ShopPivot's software helps small auto repair shops analyze their daily data for better business results. As a brand new company, it needed to reach hardworking shop owners while filtering out related people such as car owners and auto dealers. ShopPivot turned to AdWords Search Network with Display Select. The campaign combined search advertising with the best-performing display opportunities for each advertiser to reach local repair shop and gas station owners across America. Before three weeks had passed, the campaign generated 817 clicks, 21 conversions and ShopPivot's very first paying customer.
Goals
Find new customers
Raise awareness of ShopPivot's solution
Approach
Ran keywords on both search and display with AdWords Search Network with Display Select
Results
Campaign generated hundreds of clicks and 21 new customers in less than three weeks
ShopPivot provides independent auto repair shops with custom software that collects daily data, stores it safely in the cloud, then analyzes it to help shop owners get better results. “Independent auto repair shops run on razor-thin margins. They need help,” says Dave Conley. He and the ShopPivot team knew their software could help good shops become great shops. But first they had to find their customers.
My partners and I come from very technical backgrounds, and we were floored by the capabilities of AdWords and how we can see the exact value of our spend. Finding new prospects was what we were aiming to do, and with AdWords, that’s what we’ve done. It’s a little bit of magic.
—Dave Conley, ShopPivot
Goals
ShopPivot was starting from zero: “We had no traffic, no recognition, no idea if we would even have customers,” says Conley.
They faced a second challenge with online ads: “We’re B2B. We needed to reach our hardworking shop owners while filtering out all the car owners who are searching for auto repair,” says Conley.
So on the day they launched ShopPivot, Conley and his partners also launched something else: an ad campaign using AdWords Search Network with Display Select.
Approach
Search Network with Display Select combines search advertising with the best-performing display opportunities for each advertiser. The focus is on search, but with an added boost of high-performing display placements that can reach new customers at a better ROI.
ShopPivot’s target group included single-bay gas stations, local shops and small regional chains. They wanted their ads to lead to a specific conversion: a shop owner who visits their site, enters contact information and signs up for a free trial.
They started by targeting their AdWords ads to the whole United States, on both desktop and mobile screens, for a half-dozen specific keywords such as auto repair shop software. That got results right away. “We began running our ads on Oct. 8, and we had our first two conversions the next day,” says Conley. Then they began to expand their keywords.
“That was a big learning lesson,” says Conley. “If we chose keywords that were too broad, our clickthroughs went through the roof, but conversions didn’t. We were clearly triggering the wrong audiences, so we experimented some more.”
ShopPivot also experimented with ad messages that would reach the right customers, running ads like these:
They kept adjusting keywords, targeting and text as the conversions piled up. And they soon had not only conversions, but also their first client.
“It was a huge win for us seeing that first paying customer. We were really excited,” recalls Conley.
Results
In its first three weeks, ShopPivot generated 817 clicks that led to 21 conversions.
Now that they have real-world information to go on, the ShopPivot team is working on turning every one of those conversions into customers.
The first few weeks were kind of remarkable. Our rep at Google had told us, 'If you spend about this much in this way, you should see about this many conversions.' And darned if it didn't happen! She was spot on! AdWords helped us thread that needle.
—Dave Conley, ShopPivot
