analyze how your landing pages perform and tell you exactly what to change. On the Advanced package, our landing page design service builds the pages too. And we studied 45 live car dealer landing pages to see which ones actually earn the click.
None of it is a private method. We published our whole approach in this automotive PPC strategy guide - it’s the same playbook we run for clients. Read it first if you want to see the machine before you talk to us.
Flat management fee from $2,000 a month. Never a percentage of spend - dealers have been trained to think 15% of budget is normal. It’s not, and it quietly rewards the agency for wasting your money.
The math matters more in automotive than in most industries. Dealership budgets are serious money, and a percentage deal pays the agency more every time the budget grows, whether the extra spend sold a single car or not. Under a flat fee - $2,000 a month on Starter, $4,000 on Advanced - the only way we keep your account is by making the spend work harder.
Both packages, and everything they include, are on our PPC consulting page. And the reviews just below this page are our clients in their own words.
Full Google Ads management: keyword research, negative keywords, ad copywriting and A/B testing, bidding strategy, conversion tracking and competitor reconnaissance.
Everything in Starter, plus social ad platforms, unlimited ad creative design and unlimited landing page design.
$2,000 a month on our Starter package or $4,000 a month on Advanced, billed as a flat monthly fee. We never charge a percentage of ad spend, so the fee stays the same as your budget grows.
The full breakdown of what each package includes is on our PPC consulting page.
Yes. Co-op programs are a rulebook: approved terms, approved copy, documentation for every claim. We read your program requirements before building anything, then structure the campaigns so the reimbursable spend stays inside the lines without turning your account into the same campaign every other enrolled dealer is running.
Final sign-off on program compliance stays with your OEM contact. Our job is to make that sign-off easy.
Usually, yes. Searches for your dealership by name are the cheapest, highest-intent clicks you can buy, and if you leave them unprotected, aggregators and nearby dealers can collect them instead. A small branded campaign defends that traffic for a small share of the budget.
Broad make and model terms are a different fight: there you are bidding against national budgets, which is why we keep those terms on a short leash and put the weight behind local, high-intent searches.
Pricing is a flat monthly fee on both packages, and the engagement starts with a free audit of your existing account, so you see how we think before committing to anything. We keep dealerships with results and clear monthly reporting, not paperwork.
Doug Haines
You need to get your paid channel working. The results with PPC.io have been amazing and the demand has outstripped what we can deliver.
David Dinsmore
They've helped us consult on PPC efficiency for some of our billion-dollar clients. Next-level strategies.
Kathryn Wiley
Helped scale my travel business to heights I never thought possible. I almost can't handle the number of new leads we're getting.
Arlene McCoy
Helped us massively scale our eCommerce store. Nothing but glowing praise for them - Highly recommended.