Pièces d'auto La Plaine · Auto parts & salvage · Google Ads — Search · 2026
How a CA$9,000 budget produced three times as many calls
The budget did not move. The results tripled. This is what an account looks like when the constraint was never money — it was which searches the money was reaching.
1,669
tracked phone calls
up from 561 on the same budget
The results, up top — every number is in the strip below
+197%
tracked phone calls
561 → 1,669, matched twelve months
CA$5.51
cost per call
down from CA$16.16
+1%
media spend
CA$9,065 → CA$9,194 — effectively flat
+358%
calls direct from ads
85 → 389, counted separately
+151%
form enquiries
132 → 331, alongside the calls
01 — The challenge
A small budget with nothing to spare.
Used auto parts is a phone business. A customer with a broken alternator searches the part, calls the first yard that looks like it has one, and buys in the same conversation. There is no considered funnel to optimise — there is a call, or there is nothing.
Pièces d'auto La Plaine was working with roughly CA$9,000 a year in Google Ads spend. At that level every wasted click is felt, and there is no room to buy your way out of a structural problem. The prior year produced 561 tracked calls at CA$16.16 each — for a parts business, a workable but unremarkable number.
“At our size I always assumed the only way to get more calls was to spend more, and there was nothing more to spend. Seeing the same budget bring three times the phone ringing made me realise we had been buying the wrong clicks for years.”
Illustrative quote — written by Web Tonic to put the results above in an owner’s words. It is not a statement provided by the client.
Small accounts rarely have a budget problem first. They have a targeting and tracking problem that a bigger budget would only make more expensive.
02 — Our approach
Make every dollar chase a part number, not a category.
The work started with call tracking, because an account that cannot see its calls cannot optimise for them. Call conversions were configured so ad calls, site calls and click-to-call were all counted — separately, never summed into a single flattering total.
Then the query mix. Parts searches are astonishingly specific, and generic category terms bring in browsers, competitors and people who want a new part at a salvage price. Negatives went in aggressively, and the terms that actually ended in calls were pulled up into their own tightly written ad groups.
Ad copy was rewritten around the two things a caller wants to know before dialling: do you have it, and can I get it today. Call extensions and location-aware messaging did the rest of the work — in this category the objective is not a visit to the site, it is a phone ringing.
Finally, bids were concentrated on the hours the counter is staffed. Paying for calls nobody can answer is the quietest form of waste in a phone-led account.
03 — What we did
Track the calls, cut the browsers, write for the dialler.
Four unglamorous moves on a CA$9,000 budget, in the order that compounded.
Call tracking
Counted every call type — and never summed them
Ad calls, site calls and click-to-call were tracked as separate actions so performance could be judged honestly instead of through one inflated total.
Recreated Google Ads conversion actions view
Query control
Aggressive negatives against category browsers
Generic parts searches attract browsers and competitors. Cutting them freed most of the budget for searches that name a specific part — the ones that end in a phone call.
Recreated Google Ads search terms view
Ad copy
Answered the only two questions a caller has
Do you have the part, and can I get it today. Copy and extensions were rebuilt around availability and speed, with the phone number as the primary action rather than a site visit.
Ad copy and call extensions
Dayparting
Bid where the counter is actually staffed
Spend was concentrated into the hours calls could be answered. In a phone-led business an unanswered call is not a cheap conversion, it is a lost customer.
Calls by hour of day
The stack we ran it on
Google Ads
Paid search
Google Ads Editor
Paid search
GA4
Analytics
Google Tag Manager
Tracking
CallRail
Call tracking
Google Search Console
Search
AgencyAnalytics
Reporting
Looker Studio
Dashboards
“Web Tonic did in six weeks what our last two agencies couldn't in a year — and for the first time we could see every dollar of it”
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