2N Roadside Recovery

The Problem With Recovery Keywords

Search "car recovery" or "breakdown recovery" in the UK and you are competing with the AA, the RAC, Green Flag and Britannia Rescue. These brands have decades of public recognition and a stronghold on how most people think about the category.

That creates a challenge for an independent recovery firm, and two distinct ways for an ad budget to waste money.

The first is brand search contamination. Someone typing "AA breakdown cover" or "Green Flag renewal" is looking for their existing membership. Without a maintained negative keyword list, broad or phrase match keywords can pull in those queries.

The second is wrong-intent traffic. Recovery is a broad word. It catches addiction recovery, data recovery, debt recovery, the recovery position, muscle recovery, recovery trucks for sale, HGV recovery training and recovery jobs.

Every one of those is a paid click with no realistic chance of becoming a job. In a category this noisy, the account either has disciplined exclusions or it wastes money on pointless clicks.

This is why we chose phrase match rather than broad, and why negative keyword management here is a daily job. We've added over 19,000 keywords to the negative list.

Daily Management

When an irrelevant search term appears in the account and triggers an ad, that costs nothing. No money leaves the budget. The cost only begins at the click.

Catching a bad search term at the impression stage therefore costs the campaign nothing at all. Catching it a week later costs whatever those clicks were worth.

In practice, the search term report is reviewed every day. Any query that is not genuinely relevant is added to the negative list immediately. Recovery-related searches vary enough that the negative list is a living document.

That is how we catch irrelevant spend before it becomes spend.

The Numbers

• 312 conversions from 1,511 clicks across 20,148 impressions
• Conversion rate of 21.82%
• Click-through rate of 8.24%
• Cost per conversion of £18.92
• Average cost per click of £4.13

A 22% conversion rate is a strong return in a local service auction this competitive. It comes from precise targeting, aggressive negative keyword management, and an ad experience that meets the searcher at the right moment in their journey.

The consistency matters as much as the headline. April delivered 319 conversions at £18.12 each. May came in at 272 conversions and £20.39. June at 318 conversions and £20.11. July at 312 conversions and £18.92.

94.6% of Conversions Are Phone Calls

Of the 312 tracked conversions in July, 241 were website calls and 54 were calls made directly from the ad. Only 5.4% were lead form submissions.

This is typical of roadside recovery. Someone whose car has died on the A34 at 6:30pm on a Tuesday will call a number for an immediate response.

All the creative and bidding is built around that. Call extensions are prominent, phone numbers are visible, and the friction to make a phone call is minimal.

A campaign optimised for form submissions would look successful and produce the wrong outcome. This one is optimised for calls, because calls are what the business runs on.

Device Split

The device data reinforces the same point.

Mobile accounts for 84.6% of clicks and 90.6% of conversions, at a conversion rate of 22.11%. Desktop accounts for 13.3% of clicks, 8.2% of conversions and a 12.73% conversion rate. Tablet accounts for the remainder.

Why do the two differ so sharply? Someone using a desktop to search for breakdown recovery is likely researching options or comparing providers. Someone on a mobile is probably already broken down.

Mobile is where the majority of the budget competes hardest, because mobile is where the highest-converting searchers are.

When Budgets Stay Concentrated

This is one of the more consequential decisions in the account, and it is not something most PPC case studies discuss.

The campaign runs from 16:00 to midnight only. There are zero impressions before 16:00 across the entire reporting period, which is a deliberate choice based on the account's own hour-of-day conversion data.

The 16:00 hour delivers 66 conversions at a cost per conversion of £17.16, the strongest performance of any hour in the day. The 17:00 hour produces 58 conversions at £18.31. Performance holds through the evening, with 21:00 delivering 33 conversions at £17.67, before trailing off near midnight.

The late afternoon and early evening window makes intuitive sense for roadside recovery. It covers the end of the working day and the commute home. The window from 16:00 to 22:00 captures the highest volume of high-intent breakdown searches, and the data confirms cost per conversion is lowest there.

Concentrating the schedule into eight hours does mean the ads are not showing during the remaining sixteen. Some demand outside that window is not being captured. That is a deliberate trade: buy the cheapest leads consistently rather than chase every impression across the day.

A fixed daily budget spread across 24 hours competes in every hour at reduced intensity. The same budget concentrated into the window where breakdown searches peak buys more conversions at a lower cost per conversion.

What Makes This Account Work

Negative keyword discipline comes first. In a category this contaminated, the account that spends least on searches that will never convert is the one that wins. Daily review rather than monthly check-ins is why the conversion rate sits where it does.

Schedule concentration comes second. Budget is a limited resource, and putting it into the hours with the highest conversion rate and the lowest cost per conversion is the most effective use of it.

Third is call-led optimisation. Every decision in this account follows from the understanding that a broken-down driver calls, so we removed the friction in the way of that call.

Together, that PPC management approach delivers 312 conversions a month, consistently, in one of the most difficult local service auctions on Google.