1 in 4 Clicks Become Customers: How Decisive Marketing Delivered a 7x Conversion Rate Increase for BEST Autocentres

About BEST Autocentres

BEST Autocentres is a growing network of garages across Hampshire, Wiltshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. With a new garage joining the group roughly every six to seven weeks, BEST is scaling rapidly across the South of England. Google Ads helps fuel that growth by filling each site’s diary, and Decima makes sure the spend behind it is efficient.

The Challenge

Running a large and growing network of garages makes marketing hard to maintain, and as the group expanded, its Google Ads account had become misconfigured. Some ads, for example, were being shown to people in Mexico and the United States.

The biggest problem was broken conversion tracking. More than half of the account’s conversion actions were not recording anything, so BEST couldn’t see which ads were producing bookings, and Google’s automated bidding was optimising towards the wrong signals. That left two questions the business needed answered: are bookings genuinely caused by the ads, and is the spend profitable, or is it costing more to win a low margin job than that job earns?

BEST needed advertising that filled workshop diaries with its most profitable work, backed by numbers the finance team could trust.

The Solution: Decisive Marketing in Action

Interpret & Ideate

We started with a commercial question: which bookings are most profitable? Working alongside BEST’s leadership, we modelled the economics of each service and identified MOTs and ADAS calibration as the strongest opportunities. For instance, an MOT can be a gateway to further work, because around three in ten vehicles fail and need repairs in the same workshop.

For their Totton garage, we captured what MOT customers weigh up before booking: wait times, availability, what they can do while they wait and how easy the garage is to reach. For ADAS, demand existed among drivers and trade customers, but very few knew Totton offered the service.

Do & Deliver

Google Ads Management.

 We restructured the account so each garage and service has its own campaign, starting with Totton MOT and Totton ADAS. That keeps targeting local, lets every ad speak to one specific need, and allows a separate cost target for each service so spend follows margin.

Landing Pages. 

We designed and built dedicated MOT and ADAS pages for Totton, written around the insights from BEST and featuring photographs of the real team. Like all of our landing pages, they are optimised for conversion. The MOT page went from ideation to live in two days, and BEST’s team only needed to complete one questionnaire and send a few photos.

Report & Refine

Conversion Tracking

 We rebuilt measurement around the actions that signal demand: phone calls, requests for directions and completed bookings. Each action carries a value specific to its service, and we can supply the time and date of every tracked call so BEST can reconcile ad enquiries against its booking system.

Reporting is built around BEST’s two questions. A live dashboard shows the enquiries and value every campaign generates, so leadership can see what the spend is producing at any time.  Every service has its own cost target, so the account only bids for work where the margin supports the cost.

The MOT page decima built for Totton converts around one in four clicks into an enquiry, and ADAS is closer to 40%. Conversion rates like that are what make the campaigns profitable, because we win far more work from the same spend, and it’s why we’re rolling the approach out to more sites.

Matthew Critchley
Fractional CMO, BEST Autocentres

The Results

1. A 7x Increase in MOT Conversion Rate: Understanding the Customer

Running the same Google Ads configuration to a landing page built without decima, BEST’s MOT campaign converted 3.5% of clicks. With our landing page at Totton, it converted 24%, turning 1 in 4 clicks into an enquiry. The Google Ads setup was the same. The difference was a page shaped around what MOT customers care about: wait times, availability and how easy the garage is to reach.

A higher conversion rate means more booked work from the same advertising traffic, and a profitable campaign.

2. Totton’s MOT Diary Fully Booked a Week Ahead

By mid October, within four weeks of the MOT campaign going live, Totton’s MOT diary was fully booked a week in advance, and the site’s forward bookings were up 30% on the same point last year. Forward bookings are one of the two measures BEST uses to judge site performance, so this is the result the business feels most directly. It came from moving from ideation to a live page in two days, with almost no demand on the site team.

3. A 40% Conversion Rate on ADAS Calibration

Before the ADAS page launched, Totton had taken only four ADAS bookings. Between 1 September and 14 October, the campaign turned 40% of clicks into enquiries, and a click through rate of almost 16% shows the ads match exactly what searchers wanted.

ADAS calibration is specialist work, and before decima built the page we had only taken a handful of bookings. Now enquiries come in every week, and the team at Totton are genuinely excited about it.

Oliver Parmenter
Marketing Manager, BEST Autocentres

The Outcome

BEST now has a Google Ads account it can trust, with campaigns organised by garage and service, enquiries measured, and spend judged against margin rather than clicks. The conversation has moved from whether advertising works to where to apply it next.

The approach proven at Totton is now rolling out across the network. That is Decisive Marketing: understand the customer, deliver quickly, and refine with evidence.