Everyone wants to talk about the picture and the words. Those matter, but they are the last thing. An ad is arithmetic first, and if the arithmetic does not work no creative on earth rescues it. Here is the arithmetic.
Answer this before you spend a dollar
What is one new customer actually worth to you?
Not what he pays. What is left after the film, the labor and the time — plus anything he is likely to come back for. A brake customer who comes back for tires next spring is worth more than a one-off, and if you do not know roughly which yours are, you cannot tell whether an ad is making money or quietly eating it.
Most shop owners have never worked this out. It takes twenty minutes and it decides everything below.
The rule of thumb worth holding: a customer should be worth at least three times what he cost to get, and you want the money back inside a month or so. Less than that and you are buying yourself a job rather than a business. Well over it and you should probably be spending more, not less.
It is usually not the ad. It is that not enough people are searching for the thing.
In a town this size, some of the searches you would most like to advertise against are typed a handful of times a month. You cannot buy your way to volume that does not exist. You can bid the price up, you can widen the targeting until you are paying for people two counties away who were never going to drive to you — but the demand is the demand.
This is checkable before you spend anything, and it is the first thing I look at. If the term is thin, ads are the wrong tool and the honest answer is to say so — the money is better spent on the free surfaces and on being the shop people are already told about.
Once the arithmetic works, the job of the ad is narrow. It is not to be clever. It is to make the right person click and the wrong person not click — because you pay either way.
If your phone is not answered, if there is no price anywhere, or if your reviews are thin — ads will only make you pay to show more people a shop that is not ready. Fix the free things first. Paid traffic multiplies whatever is already there, in both directions.
The arithmetic above is arithmetic and it holds anywhere. The advice on what to put in the ad comes from published practice and from what I have watched work, and I will tell you plainly when something is one shop’s result rather than a pattern — because one shop is a story, not evidence, and this trade has enough people quoting each other’s stories.
When I have run enough of these in this trade to say “this beat that, here are the numbers,” that is what this page will say. Until then it teaches you the part that decides the outcome anyway.
Written for independent auto repair and auto glass shops. If you read this and fix it yourself, that is a good outcome and I would rather that than sell you something you do not need.