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 up and left 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 of them came from outside the service area. A fitting shop cannot help a customer who cannot drive to it. Every out-of-area click was money spent on someone who could never become a customer, and every out-of-area phone call was time spent on an enquiry that could only end one way.
The owner’s instinct was that something was wrong. He was right, and the account turned out to be worse than he thought.
What we found
The campaign list gave the game away before we looked at a single metric. A Cape Town business was running separate campaigns aimed at Johannesburg and Pretoria — cities well over a thousand kilometres away, where the shop cannot fit anything to anyone. Those campaigns had been quietly spending for a long time.
Sitting alongside them was a Smart campaign. That is a campaign type that hands targeting, bidding and placement decisions to Google’s automation and gives the advertiser almost no visibility into, or control over, any of them. It is a reasonable choice for a business with nobody to manage the account. It is a poor choice for a business paying somebody to manage the account.
Underneath that, four structural problems:
The approach
The account could not be fixed with tweaks. It was rebuilt — but in stages, because the urgent problem and the structural problem were not the same problem.
The results
Click-through rate is the clearest single signal that an account is showing ads to the right people. It sat between 2% and 3% through the first half of 2025. After the cleanup it settled between 6% and 8%, and it has held there.
Cost per lead followed. Comparing the four months before the cleanup with the two months after it, the blended cost of producing a recorded lead fell by 20%.
What we are working on now
This is a live account, not a finished project. Search-term hygiene is reviewed on a cadence so the account does not drift back into the waste it started in, and the structure is being extended beyond pure search — there is now a seasonal demand-generation campaign running alongside it.
The honest position on an account like this: the big win was early and structural, and the work since has been the slower business of compounding it.
The takeaway
Cheap management is expensive. Paying for the ads and paying someone who is not really managing them produces bad results from both. For a local service business, location targeting is not a setting you check once — it is the difference between a lead and a wasted phone call. And structure is not housekeeping: it is the thing that makes every future improvement possible.
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All figures are taken from live Google Ads accounts and were last verified on 14 July 2026. Client identity withheld by request. Results reflect specific market conditions and business context; individual outcomes vary.