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CASE STUDY · GOOGLE ADS · ESSEX, UK
Google Ads Case Study — Minibus Hire in Essex
Elite Essex Minibuses books airport runs and group travel across Essex and east London. Three quarters of Google Ads Search: 8,972 clicks, 1,856 conversions, £7.48 a conversion.
GOOGLE ADS
SEARCH CAMPAIGNS
LOCAL TARGETING
CONVERSION TRACKING
PROJECT FACTS
AT A GLANCE
1,856
CONVERSIONS
Google Ads
£7.48
COST PER CONVERSION
Google Ads
20.7%
CONVERSION RATE
Google Ads
8.6%
CTR
Google Ads
Every number on this page names the tool it came from.
The brief
Elite Essex Minibuses is a minibus and airport-transfer operator working a tight local patch — Essex and the eastern edge of London. The job was never reach. It was to buy the searches that end in a booking enquiry, and to keep the cost of one enquiry under control while volume scaled.
Delivery began in Q1 2026 from a standing start. Everything on this page is computed from the account’s own Google Ads exports for Q1 to Q3 2026: 8,972 clicks, 1,856 conversions and £13,885.54 of spend, at £7.48 a conversion.
Three quarters, in order
- Q1 2026448 clicks · 75 conversions · £6.96 each
- Q2 20264,208 clicks · 890 conversions · £6.87 each
- Q3 20264,316 clicks · 891 conversions · £8.14 each
Volume multiplied roughly nine-fold from Q1 to Q2 and then held through Q3. Cost per conversion moved from £6.96 to £6.87 to £8.14 — the Q3 rise is the price of the extra volume, not a collapse in efficiency.
[ Figure: cs5-elite-quarterly.png — Fig. 1 — Clicks, conversions and cost per conversion by quarter, Google Ads ]
Where the money actually goes
Mobile is 82% of spend and 82% of conversions, at £7.45 a conversion — marginally cheaper than desktop’s £7.61. Computers take £2,365.62 across 1,298 clicks for 311 conversions. Tablets are a rounding error: £119.45, 91 clicks, 14 conversions at £8.53. TV screens never delivered at all.
The +10% mobile and desktop bid adjustments are doing no harm. But this is not a campaign with a mobile segment. It is a mobile campaign with a small desktop tail, and that is where the landing page and the phone number have to work.
[ Figure: cs5-elite-devices.png — Fig. 2 — Spend and conversions by device, Google Ads ]
When the phone rings
Impressions concentrate between 10:00 and 19:00 and peak at 16:00 with 9,371. The hours either side of that peak — 12:00, 13:00 and 14:00 — sit within a hundred impressions of it. Between 02:00 and 05:00 the account is effectively dark, at one to five impressions an hour.
Day of week is flat. Monday is the highest at 16,288 impressions and Friday the lowest at 13,906, and the spread in between is narrow. There is no day here worth cutting.
[ Figure: cs5-elite-hours.png — Fig. 3 — Impressions by hour of day, Google Ads ]
The keywords that carry it
Conversions as recorded in the Google Ads account.
- mini bus hirebroad · 5,225 clicks · 52,519 impressions · 1,119.57 conversions
- Minibus Hirebroad · 968 clicks · 11,994 impressions · 181.98 conversions
- airport transfers near mebroad · 381 clicks · 8,041 impressions · 83.00 conversions
- minibus hire Essexbroad · 383 clicks · 4,185 impressions · 74.17 conversions
- airport service near meexact · 176 clicks · 3,073 impressions · 48.42 conversions
- airport transfers minibusbroad · 221 clicks · 4,263 impressions · 41.00 conversions
- 16 seater minibus hirebroad · 122 clicks · 1,303 impressions · 32.33 conversions
- minibus hire southendbroad · 97 clicks · 635 impressions · 21.04 conversions
One broad keyword, “mini bus hire”, carries 60.3% of every conversion in the account. That is a concentration worth naming out loud: it is what makes the account efficient today, and it is a single point of failure.
[ Figure: cs5-elite-keywords.png — Fig. 4 — Conversions by search keyword, Google Ads ]
Holding position against bigger budgets
At 21.99% impression share and a 73.64% top-of-page rate, the account sits level with the largest advertiser in the auction, on 22.12%, and ahead of everyone else. The next two are on 20.07% and 11.85%, and every other advertiser in the report is under 10%.
That is worth stating plainly: a local operator on this budget is not being pushed off the page. Competing advertisers are anonymised here.
[ Figure: cs5-elite-auction.png — Fig. 5 — Impression share against competing advertisers, Google Ads Auction Insights (competitors anonymised) ]
Who is searching
35–44 is the largest age band at 27.17% of impressions, with 25–34 on 23.19% and 45–54 on 21.70% — 25 to 54 together make up 72% of impressions. 55–64 accounts for 16.87% and 65+ for 11.12%; 18–24 barely registers at 0.23%. Women are 55.82% of the known audience and men 44.68%.
This is useful for ad copy and for deciding what the landing page shows first. It is not a targeting lever.
What I would tell a similar operator
- One keyword carrying 60% of conversions is a result and a risk. Build the second and third earners before the first one moves.
- Mobile is not a segment here, it is the account. The landing page and the phone number carry more weight than any bid adjustment.
- A bid adjustment of −30% on London and +30% on Essex produced near-identical impression volume from both. Worth asking whether the split is doing what it was set up to do.
- Cost per conversion rose 19% when volume doubled. Decide the ceiling before the next scale-up, not after.
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