ParkingMyCar lets Italian travelers book parking at 23 airports and 16 ports, across more than 220 car parks. Midsummer Agency started with an audit and consulting, then took over its Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
PPC
ParkingMyCar is an Italian startup that works like a hotel booking site for parking. Travelers compare car parks near their airport or port, book online and turn up with a space waiting. It runs on its own custom website, and has since grown into city parking and strisce blu, Italy’s paid on-street parking marked out in blue lines.
Every booking sits on 2 levels at once, with a third underneath.
Car parks also fill up. In August they run overbooked, and a campaign that keeps selling a full car park is spending money on bookings it can’t take.
ParkingMyCar wanted more bookings while keeping a profitable return on ad spend on Google Ads in Italy, and it wanted the account ready before the summer peak. Revenue was coming in, and the next step was making it steadier and easier to forecast from month to month.
A marketing lead ran Google Ads in-house, alongside everything else a startup asks of one person. When we reviewed the Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts, we saw clear room to grow.
Search and booking also happen on different days. Someone looks up parking for Malpensa today and books for a flight 3 weeks out, so the day a campaign spends and the day the revenue lands rarely match. Any budget plan had to allow for that gap, and for car parks that might be full by the time the traveler arrives.
We started with the audit and a few months of one-to-one consulting: we set the plan, and worked through it with the client’s marketing team, making changes side by side with them. The results made the case for more, and we went on to run Google Ads and Microsoft Ads ourselves.
ServicesGoogle Ads · Microsoft Ads
ParkingMyCar’s site already had what the ads needed: a page for every airport, every port and every car park. Dynamic Search Ads read a site and match each search to the page that answers it, so we launched them on top of that structure, with an ad group per airport and port, each pointed at its own pages.
Someone searching for a named car park at Fiumicino landed on that car park. Someone typing “parcheggio aeroporto Bologna” landed on Bologna. We rolled the ad groups out a few at a time, from Rome and Lamezia Terme to Linate, Venice, Palermo, Catania, Genoa and Bergamo, and ports like Naples and Milazzo. It quickly became the best-performing campaign on the account.
At the same time we rebuilt the main search campaigns. We swapped broad match for exact and phrase keywords built around the searches that actually converted, and split ad groups by the service people wanted, so car valet, low cost and long-stay each got their own ads.
Bidding moved to target return on ad spend, set campaign by campaign. Then we opened the account up in 4 directions:
After that we kept pushing. Campaigns kept running out of budget, so the budget went up, again and again, as long as the return held. Keywords that brought back less than they cost over 90 days came out, and remarketing lists on the Dynamic Search Ads went after people who had already searched once.
When we took over management, we laid the groundwork first: referral exclusions in Analytics, a naming convention, fresh audience lists, the Google Ads tag with enhanced conversions, and automated alerts that warn us when an ad points to a page that no longer works, or when a campaign spends more than its budget.
Then we went after the patterns in the booking data. We tested bid adjustments by day of the week, raising bids from Tuesday to Thursday and lowering them at the weekend. We rebuilt the brand campaign with more granular ad groups, fixed the price extensions, and gave Fiumicino and Ciampino campaigns of their own.
The ad copy got a test too. In the quiet season we swapped the formal ads for a lighter tone that poked fun at the things travelers worry about, like how the shuttle actually works, and measured the new ads against the old ones.
A full car park makes a campaign look broken. Together with the client we set up a way to know, in close to real time, when a location had capacity, with alert scripts watching the account. That let us pull back on locations that were full and push the ones with space.
Milan Malpensa showed what space looked like. It is one of Italy’s busiest airports, and ParkingMyCar had plenty of room to grow its visibility there. We switched the campaign to bid for impression share for 2 weeks, to win the top of the page, then went back to a return target. Daily bookings more than tripled compared with before the test.
Our management started just as ParkingMyCar was rebuilding its website. We passed on conversion advice along the way, from adding filters and sorting to the results page to giving the mobile search button more contrast against its orange background. The client kept the URL structure intact, so every ad group carried straight across.
In the first 5 months we scaled revenue and ad spend by 455%, and the account held its return on ad spend target the whole way. The structure kept climbing into the summer: at the summer peak, revenue was up 2,000% on the year before.
Once we took over management, the Dynamic Search Ads campaign stayed the account’s top performer in report after report.
They were highly professional and helpful. Always on time, easy to reach through email, fast in finding solutions.
The CMO
ParkingMyCar
Micky
Pay Per Click
Ran the audit and the consulting, designed the Dynamic Search Ads structure, and set the strategy for Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
Mark
Pay Per Click
Worked the Google Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts day to day once we took over management.
Ecommerce plus physical stores? B2B and B2C under one roof? One market or eleven? The businesses other agencies find too complex are the ones we make shine.
