Vehicle recycling · Google Ads
Take My Scrap Car
Inquiries by the dozen. Every day.
Luke Parfitt's family has been buying end-of-life vehicles at its yard in Hempnall, Norfolk, for around 30 years, breaking them for parts that go all over the country and abroad. Take My Scrap Car is the side of the business the public sees: an Authorised Treatment Facility that pays people for their old car and collects it the same day, anywhere in Norfolk and Suffolk. Pivotal has looked after it online for around 15 years, from the brand and website to the Google Ads account we have run for more than a decade.
- Leads from Google Ads
- 22,700+
- Cost per lead, the lowest yet
- £4.68
- Leads a year in two years
- 2.6x
Results for Take My Scrap Car: 22,700+ leads from Google ads; £4.68 cost per lead, the lowest yet; 2.6x leads a year in two years.
“I've worked with Pivotal for many, many years. It really does give results. We are getting inquiries by the dozen on a daily basis. It is beyond belief where it's come to.”
Luke Parfitt, owner, Take My Scrap Car
The Opportunity
It started with a scrap car of Tait's own. Tait found Luke's number in the local paper, Luke came to collect it, and the two got talking about what a proper online presence could do for the yard. Within a week they had met to plan it.
Nobody searches for a scrapyard until they need one, and then they want an answer straight away: what will you pay, and when can you collect? The yard that turns up first in Google, and makes it easiest to call or book, gets the car. Luke wanted a steady supply of vehicles coming in without relying on the newspaper.
The Search
One Google Ads account, run by the same team for over ten years. Search campaigns catch people who need a car gone now; location campaigns cover the towns and villages across Norfolk and Suffolk the yard collects from. Every month we research new searches, write fresh ads, block the searches that never turn into a car and pull the target cost per lead down, and every online booking and every call from an ad is counted, so the budget goes to what brings vehicles in.
New formats, tested small first. More recently we added Performance Max for leads on a small daily budget; in its first month it brought in 50 leads at £3.02 each, and it now runs alongside search. Google has since upgraded the account to dedicated support from its EMEA headquarters, with its own account strategist.
The Website
Built to get the phone ringing. Take My Scrap Car has one job online: turn a search into a call or a booking. Every page leads with the phone number and a quote form that starts with the registration number, with pages for the towns the yard collects from and the makes people search for, and local content written for Norfolk.
Looked after, year after year. We keep the site's Google Business Profile current, run it behind Cloudflare, keep WordPress and its plugins up to date by testing every upgrade on a copy first, and set up Google's consent mode so tracking respects every visitor's choice. Session recordings show how people really use the site on their phones, and they shape every change we make.
Simple to work with. As Luke puts it in the film, Pivotal talks in a language he understands and leaves the yard to do what it does best. “In a nutshell, if I ask him to do something, it's done.”
The Results
Over more than a decade the account has brought in over 22,700 leads, bookings and calls, at an average of £6.85 each. Around a third of the people who click an ad go on to book or call. The most recent years have been the strongest yet: in two years the number of leads a year has grown 2.6 times, from around 1,600 to over 4,200, with one January alone up 83% on the year before at a 17% lower cost per lead. Today the account runs at £4.68 a lead, the lowest it has ever been. That is the dozen-a-day Luke describes, and a big part of a business he says is now around ten times the size it was when it started.