Drive

6,468% Increase in “Used Car” Leads (YoY)

Against much competition, the following case study made DataSauce a Google Ads agency finalist at the 2025 APAC Search Awards – under the category of Best PPC Campaign.

‍So safe to say, it’s one for the books.

‍But first, some context: Drive is Australia’s trusted destination for buying and selling cars, with a unique marketplace model that spans new, used, and seller-led transactions. 

‍And as much as Drive.com.au is known for its automotive content, part of the “A” in our values meant that this partnership involved ambitious targets… Way beyond offering a good read. 

‍It was all about scaling Drive’s digital strategy to drive marketplace growth.

With such a nuanced business model (e.g. negotiations with dealers, vehicle inventory levels, buyer behaviours, multiple marketplace streams), this Google Ads PPC approach needed to be nimble, data-driven, and primed for scale. And from here forth, you’ll be privy to just that.

The Campaign:

“Growth” sounds like a simple enough objective. But achieving this for Drive meant navigating a complex PPC landscape where budgets, inventory levels, and KPIs fluctuated daily. 

Rather than segmenting audiences by traditional demographics like age or location, paid Google Ads campaigns for Drive were structured around intent — targeting buyers and sellers across three key marketplace streams:

• New: Users looking to buy a new car.
• Used: Users searching for second-hand cars.‍
• Sell: Individuals looking to sell their car to dealerships for an instant offer.

We then unpacked trends in terms of when, why, and what users spend on, to inform us where to invest and scale – whilst keeping ad copy applicable to all in a conversion mindset.

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Historical data revealed:

NEW:

High levels of purchase appetite at the start of the year.

Think “New Year, New Me” where users consider starting their year with a new car, meaning Google searches spike after Christmas.

USED:

Search volume ramps up from March onwards, right before EOFY.

Rationales include inventory clearances that spark significant sales, tax deductions for individuals and businesses for potential write-offs, and corporate fleet sales.

Majority of this period’s purchase activity falls under the Used pipeline, as vehicles within this stream are likely to be <$20,000 – constituting eligible assets for an instant write-off amongst small businesses.

Patterns of human behaviour are a beautiful thing.

And for a digital marketing agency like us, this meant we could reference trends of search intent to spend directly where ads have the greatest impact, scaling Drive with precision.

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The Results:

• 6,468% increase in “Used Car” leads (YoY)
• 851% increase in YoY “New Car” leads (YoY)
• 1,328% increase in conversion rates
• 45% increase in YoY audience size, bumping up Drive’s market share to the #2 spot with 2.68M unique monthly visitors, the highest it’s ever been for Drive.

Visually, these uplifts looked a little like this:

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The Solution:

Now, we wish we could say it was easy hitting numbers like those. But in reality, our Google PPC strategy was built on three crucial pillars (monitored closely, constantly, collaboratively)

→ Marketplace UX / UI Optimisation

→ Hyper-Granular Campaign Structures

→ Intent-Led Ad Copywriting

Hyper-Granular Campaign Structures

Remember the three different streams for Drive? Our Used, New & Sell funnels? 

Under the expert care of our account managers – and Kento, our Head of Search with 20 years’ experience – each stream had a tailored set of Google Ads campaigns to maximise opportunity. 

Ad campaign types were decided upon through evaluating their respective benefits and alignment with specific needs. For example, users in the Used stream tend to know precisely what they’re searching for, leading to less reliance on Performance Max in favour of Generic “Make/Model” campaigns instead. And due to specific search intent, our “Make/Model” path then drove a stronger presence in SERPs to produce better Allocated Leads that will convert. 

It also focuses on granularity, including every make and model available on Drive’s website.

If new cars are added, we add them to our paid Google Ads campaigns. This involved frequent scraping of the website, adding new ads and keywords wherever relevant.

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Drive was also one of the first car aggregators in ANZ to access Google's Vehicle Ads program (for automotive advertisers), and we trialled it in May 2024. 

Not sure what “Vehicle Ads” are?

Think Shopping Ads, but for cars.

Enabling this allowed for:

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• Highly relevant and informative listings
• More qualified leads
• Cheaper CPCs, and Cost per Acquisition

Vehicle ads have now become our second-best campaign, generating inquiries for both Used and New – all through staying in the know and incorporating the latest Google Ads products.

Intent-Led Ad Copywriting

As part of our insights-driven strategies, we write Google Ads copy in line with behavioural science principles that follow five psychology-backed guidelines to nurture consumer trust.

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The below screenshots are examples of real Headlines and Descriptions in our Make/Model campaign, with highlighted lines denoting the colour-coded principles each aligns with.

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Per Google’s conducted study, applying two of these principles can be just as compelling as a 10% discount, and applying all five can sell as well as 15% off. Crazy stuff.

Marketplace UX / UI Optimisation

Next up, we’re bringing in CRO. 

Sometimes levers we pull to boost PPC search campaign performance lie outside the various Ads Managers. For Drive, we found that conversion rate was an issue after ad-level fixes were made, as landing page destinations we sent traffic to weren’t optimised for conversion.

Together with our client, we developed conversion-focused landing pages:

Before: Traffic sent to generic Showroom page.

After: Split stream landing pages, incl. New Car Marketplace and for Used + New.

Optimised for Buy/Sell, this all-new landing page included strategic UX and UI functionalities – like a simple top of page search-bar as its focal point. It further enhanced ease of navigation through filters (by brand, model, body type, price and location) without distracting users away from other on-site resources.

‍Drive.com.au often brings in visitors with information gathering search intent, rather than for buying or selling cars (i.e. transactional) – which meant our PPC ads weren’t clicked on for their intended purposes.

But with this, we made Drive a Marketplace… For Google Ads purposes.

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By keeping users interested in Buy/Sell exploration per their searches, we saw an immediate AND continued uplift in performance after the landing page went live in August 2023.

• Conversion Rates increased by +1,328%‍
• Lead Volume increased by 199.7%

Of course, there were a plethora of other tweaks we made along the way.

To optimise the account per real-time sales, stock levels and dealer negotiations, we relied on human intervention. Meaning liaising daily with Drive’s CFO, and toggling spend between Performance Max and Generic campaigns by lead quality and peak periods by stream. 

We removed broader interest segments like “cars” as audience signals, niching down to manufacturer level (e.g. Toyota, BMW) to allow for targeted and higher intent audiences.

The list keeps going, but we shan’t bore you with even more nitty gritty.

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By understanding Drive’s consumer behaviours and peak periods, our performance marketing experts were able to scale in line with key calendar dates and demand. 

PPC efforts allowed Drive to not only smash KPIs, but aim for more ambitious targets – upon a new business model which focuses on all streams equally, whilst transforming its reputation of automotive content resource into one that is also a trusted Marketplace.

This reflects in the latest April ‘24 Ipsos iris report, where Drive hit an audience of 2.68m – its highest ever result which cemented Drive’s place at #2 in terms of market share.

It’s undeniable. The Ps in PPC stand for profit, powerhouse, and potential.

(No, they don’t.)

But you get the point. Speak to one of our experts today for their take on how to scale your business, and unlock a free audit – if we’re a good fit, that is!