GTS Auto Repair — Meta Ads that fill a garage's WhatsApp

A car-repair customer does not want to fill in a form. They want to describe the noise, send a photo of the warning light and ask what it will cost, and in the UAE the place they do that is WhatsApp. So the goal for GTS was never clicks or page views. It was conversations: people with a car problem, in the area, opening a chat with the workshop.

That changes how the ads have to be judged. A click-to-WhatsApp ad that is cheap per click but brings in people who never reply is worse than a more expensive one that starts real conversations. The question for the month was which creative and audience produced the most conversations for the least, and whether showing the whole range of services worked better than leading with specific ones.

We ran every campaign on the messaging objective, so Meta optimised for people likely to start a WhatsApp chat rather than people likely to click. Four campaigns ran side by side: three service-led ads, each built around specific repairs, and one catalog ad showing the full range of services GTS offers.

Over the month they reached 192.8K impressions and started 236 conversations at an average of AED 17.92 each, against a benchmark of AED 25 for the category. The best performer, the original service-led campaign, produced 90 conversations at AED 16.62. Its two variants came in at AED 16.19 and AED 16.41.

The catalog ad brought volume, 79 conversations, second only to the winner, but at AED 20.76 each it cost about 20% more per conversation than the service-led ads. Showing everything reached more people but converted fewer of them. A specific repair is a better opening line than a list.

That set the plan for the next month: move budget onto the winning service-led campaign, cut or re-target the catalog ad, and test new creative against the audience that was already working. GTS's WhatsApp is also where our booking bot runs, which is written up as a separate case study.