If you’re spending money advertising your car wash, you want to see this video—six key metrics to ensure you’re tracking. Hey guys, I’m Mike Berlin from SLAM CarWash Marketing, bringing you some new ideas to consider when marketing your car wash. It’s the SLAM Six, and in this episode, we’re talking about Digital Advertising and what to track to ensure campaigns produce a solid return for your investment.

At SLAM, we’re a bunch of digital advertising nerds because it’s the best value, and we can track it better than most other forms of advertising. With that in mind, here are our top six KPIs to understand and monitor closely.

1. CPM (Cost Per Millie, or Cost Per Thousand Impressions)

If we’re running a brand awareness campaign, we’re trying to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible to fill the top of that lead funnel. We’re trying to drive awareness. The more people that see our ad means, the more likely they will respond to it. Generally speaking, anything less than $5 CPM is a win.

2. Search Traffic

Talking about brand awareness—How do you measure brand awareness?

By getting our ads in front of so many people to influence the community, to make them talk about your car wash, think about us, and crave the wash. Search traffic allows us to measure how many people in our market area searched for “car wash near me.” Better yet, how many people searched for “car wash” or our car wash by name. Did we influence that number and make more people want a car wash?

3. CTR (Click-Through Rate)

Click-through rate measures the effectiveness of the ad creative. Was it a headline or a video that stopped the scroll on Facebook, and connected with somebody enough for them to react? Did we evoke an emotion and make them feel something with our ad, or did we provide a compelling call to action that caused them to click? You know, click the button, and go to the landing page or the website, or better yet, click the button that goes directions to wash. Click-through rate measures how well your ad creative connected with the audience.

4. Foot Traffic or Directions

When running GPS-based ads on Google and Waze, the goal of the ad is to get that person to the wash. Someone searching for “car wash near me” on their phone is a hot lead because they want what we have. Your goal is to direct them to you car wash Google listing and show them that your wash will make them happier than the car wash down the street. Our goal is for them to tap on that directions button, use the GPS, and drive to our car wash. This is the most important metric because its needed to drive foot traffic from your ads.

5. Conversion Rate

At SLAM we know that we can run ads to drive more traffic to the wash. If our goal is to grow unlimited members, a new person driving on the property is a sales lead. We can provide more leads but how do we measure how well the sales team is doing at closing those leads and turning them into members? Out of 10 non-member cars that drive through the gates, how many are we selling into the Unlimited Plan? Conversion rate is a measurement of how well our sales team is doing. it helps answer questions like, are we providing the proper training to our team? Are we arming them with suitable sales materials like rack cards? And do we have the right message on the Pay Station screens? Conversion rate is very, very important.

6. Return on Ad Spend

This is the big one—let’s say our average ticket price at a car wash is $14. If Google and Waze ads drove 300 people to the wash this month and your sales team converted 10% of that traffic into the Unlimited Plan at $30 a month, with a 10 month average member cycle, that total is $1,780 worth of business that came from this month’s ad campaign. And if we spent $11,000 this month on that digital ad campaign, then that’s about a 1200% return on ad spend. At the end of the day, you’re spending money on advertising to see a result.

One last thought for today. If you run digital ads, don’t just geo-target your ads with a flat 5-mile radius. Use some data. We use data to help us determine where to advertise, meaning we’re using cell phone data, and we can see all the people that come to your wash or your competitor’s wash. We can see those people on a heat map. I can see exactly where those people live and work. What this does is it allows us to advertise to the people who will buy from us and not waste money advertising to the people who won’t drive to our car wash because the more responsible we are with your money, the more efficient we can be with the ad spend, and the more return we can get for your investment.

That’s your SLAM Six. I hope this gives you some new ideas to think about when advertising your car wash.