General Repair (GR) is way different than a transmission specialty shop and/or a GR shop installing transmissions. Our Average Repair Oder (ARO) is about $1,700 and our Major Average Repair Order (MARO) is about $3,400.

GR work is typically typically has an ARO and/or MARO of much less. Much like the old Yellow Page days, a transmission shop typically pays more for the phone to ring due to the higher ticket totals which brings me to another point.

Imagine, if you will, a lead costs $50 bucks, per your example. We need to be mindful of what type of work that $50 lead is going to bring in. Oil changes? Flat repair? I/M inspections? -OR- installing a reman transmission? Hmmm…

They don’t call them “keywords” for nothing. My vote is to only bid on keywords that have the highest odds of generating big ticket work. Who wants to generate a $150 ticket when the lead costs $50 bucks?

Here’s a great example: We are a transmission specialty shop that only does transmission and drivetrain work. At first blush, you would think the keyword “transmission” is a great keyword, and it is if you’re going after “clicks”, “traffic” and generally give a transmission shop’s website high metrics. However, we don’t bid on that keyword because it’s a “click burner” keyword. In other words, lots of clicks and activity, but few phone leads and the few phone leads we get off of that keyword are of very low quality due to the generalities of the word. 2-or-more words in a keyword, the better. It’s more specific. Not long tail, but in the middle.

Shops need somebody who either knows this stuff or can easily figure it out as online advertising is not an exact science and each shop has their own unique personality. Heaven knows how much of our own hard earned dollars has been spent trying to get this stuff down. And right when you think you have it all figured out… Google, Bing/Yahoo changes the rules. 🙁 It’s never ending.

I’m here to testify that online advertising works for us. Our website is homespun and so are our marketing campaigns. I don’t want to give anybody they can do this stuff themselves because since 2008 when we started with AdWords, we have spent over $200K and the stats are below.

Mind you, this is me doing all the work and not paying anybody except Google. Add Bing&Yahoo and the numbers are even more. So, as I see it, I’ve paid about $40K a year, plus Bing and Yahoo for this adventure. A shop owner has to then ask him/herself, “Wow. Outsourcing would be cheaper, wouldn’t it?” Hmmm… my vote is yes.

Kurt, keep up the great work!

Larry,

Thanks for chiming in here.

One note on what you are talking about though. If I am reading you correctly, you have 50+ keyword level call tracking #s? This isn’t necessary as with alot of third party call tracking services they offer something called DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion) where the clicks are tracked back to the keyword through Analytics and in turn Adwords through a snippet of Javascript placed on your site

So, really all you probably need is one phone number for Adwords, one for Bing, etc (one per media channel) unless you are getting into larger ad spends, but the Call tracking company can help you determine how many #s you’d need based upon traffic.

Kurt

Second bid Dutch auction. It’s not a hard concept to grasp if a person does their research and they will soon learn the bidding game is just that: A Game.

Go in, bid the heck out of all the keywords that generate quality phone leads and you’ll never pay a penny above the top bidder. However, without keyword level call tracking, you’re back to the guessing game at best. Metrics man, Metrics.

Why do so many people try to reverse engineer Google’s algorithm when it’s publically available in black & white? What disappoints me is when a SEO or SEM guru claims to have some alleged inside track on Google or that they used to work there, or the worst I’ve heard recently is that somebody is claiming Google is paying them to be a consultant. OH, BROTHER, GIVE ME A BREAK, will ya’?

To answer the question directly, AdWords costs our shop $6K/mo. and is worth every penny of it because we can measure it. Yep. We have 50 keyword level call tracking numbers. But that’s not the half of it. Bing, Yahoo!, AAA, and even the freebie YP.com and RepairPal.com are on keyword level call tracking.

We dumped both YP.com, YellowPages.com and two other services I don’t care to mention simply because they couldn’t make the phone ring, yet we still get free phone calls.

Here’s the math: Currently:
$10.58/click
$31.02/conversion

As Eric said, if you can’t do this yourself, hire AMG. With that being said, I think the best use of a shop owner’s time is to manage and watch over their online campaign(s).

AMG, and others, use WordPress for a reason. Although we don’t use WP, what I like about it the most is its fast load time. PageSpeed is off the hook. And, like HTML5, it’s device responsive.

More babble, later.