Monitoring the success of your car wash marketing

When you carry out advertising measures for your car wash, you naturally also want to know whether they are effective – and if so, how. There are ways to monitor the success of your marketing, but not all of them are actually worth it. We will explain why here.

The practical check of success takes place in everyday life

There is a very simple way to find out how well your marketing is working: count the number of customers who visit your car wash every day. Because unlike many other companies or businesses, customers cannot use your services over the Internet. They cannot order anything, buy or commission anything. Whether your interesting content and the exciting offers attract people to your car wash, you will actually only see in everyday working life.

The advertising effectiveness study online can be tracked

Depending on where you place ads online, you can see how many clicks the campaign has brought you. You can track the success of your Google ads with Google Analytics. To find out who is accessing your website from where, use the etracker tool. Facebook Insights gives you an insight into the activities there around your profile, and Twitter Analytics is the equivalent for the Twitter platform. However, these numbers are all just meta-data of what you are actually interested in: how many of the people actually come to your car wash?      

Radio and print advertising make it more difficult to monitor marketing success

Unlike online marketing solutions, when you have ads broadcast on the radio or have them placed in the newspaper, you have no way of tracking the number of people who have been reached. Counting the number of customers is the only way here: does it increase after placing the ad? However, these figures are not completely reliable either. Perhaps the day on which the ad is published is also attractive for car washing for other reasons. It is possible that winter is coming to an end or that a longer period of rainy and mucky weather has just stopped. In short, you cannot be sure what triggers the flow of visitors.

However, in addition to your normal web presence and the social media accounts, which are always visible, you can place targeted print advertising, distribute flyers or commission radio advertising. If this is the only additional advertising measure and there are actually more customers in the next few days, you can carry it out more regularly.

Monitoring of advertising success through enquiries

If you advertise, you want to know which type works best – on the other hand, you may spend a lot of money on something that reaches virtually no one. However, you will then have no other choice than to enquire. For example, you can tell your employees to ask customers how they found out about your car wash. However, such questions are considered to be rude by some people and affect the positive customer experience.  

An alternative is a questionnaire, which you put on display. Here it is sufficient for the customer to make a mark on the tally sheet and thus indicate whether they found out about the car wash via the website, in one of the other online media, on the radio, in the newspaper, by flyer or in some other way. In this way, the statement remains anonymous and is quick – the customer does not feel hassled and you get the desired numbers.  

You can also ask on your website how your customers found out about your car wash. Of course not everyone will respond, but the answers can still be enlightening. Remember, however, that you will never get the answers online from those who do not use the Internet and must have found out about your car wash in other ways.

Summary: Checking the success of advertising for car washes is not fully possible

While you can follow online advertising measures at least to the extent that you can see the numbers of clicks and likes, it is more difficult with other forms of advertising. You cannot tell from looking at your customers which channels they used to find out about your car wash. You can ask your customers for information, but whether this is a good idea is another matter. It is important that you monitor the number of your customers and repeat those actions that have led to an increase.