An Illinois HD shop was burning $12,100/mo on Google Ads — and 70% of it was going to AAA towing, "auto mechanic near me," and cell-phone-repair searches. We rebuilt the targeting around diesel-specific search intent. Same budget. Calls dropped from $80 to $31 each. Revenue jumped from $92K to $128K in 60 days.
The owner thought the ads were broken. They weren't. The targeting was. A generalist Google setup, inherited and never rebuilt, was sending pickup truck owners, AAA roadside calls, and cell-phone-repair searches straight to the front desk.
We rebuilt the account from the ground up around diesel-specific search intent. New campaign architecture. Aggressive negative keywords. Call tracking on every line. Weekly optimization tied to real call quality.
AAA, pickup trucks, oil-change requests, gas vehicles — a front desk drowning in the wrong calls while the heavy-duty work they specialized in barely came through.
$80 a call before the rebuild. Diesel shops on targeted campaigns should be closer to $30–$50 — higher-ticket clutches and transmissions at the top of that range, common repairs at the bottom. Google was charging a quiet penalty.
The black box: money in, calls out, nobody could tell which $12K of spend drove which $92K of revenue. No keyword architecture. No negatives. No call tracking. No weekly loop.
Cost per call dropped from $80 to $31 in two months. That's not a budget change — that's the result of killing the keywords that pulled in pickup trucks and AAA, and concentrating spend on heavy-duty search intent only.
And because every call now ties back to a keyword, the loop tightens every week. Bad terms die. Good terms get more budget.
"You weren't running ads. You were feeding a black box and hoping."