Case study · Local vehicle-accessory fitting
A fitting shop stopped paying for leads it could never convert.
A Cape Town towbar and vehicle-accessory fitting shop was running Google Ads through a manager who had set it and forgotten it. The phone rang, but too often with people who lived too far away to ever become customers.
The challenge
Leads were trickling in, but a large share came from outside the service area. A fitting shop cannot help a customer who cannot drive to it, so every out-of-area click was wasted spend. The owner\u2019s instinct that something was wrong turned out to be correct.
The audit found four problems: location targeting set far wider than the business could serve, search terms matching irrelevant low-intent queries, a flat campaign structure with no separation by intent, and ad copy that did not reflect what the shop actually offered.
The approach
The account could not be salvaged with tweaks. It was rebuilt from the ground up: location targeting locked to the real service area, a four-campaign structure split by intent (core products, competitors, vehicle models, brand), a systematic negative-keyword programme, rewritten ads, service-specific landing pages matched to each ad, and a move to Target CPA bidding once the data was clean.
The results
The numbers tell part of the story. The rest is in the phone calls: the owner no longer fields enquiries from people who could never reach the shop. For a local service business, that is the win that matters most.
The takeaway
Cheap management is expensive. Paying for ads and paying a manager who is not actually managing the account produces bad results from both. For a local service business, location targeting is not optional, and structure is what makes ongoing optimisation possible at all.
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All figures are from live Google Ads accounts. Client identity withheld by request. Results reflect specific market conditions and business context; individual outcomes vary.