Local Toyota Dealership

A multi-franchise Toyota dealership on the NSW Central Coast. The acquisition problem for any local Toyota dealer is structural. The high-funnel buyer journey (model research, comparison shopping, price benchmarking) happens online and across multiple sessions before the customer ever physically arrives at the showroom. Younger car shoppers reference up to 25.6 information sources in the decision cycle.

A regional dealer cannot match Toyota Australia's national brand spend or the Big Four dealer-network share of voice, but the dealer is the one who has to convert the local lead. Test drive bookings are the single most economically important online conversion event for the dealership, because the dealership's own sales data showed that every test drive lead carried a 30% probability of converting to a vehicle sale. The system had to deliver test drive volume from in-market Toyota shoppers on the Central Coast at a cost per lead that the unit economics of an A$20,000 to A$50,000 vehicle sale could comfortably absorb.

A Google Display Network acquisition system built around the in-market Toyota shopper at the moment of model consideration, segmented to the Central Coast geography that defined the dealership's catchment. Display creative was developed as a full IAB-standard banner kit shipped in two design variants, so the campaign could rotate creative without losing inventory access.

The initial Spring Sale flight ran 40 days to establish contextual targeting and audience tuning. By the third month of the engagement the system had been split into 17 model-specific Toyota campaigns (Land Cruiser 70, Rav 4, Hybrid, Prius, Hiace, Camry, Yaris, Corolla, Hilux, Prado, Aurion, 86, FJ Cruiser, Tarago, Land Cruiser, plus a dealership brand line and a Spring Sale contextual line). Each campaign was optimised against its own conversion volume and conversion rate.

The granularity meant lower-volume model campaigns like Yaris and Hybrid could be tuned toward conversion rate, while higher-volume models were tuned toward lead volume. Every banner routed to the dealership's test drive form, the lead capture page for Name, Phone, Model and Location.

A single 31-day flight delivered 99 test drive leads at a cost per test drive lead of A$14.51. Applied against the dealership's 30% test drive lead to vehicle sale conversion rate, that flight accounted for approximately 30 vehicle sales at a media-attributable cost of A$48.36 per car sold.

The lead-volume system over-delivered on click target by 45% (2,904 actual clicks against the 2,000-click target booked in the insertion order) without sacrificing efficiency, and the channel-level conversion rate of 3.41% held across 679,869 impressions. The cost per test drive lead had compressed 84% over the optimisation cycle, from A$89.28 in the Spring Sale flight to A$14.51 by the third month, against an unchanged channel and an unchanged creative kit.

The sharpest model-level campaigns were the Yaris (10.81% conversion rate on 37 clicks, four leads) and the Hybrid category line (8.14% conversion rate on 172 clicks, fourteen leads).