Launch of advertising for a service station in Tenerife

The importance of a unique selling proposition

What services should be promoted? There are so-called “evergreen” services that all car owners need without exception. These are not random repairs, but work that is performed regularly according to regulations. For example:
- Air conditioning refill. This is especially relevant in the hot climate of Tenerife.
- Antibacterial cleaning of the air conditioner. Not everyone does this, but it is important for health, especially if the owner has allergies or small children.
- Film wrapping. A popular service that also looks great in banners and is easy to present creatively.
- Car painting. Paint and varnish work sells well through banners and visual “before and after” examples.
These are precisely the areas that allow you to build advertising campaigns not only through search queries, but also through bright creatives.

How is search advertising structured? It's relatively simple. First, a list of services provided by the service station is compiled. Next, keywords are collected for them and campaigns are launched. In the ad texts, we always try to add a direct offer: for example, “15% discount for new customers” or “€20 off your first service.” This works better than a dry list of services. In the case of banners, special attention is paid to creativity. The more beautiful and noticeable the banner, the higher the click-through rate, the more impressions and, accordingly, conversions.

Specifics of launching advertising specifically in Tenerife

Everything here is very different from big cities. First, the island itself is very small: approximately 1–1.5 million people live here. At the same time, most of the people are tourists who do not need car services: they drive rented cars. That leaves only the permanent population, which is the target audience.

Second, there is a nuance in targeting. Google advertising campaigns have a setting to show ads only to those who permanently reside in the region, or also to those who are visiting. For a service station, it makes sense to choose the first option. But as soon as you enable this targeting, your reach drops sharply.

And the third feature is languages. There are catastrophically few queries in Russian and Ukrainian. Google Ads practically ignores them. Even if you set a bid of $20 per click, the ad may simply not run. The reason is that Google does not have CTR statistics for these languages in the region, and the system does not understand how much you can actually earn from impressions.

As a result, ads in Russian and Ukrainian can bring in 10-15 queries per day at best, which is too little for a campaign to function normally. Moreover, Google often considers organic search results to be more relevant and simply does not include ads.

This is exactly the problem we encountered: there are so few queries that ads for them are virtually never shown. Google is “afraid” to launch a campaign because it cannot calculate bids and click probability.

A similar situation arose when setting the user's browser language to Russian or Ukrainian and selecting the “Tenerife” region. The reach of such a campaign was minimal. Moreover, it seemed that Google perceived users with SIM cards from Ukraine or Russia as “visitors” rather than permanent residents of the island. As a result, the ads were simply not shown to those who could actually be the target audience.

Therefore, we focused entirely on Spanish-language queries. Even Russian-speaking residents of the island often enter them in Spanish, because they understand that this way they will get more relevant results and have a better chance of quickly finding the service they need.

We launched search advertising and banner advertising. Together with the client, we developed promotions:
- a discount for new customers,
- free oil and filter replacement when purchased at a service station.
We planned to launch advertising for car painting, but the client was waiting for permits to open a new workshop.

At the same time, we set up social media campaigns with similar offers. Promotion through Telegram groups became a separate area of focus. We found local chats where Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking residents communicate. We agreed with the administrators to place native posts in the format of “conversational” messages: without direct advertising, but with an emphasis on information about new services or promotions. This provided additional contact with the target audience.

In the first month, we received about 20 inquiries from potential customers who wanted to sign up for services. But then an unexpected problem arose: the client already had a schedule booked up for about a month in advance. We didn't know this before launching the ad campaign. The client said they needed more work and more customers. But in practice, it turned out differently: people were asking for services they needed “right now,” within a week at most. And the service station was offering appointments in 4–5 weeks. Naturally, many people weren't happy with this: customers wanted quick results, not to wait almost a month.

We planned to increase the campaign budget and expand the reach. However, faced with this situation, it became clear that there was no point in scaling up advertising yet.

Currently, advertising campaigns are running on minimal budgets — about $500 per channel per month. Their task is not so much to generate a flow of “hot” requests as it is to build awareness: so that people within a 4-5 km radius know that this service station is nearby and what services it provides. Leads continue to come in, some customers make appointments, but without the ability to quickly close their requests, scaling will not have the desired effect.

If you launch an ad campaign and get leads, you need to keep in mind that most customers expect to receive the service or product immediately or in the next few days. If you are not ready to close requests quickly, advertising may be ineffective. In our case, half of the requests were lost simply because the earliest appointment was a month away. It turned out that money was spent on advertising, there were leads, but no deals were closed. Therefore, before launching, it is important to define the goal and resources. If you already have a schedule for the month ahead, you may simply not need advertising at this point.

Together with the client, we found a solution: to run ads only for new services that do not yet have a waiting list. In our case, it was a car painting service. The new workshop had just opened, there were no appointments, and that's where we directed our advertising budgets. This approach turned out to be logical:
- no overloaded schedule,
- the service is new,
- there is an opportunity to attract the first customers with a promotion and form a base of loyal users.

We emphasized the offer: “discount for new customers on car painting” and built campaigns so that residents of nearby areas would learn about this service as quickly as possible.

Results and challenges

The case study showed that advertising for a service station on a small island works very differently than in large cities. A limited audience, language characteristics, and specific demand requirements all need to be taken into account.

The main lesson is that advertising must be tied to the real capabilities of the business. If you are not ready to serve leads in a short time frame, it is worth redirecting budgets to other areas or temporarily postponing scaling.

In our case, advertising for standard services was limited by low bandwidth, but the campaign for the new service showed good potential. This helped us avoid unnecessary costs and direct resources to where they really work.