> 40% Conversion Rate
Exceptional conversion of click into conversion drove signficiant ROI.
20% CPA Reduction
Cost-per-acquisition decreased 20% to a historical low across the account.
Ship a Car Direct moves cars across America for everyday consumers, matching them with vetted carriers for cross country transport. The business has built its reputation on a damage free guarantee, full insurance cover, and carriers chosen for reliability. Over a million customers have used the service, backed by more than 50,000 5 star customer reviews. Handing a vehicle to a stranger for an interstate drive is a genuine leap of faith for most people, and Ship a Car Direct has spent years turning that leap of faith into a calculated bet.
What challenges did we face?
Ship a Car Direct’s Google Ads account dated back to 2008, 18 years of accumulated history. It had served the business well for most of that time, but over the past few years the account had drifted into confusion: nearly 20 campaigns with no defined intent between them, competing against each other for the same searches rather than working together. The tracking had deteriorated just as quickly. Multiple irrelevant conversion actions had crept into each campaign, muddying Google’s own learning and inflating reported performance well beyond what was actually happening. Bid strategies and targeting hadn’t kept pace either.
The result was a business problem, not just a marketing one. Lead volume swung wildly month to month, true cost per lead kept climbing, and the ROAS the account reported wasn’t based on real revenue data, so it wasn’t a number anyone could safely act on. Ship a Car Direct needed numbers it could trust to make decisions, and an account structure that could actually scale through the business’s seasonal peaks and troughs. Neither existed.
A scalable high-conversion engine.
The first job was making the data trustworthy. Working alongside Ship a Car Direct’s own developer, we built offline conversion tracking that fed real, dynamic values back into Google Ads, instead of the static, outdated conversion actions the account had been reporting against. It was a complex build involving multiple stakeholders, and it had to happen before anything else could be trusted. We then went through every conversion action on every campaign and stripped out the ones that had been confusing Google’s own learning and inflating the numbers, so the account was finally optimising against data that reflected what was actually happening in the business.
With clean data analytics underneath the account, we turned to the structure itself. Almost 20 campaigns, the product of drift rather than deliberate strategy, had ended up overlapping and competing with each other. We consolidated that down to 10, each with a single defined purpose and a media budget large enough to fund all of them properly. The campaign mix shifted back toward Search, the strongest performer for a high trust, high consideration purchase like vehicle transport, while keeping Performance Max and Demand Gen in play at a smaller, more deliberate scale rather than cutting them entirely. Every ad group and keyword was remapped so campaigns stopped bidding against each other, and bid strategies were rebuilt to match the new structure.
None of this happened quickly. Landing on a structure that matched the size of Ship a Car Direct’s business, without recreating the sprawl we’d just removed, took hours of internal strategy work before a single campaign changed. The overhaul was completed at the end of April 2026. Throughout, the goal stayed the same: stop the wasted spend, give the business numbers it could actually plan around, and build an account capable of scaling up or down through seasonal demand instead of just absorbing whatever came at it.
What impact did we make?
By May 2026, with the overhaul complete and a full month of clean data behind it, the results were unambiguous. Spend stayed stable month on month, but lead volume improved by 20%, building on a 28% increase the month before. Cost per lead fell 20% to a new historic low for the account, on top of a 28% decrease the prior month, meaning the business was generating more leads at a lower cost from the same budget. ROAS, calculated from real data for the first time, exceeded the client’s own benchmark goal.
The standout result sits in non-brand Search. Cold and warm traffic is harder and more expensive to convert than branded search, and vehicle transport is a genuinely competitive category to do it in. Once we segmented and refined targeting across five non-brand campaigns, conversion rates landed at 39%, 41%, 48%, 40% and 40%, a combined rate of 41% that’s well outside what’s typical for this campaign type. Cost per lead on these same campaigns also dropped to a record low, $6 to $8 cheaper than what had historically counted as a good non-brand result.
For the business, the change that matters most is trust. Ship a Car Direct now has real numbers to plan against, lead volume it can rely on, and an account structure built to scale through seasonal peaks rather than buckle under them. As owner Michael put it: “Really impressed by the work you both have done on the account.”
> 40% Conversion Rate
Exceptional conversion of click into conversion drove signficiant ROI.
20% CPA Reduction
Cost-per-acquisition decreased 20% to a historical low across the account.
What did we learn about this project?
This work proves that scale problems are often data problems wearing a different name. Ship a Car Direct didn’t need more campaigns or more budget, it needed numbers it could trust and a structure built around them. Once the tracking was fixed and the account stopped competing with itself, growth followed almost immediately, including some of the strongest non-brand conversion rates we’ve ever seen in a genuinely competitive category.
