If you are new to Google Ads, rest assured that you’ve chosen the right PPC ad platform for your business.
Going by leading PPC marketing KPIs, Google Ads offers some of the highest conversion Value and ROI.
Still, it is important to truly understand what you are getting into before spending/ad spend significant amounts of money and time on a Google Ads strategy.
It takes much work to get best results that can be studied and analyzed to tweak the process for better outcomes.
An essential part of this endeavor is to estimate, track and dramatically improve conversions.
A conversion value is any action taken by a user at your behest. For example, they request a demo, sign up for a trial, buy something or submit their emails because that’s what you drive them to do.
This article will discuss the right way to estimate conversions in Google Ads.
But before that, let’s get familiar with the basics.
Paid marketing is one of the easiest ways to let your prospects discover your products, service, or business through digital advertisements on the SERPs.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Pay-Per-View (PPV) options allow businesses to purchase ads that are great at targeting the right audiences. Since it is an inorganic way of getting credibility, ranking, and ad traffic for your business site, it reaches your audience on a priority basis so that you don’t have to wait for your customer to find you through the search engine. Your website or product advertisement will pop up on the SERPs as soon as a related query is entered.
Google ads work because more than 70 percent of users prefer to see ads personalized according to their interests. In addition to that, over 65 percent of searchers have no qualms about clicking on paid ads. That’s why smart PPC campaigns focus on people who are actively looking to buy and not merely researching a product or service.
As businesses continue to battle for rankings, conversion value, automation, and personalization, the stats clearly show that paid marketing technique is the quickest way to go!
Paid marketing includes the display of ads on SERPs (search engine results pages) like Google and Bing and social media channels (like Facebook).
Businesses and marketers select a medium for advertisement –i.e., Google Ads or Facebook. Then they define their targeted audience on the web. This audience is categorized by demographics, preferences, age, location, search entries, previous purchases, and pages visited.
The method is commonly known as PPC (Pay-Per-Click). This means the advertiser has to pay for each click on their advertisements. To place an ad for the SERPs, a business must pay a certain amount; once the payment is made, the ad campaign goes live. Your ad starts to display on the SERPs whenever a related term or keyword is entered into the search bar on Google.
Now that you know all about paid ads and how they work, here is how Google Ads work and what it offers to track more conversions and estimate the total conversions.
Google AdWord’s, now known as Google Ads, allows marketers to create ads and run them on the Google search engine to reach their audience. It works for PPC pay-per-click advertising, where you have to pay for every click your visitors click.
The rate-per-click is always varying; depending on several/many factors, marketers only have to set their budget for their campaign. The ads remain live until their budget ends, and it ends when the entire amount is used up.
Google Ads is a robust program, and it gets even more potent with every update. Since it has been improvising with the latest technology and AI, it also allows you to track your conversions. It is the only medium for creating highly profitable Google Ads and tracking conversions.
The fantastic conversion trackings feature of the program allows you to post and track the ad metric in the most simplified form. It offers various data for the business to optimize their next ads according to the data retrieved from a previous ad campaign.
One thing that plays a significant role in PPC ads is conversions. Without Google Ads and its conversion trackings installed, you will never know how many clicks you got each day or from each ad campaign. Also, it will tell you how many clicks resulted in leads, sales, and so much more. You can use this information to optimize your next campaign with utmost perfection.
When running a PPC campaign, businesses need to track and estimate their conversions after each movement. Here is why:
Ever since the industries have started to grow with digitalization, Google has been trying to bridge the gap between businesses and their goals with intelligent data and insights. When it comes to conversions with Google tools, Google has all the knowledge of the universe. Also, with the innovating AI and machine learning Google has become even more powerful and more intelligent over time.
Thus, working with Google tools is getting intellectual data from the entire population of the world. It records all the user behavior history and so much more. This data comes into play when you place the ads with the targeted audience and reap the result without any effort. It also offers smart tracking tools for paid ads, which helps estimate the conversions a business gets from each paid campaign.
Since all of our devices are linked with Google and have Google accounts logged in, it can access all your information from your credentials to your location. Considering the power it has, clicks are just a minor thing, which Google can easily track. This is how it gathers all the conversions that happen. Even if you open an ad through your mobile browser but make the purchase from a desktop, Google will know it!
This is where the conversion trackings tool comes into play. We went over numerous things to emphasize the importance of the tool and how it helps you determine the estimated rate of conversions. Once you run the ad, you can get to know about each click, lead, conversion value or sale, based on your own criteria of conversions.
To better utilize the conversion trackings tool, you need to understand each of the above things in this article. Then decide on the actions that you count as a conversion. Whether it is when someone visits your website, call you, sign up for a newsletter, call you, and fill out an online survey or when someone contacts you online.
Here are the three sources you can use to identify your conversion value criteria:
Estimating conversions today is easier than ever before. Here is how you can do it with Google Ads resources:
Cross-device conversions are noted as a user clicks an ad on one device but completes the conversion value on another. You can use the insights extracted from Google Analytics based on user data.
This data comes from users who have either signed in to their Google analytics accounts and/or have their ad personalization feature turned on.
Google Ads exports this cross-device and same-device data from analytics to Google Ads campaigns and shows it to you through the conversion trackings tool. Later on, you can use this data for your PPC bidding. However, to automate the conversion exports (even with AI) to Google Ads, you can Activate Google Signals and Import the Analytics in Google Ads.
To track the webpage conversions, you need to add a conversion trackings tag to your website. This tag will gather all the insights of the click-through rate. It will track the activity on your ad and the website and let you know if someone clicked on your ad and visited your website. Also, it follows the activity of the users when they visit your website and complete a conversion value action.
These conversion actions may include purchase, sign-up, contact information form, call, reaching out to the support for further assistance, or anything you list as valuable.
However, this only happens when you create a website conversion actions in your Google Ads account, you’ll get a conversion trackings tag to add to your website. Also, you will need to identify a conversion value page on your website, which can be a thank you page, after a completed action.
This resource helps you track the CTA usage that involves a call on a number mentioned on your business website.
You can use Google Analytics/Phone Analytics and reporting to enable the instant tracking of website call conversions. By doing this, you will be able to access insights when someone uses your on-site number to call you after clicking any of your ads.
This feature will help you track ad leads generated by phone calls to your website number.
These phone call conversion action will help you see how efficacy your ads lead to phone call conversions. Since the number is linked to your website and the ads, you will be able to track all the leads through conversion action tracking.
Also, you with this source, you can analyze the keywords, ad groups, ad, and campaigns that lead to more call conversions.
For setting up call conversion actions, you will need a Google Ads account, a conversion actions, and the addition of the conversion action tag to your business website.
If you use Google Ads to promote mobile apps, you can use Google Ads’ conversion trackings tool for download tracking. It will help you how many downloads do your ads lead to.
The tool will track when your ads are clicked, leading to app installations and in-app activity. However, due to the difference in OS, iOS tracking might be impacted. So using Google Analytics is essential. You would also need to keep track of the apple framework’s updates to ensure maximum conversion trackings.
You can track mobile app conversions with Firebase or import mobile app conversions from a third-party app like analytics tools or Google Analytics.
You can track various types of mobile app conversions, including:
Google Ads is a powerful tool that enables you to run paid ad campaigns and offers insights through Google Analytics, gathered all in one place. Also, it allows you to analyze the different rates of conversion through all mediums that display your paid ad campaign.
However, if you are still wondering the right formula to estimate the total conversions, here it goes:
You only need to track and conclude all of the conversion mentioned above sources with the help of Google Ads. And then, you need to add them all to estimate the total conversions.
Estimated Total Conversions = Current Online Conversions + Cross-Device Conversions + Website Conversions + On-site call conversions.
Given the fact, these complexities can lead you to a massive fiasco if you set up a PPC campaign based on inaccurate data and insights. Thus, analyzing and estimating your total conversions is critical for a business and its budget. However, if you need to run a Paid Ads campaign, you must seek the help of a professional to avoid any financial damage.
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Pay-per-click (PPC) remains one of the fastest paths to pipeline, but the economics vary widely by industry and are shifting as AI reshapes the SERP. CPCs are up versus prior years, conversion rates have improved in many categories, and lead quality is increasingly a function of how well advertisers feed first-party data into bidding models.
The table below summarizes 2025 search-PPC benchmarks by sector—CPC, conversion rate (CVR), and cost per lead (CPL)—so you can compare what “good” looks like in your niche and calibrate ROI assumptions.
Use these numbers as directional guardrails, then layer in your own close rates and LTV to get to the only metric that matters: profitable growth.
In short, AI is changing the way PPC campaign management is occurring, and it's happening FAST.
ROI ≈ (Close-Rate × Avg Customer LTV ÷ CPL) − 1
Example (legal): if close-rate 12% and LTV $6,000 on CPL $132 → ROI ≈ (0.12×6000 / 132) −1 ≈ 4.45x (345% net). Improve any one input (faster intake bumps close-rate; better routing lowers CPL) and ROI jumps. Benchmarks for CPL/CVR above provide solid starting points. LocaliQ
PPC will keep paying when two things are true:
(1) you can convert and qualify leads quickly, and
(2) your bidding models are trained on the outcomes that actually make you money.
As AI compresses differences in targeting, the edge shifts to first-party data, creative velocity, and value-based bidding.
Treat the benchmarks above as starting points, then rebuild your ROI math from the ground up: ROI ≈ (Close Rate × LTV ÷ CPL).
Contact us today for your customized PPC audit to see how we can improve your search engine marketing ad spend.
When you’re running pay-per-click (PPC) ads, it’s easy to assume clicks mean genuine interest, but most car shoppers are just kicking tires online. Seeing your inventory once doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy anytime soon or even at all. If you want to reach the portion of clicks that come from serious buyers, you need to use retargeting.
The reality is that even prospects who intend to buy a car will bounce before contacting you or visiting your lot in person. And if you don’t have a way to keep them aware of your business, when they’re ready to buy, they’ll buy from a competitor. Running retargeted ads will keep your dealership in their awareness even after they bounce.
According to a 2022 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study, the average person spends more than 14 hours searching for a new car, which includes visiting around 5 websites before making a purchase decision. The sites they visit include automakers, dealers, third-party sites, and pre-owned car lots with online inventory. Your prospects aren’t going to buy right away, so to get the sale you need to reel them back in. If you’re not using retargeting – also called remarketing – in your PPC campaign, you’re missing out on hot leads.
Buying a car isn’t a small decision. People compare makes, models, and deals and look for dealerships with great reputations. Getting a single click from a potential car buyer isn’t enough to make the sale. And when they bounce, there’s no guarantee they’ll remember you exist. You’re paying for all those initial clicks, and if potential leads never come back you’ve wasted your ad spend. When you use retargeting, you’ll have another chance to turn their curiosity into a conversation, and that’s why remarketing is an essential component in every PPC ad campaign.
PPC ad retargeting for car dealerships shows your ads to people who have already clicked on an ad or visited your website. When implemented strategically, it keeps your dealership visible across multiple platforms and follows those people across the web. For example, when you run retargeted ads on the Google Display Network, your display ads will show up on the blogs, news sites, and apps your prospects frequent.
You can also run retargeting campaigns on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. As long as your prospects scroll through their daily feed, your ads will show up for them if they’ve already interacted with you. YouTube also offers retargeting options with video ads that play right before the content. In fact, don’t underestimate the power of YouTube video advertising. According to data from Wyzowl, video ads convince 84% of people to buy a product or service.
Not everyone searching for a new car will respond to the same bland, boilerplate message. For example, someone browsing luxury SUVs isn’t going to click on an ad that says, “Low APR on all models!” That’s where remarketing shines. It lets you tailor your message to what each user actually wants, which increases response rates.
With retargeting, you can segment your audience based on their interests and behavior. For example, someone comparing financing terms won’t be swayed by flashy sports car imagery. With retargeting, you can show truck shoppers truck ads and sports car shoppers sports car ads. It sounds simple, but it’s one of the most powerful marketing methods of all time. People are far more responsive to messages that feel personal. You may have caught their attention with a general ad at first, but once they start browsing those SUVs on your website, you can retarget them with SUV ads.
When you use retargeting, you can provide different calls to action (CTAs) to users based on how they’ve engaged with your web pages. A visitor who spent a lot of time on your truck inventory pages can be served ads for your latest truck deals. Someone who checked out your lease specials can be hit with ads that talk about financing offers. It’s deceptively simple and brutally effective. Relevance is everything. When your ads reflect what the prospect was already thinking about, it feels personal and resonates.
A next-level tactic is using engagement depth to determine how strong your call to action should be. For instance:
· Multi-page viewers and long dwell times. These are warm leads and can be retargeted with stronger CTAs like “Book a test drive” and “Get a quote today.” They’re close to converting and just need a little push.
· Single-page bouncers. These are people who just peeked at your site. They can be re-engaged with lighter touchpoints like a general promotion or model comparison guide to reel them back in.
· Abandoned lead forms. If someone started filling out a form but didn’t finish, retarget them with a reminder and a stronger offer to sweeten the deal (e.g., “Complete your form for $500 off!”).
This level of nuance turns retargeting into a conversion machine and allows you to show the customer exactly what they want to see.
People don’t buy cars from whatever dealer they find first. That’s too risky. They buy from dealerships they trust and that feel familiar. You can build that sense of familiarity and trust through retargeting. For example:
· Consistent branding across ads. Using consistent branding, design, and messaging throughout your ads reinforces your dealership’s identity.
· Frequency builds familiarity. People need to see a brand between 5-7 times before they’ll remember it. Retargeting puts your dealership in front of people over and over again. Even if they don’t click right away, it’s helping to establish your credibility.
· Social proof works. When you use social proof like customer testimonials or awards in your ads it builds trust with your prospects.
Trust is earned over time, and retargeting will help you get it.
If you’re not using retargeting, your competitors definitely are. Car dealerships operate in one of the most brutally competitive markets out there, with national chains and franchise giants dominating search results and flooding ad channels with endless budgets. If you’re not showing up again and again, your competitors will, and they’ll scoop up all your leads.
The good news is you don’t need a massive marketing budget to get results. Retargeting allows smaller, local dealerships to play smart rather than trying to play big. When you focus on local PPC with hyper-targeted remarketing, you can reach a smaller, more qualified audience – people who are actually in your area, browsing your inventory, and likely to buy soon.
And unlike those cookie-cutter campaigns from national dealers, you can make your messaging feel personal and specific to your local community. That’s an edge big budgets don’t have.
Every visitor who leaves your website without converting is a potential sale but not necessarily lost. With smart retargeting, you can bring them back into your funnel and stay top-of-mind while your competitors waste money shouting into the void. Persistence wins the sale and retargeting is how you stay on the map.
To be blunt, search ads can get expensive fast, especially when clicks can cost a couple dollars per click. Pouring money into cold traffic is gambling on people who may not be ready to engage. Retargeting changes everything.
Display retargeting clicks typically cost a fraction of what you’d pay for search ads using competitive keywords. You’re no longer paying top dollar to get someone’s attention from scratch – you’re nudging people who already know who you are, and those people are more likely to respond. This makes retargeting one of the most cost-effective ways to use your advertising budget.
· Lower CPC, higher intent. Retargeting costs less per click, but you’re targeting people who already visited your site and showed interest.
· Better conversion rates. Familiarity breeds trust. Retargeted visitors are statistically more likely to convert than new users who just clicked an ad out of curiosity.
· Higher ROI. Since retargeting reaches warm leads, the cost of acquiring a lead is usually lower, which means your overall cost per lead is lower and you get better ROI.
If you’re skipping remarketing because you think it’s just something “extra” that doesn’t make a difference, you’re not saving money – you’re losing easy wins. Instead of perpetually chasing new, cold traffic, invest in converting the traffic you’re already getting. That’s exactly what remarketing does.
Generic ads are fine for first impressions, but once someone has browsed your inventory it’s time to get specific with dynamic retargeting. Here’s how it works:
When a prospect views a specific vehicle on your site, you can use retargeting ads to show them the exact vehicles they viewed and others like it down to the year, color, trim, and mileage. For example, if they looked at a black 2005 BMW 535i, that’s exactly what they’ll see in the ad – the same photos, same specs, all across sites like YouTube, Facebook, news platforms, and more. This reminds your prospects of exactly what they want.
Dynamic retargeting works by integrating your live inventory feed with your ad platform, like Google Ads or Meta. This means the vehicles displayed in your ads will always be up to date and won’t feature cars you sold last week.
Beyond personalization, dynamic ads are an incredible tool for creating a sense of urgency:
· Leverage scarcity. With these ads, you can leverage the power of scarcity by stating that your inventory won’t last. Using messages like “Only 1 left” or “Recently reduced” signals that the opportunity won’t last.
· Show what’s popular. If a particular model is getting a lot of views, let your prosects know. People don’t want to miss out on a good deal.
· Trigger action with FOMO. Fear of missing out is real, and when people see the car they want again – with a reminder that it might sell soon – they’re more likely to come in for a test drive.
By using retargeted ads, you can increase conversion rates by up to 200% compared to standard display ads. These ads feel more like a helpful reminder than an outright advertisement.
If you’ve never run paid ads before, it’s easy to assume your only options are basic keyword targeting and generic follow-up ads. But today’s ad platforms give you a buffet of hyper-specific targeting capabilities to fine-tune exactly who sees your ads, where, when, and how.
One of the most effective PPC retargeting tactics for car dealerships is location-based targeting. With radius targeting, you can serve ads to people within a specified distance from your dealership, like within 10-15 miles. These will be prospects who are not only likely to visit your site but could realistically walk into your showroom today. Don’t waste ad spend on clicks from people three states away.
Then there are device-specific campaigns. If your analytics show that 75% or your traffic comes from mobile (this is common), you can launch a mobile-only retargeting campaign with click-to-call buttons, mobile-optimized landing pages, and a map and directions built right into your ads. This will improve the user experience and increase conversion rates.
Timing also matters. When you schedule your ads you can control when they appear. Run them during lunch breaks, in the evenings, or on weekends when people have more time to browse car listings and are more likely to make big purchase decisions.
Other strategic targeting elements include:
· Demographic targeting. You can tailor your messages based on age, income level, and household status. A 25-year-old college grad and a 45-year-old parent are not shopping for the same reasons even though they might buy the same car.
· Behavioral triggers. You can create audiences for your retargeted ads based on repeat visits, clicks, video views, or interaction with a specific feature like a trade-in calculator.
· Lookalike audiences. Build new audiences that resemble your best customers. Platforms like Meta and Google are really good at identifying similar users based on their behavior online.
The bottom line is that retargeting doesn’t have to be broad. With the right strategy, it becomes a smart, cost-effective system for reaching the right prospects at the right time.
Have a sale, lease offer, or year-end clearance? Retargeting can amplify the urgency to act now. By offering short-term discounts and financing deals, you can tap into the urgency people feel when presented with time-sensitive offers. Emphasize the end date using a countdown timer or final deadline to create FOMO (fear of missing out).
With this type of retargeting, you can align your ads with your email messaging to increase conversions even more. For example, if you sent out a promotion to your email list, they’re likely to see your retargeted ads and be reminded of the deal you’re offering.
Retargeting is the PPC secret weapon most car dealerships don’t take advantage of. Using this strategy can make the difference between a one-time curious visitor and a buyer ready to schedule a test drive. If you’re spending money on clicks without retargeting your visitors, you’re wasting your ad spend.
At PPC.co, we specialize in high-performance white label PPC campaigns that include smart retargeting from day one. Whether you’re launching your first campaign or looking to tighten up your existing ad strategy, we can help you capture more leads, drive more traffic, and move cars off your lot. Let’s turn those clicks into closed deals – contact us now to get started.
