How a refreshed paid media strategy generated 30,000 leads in a single month for Motors

The secondhand automotive industry was becoming more crowded, with leading brands dominating market share. Competitor research revealed that challenger brands were disrupting the market by investing in paid media strategies.

Alongside the increasing competition, a Google algorithm update negatively impacted organic visibility for Motors, ultimately causing a decrease in traffic.

Prior attempts to improve performance through paid media had failed to deliver, resulting in Motors’ senior stakeholders losing faith in digital marketing tactics and acquiring leads at an efficient cost.

But in June of 2023, Motors decided to test a paid media investment once again, appointing digital marketing agency Impression to devise and deliver a new approach.

Specifically, the brand tasked the agency with driving 20,000 leads per month from paid media efforts, while also reducing cost per lead by 40%.

Strategy

One key challenge was bringing Motors’ senior team on the journey – and proving that paid media could be a key lever to help them achieve their business objectives. As such, the strategy needed to be robust and grounded in testing to increase confidence that higher investments would result in positive returns.

The Impression team broke down the strategy into three key milestones:

1. Build foundations

With Motors losing organic visibility and traffic, it was crucial to bridge the gap that audiences used to find the site via paid efforts. This involved a complete restructure and setups across social and search, including new focus keywords, ad groups and dynamic search ads.

The Impression team held biweekly calls with the Motors team to update them on progress and agree on the next steps. These meetings became a great foundation for the agency-client relationship, instilling trust and confidence in our approach.

2. Generate demand

Next, it was time to focus on generating demand and bringing a high volume of relevant users to the site.

Via paid search and social advertising activity, Impression leveraged Performance Max campaigns, restructured product feeds to improve the quality and reach of these campaigns and relied on vehicle feed ads across Meta, with ad copy tailored for different locations and audiences – either prospect or retargeting.

3. Innovation and sustainability

The team sought new ways of working and new products to unlock a competitive edge in a crowded market. They partnered with Google to become the first UK advertiser to launch vehicle ads – which was then a closed beta. As the only automotive advertiser using this format at the time, Motors was able to dominate the search engine results page.

Thanks to the previous work Impression had carried out, such as restructuring accounts in search and social, the agency had well-optimized and well-structured data to use in retargeting.

Results

As a result of the initiative, Motors saw an average of 20,000 leads per month, peaking at more than 30,000 in September of last year.

Meanwhile, the program helped reduce cost per lead by 55%, surpassing expectations.

Plus, Motors achieved an increased budget approval to continue to invest in paid media. Today, the brand's senior leadership views performance channels as essential drivers for achieving critical business outcomes.

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