Ten Cities.
One Lead Engine.
ADESA Auctions Canada runs wholesale vehicle auctions from Vancouver to St. John’s. Dealers buy there, fleets sell there, and everyday car owners can sell there too, if they know it’s an option.
From 2018 to 2024, AdEasy managed ADESA’s marketing across ten Canadian cities, right through a national rebrand to OPENLANE.
Seller leads across ten cities in nine months
Leads in July 2023, the biggest month of the program
Average cost per lead in the third quarter of 2023
Cities, each with its own campaigns and its own rep
Leads are seller form fills and calls from Google, Meta and Microsoft Ads, tracked by city. Ad spend is media only.
Winnipeg Isn’t Vancouver.
Halifax Isn’t Calgary.
ADESA needed one partner to handle marketing for every location: ads, print, video, events, hiring, community sponsorships and landing pages. The biggest job was the consumer program, which buys cars from everyday owners and sells them to dealers through the auction lanes.
Someone with a car to sell has plenty of options. They can sell it privately, trade it in at a dealer, or use one of the newer apps that come to their door. The auction has to earn the call.
And every market behaves differently. What costs $20 a lead in one city can cost $80 in another. A national campaign would have spent the budget where clicks were cheap, not where the auction lanes needed cars.
Each city also had its own rep working the leads. A lead that sat in a shared inbox was a car sold somewhere else.
Every city had its own campaigns. Every lead went to the local rep.
We Ran Every City,
Like Our Own Business.
A Campaign for Every City
Google Search, Meta and Microsoft Ads built city by city, each with its own budget. When one market got expensive, we could fix it without touching the others.
Videos That Teach the Process
Our best ads by far were short videos that explained how selling a car at auction works, step by step. Montreal got its own versions in French.
Every Lead to the Right Rep
Every lead went straight into a sales pipeline in ActiveCampaign, assigned to the rep in that city, with follow-up emails in English and French. ADESA could see leads by city and by rep.
Wore the ADESA Name?
We Probably Made It.
Also: display ads on Kijiji, trade show banners, email newsletters and landing pages for every location.
We Listened
to the Calls.
The ads promised that selling a car at ADESA was easy, safe and fast. In 2022 we wanted to know if the phone calls said the same thing, so we listened to recorded calls from the reps in each city and reported back to ADESA’s leadership.
The best calls explained the process first and built trust before asking about the car. Others jumped straight to the vehicle details. After the call, sellers still had a form to fill out and a car to get to the auction. Fees were explained one way in one city and another way somewhere else. Transport came up only when a seller asked.
None of that shows up in an ad report. All of it decides whether a lead turns into a car in the lane.
An ad can only promise what the phone call delivers.
957 Sellers
in One Month.
From May 2023 to January 2024, the program brought in more than 6,400 seller leads across ten cities. July 2023 was the biggest month, with 957 leads.
In the third quarter of 2023, the campaigns produced 2,488 leads on $71,660 in ad spend, about $29 each. Google Search carried three in four of those leads. Meta kept sellers seeing the videos, and Microsoft Ads added a few more at low cost.
Every one of those leads landed with a named rep in a named city, so ADESA could see what each market produced.
seller leads in the third quarter of 2023
Q3 leads came from Google Search
leads in November 2023, the last full month as ADESA
local reps, each with their own pipeline
“I’m not a salesman and find the situation of trying to sell my own car to be awkward and uncertain. My vehicle sold first run for more than I would have got for trade in! Took it in Wednesday, sold Saturday.”
| Quarter | Ad spend | Leads | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q3 2023 | $71,660 | 2,488 | ~$29 |
| Q4 2023 | $77,680 | 2,318 | ~$34 |
We kept December and January in. They’re the next part of the story.
Auction day at ADESA Richmond, from our video and photo shoots
Source: AdEasy lead tracking for ADESA Canada, May 2023 to January 2024, Google, Meta and Microsoft Ads. Ad spend is media only. Montreal joined in August 2023.
A Rocky Rebrand.
Then Back on Track.
In mid-December 2023, ADESA Canada became OPENLANE. We rebuilt the program for the new brand: new ads in every city, new tracking, new follow-up emails, and the email settings that keep those emails out of spam folders.
A new name still means starting over with people who have never heard it. Leads fell about 30% in December and 50% in January compared with the summer and fall average. We told OPENLANE exactly that, and kept working the campaigns month by month.
By June 2024, the seven markets we were still running brought in 753 leads in a month, more than three times January. Cost per lead dropped from about $82 to about $34.
Winnipeg, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Kitchener and St. John’s. These numbers come from OPENLANE’s 2024 tracking, which counted fewer markets than the 2023 chart above, so the two charts aren’t a direct comparison.
Source: AdEasy leads update to OPENLANE, February 2024, and OPENLANE monthly metrics and ad spend, January to August 2024. Ad spend is media only. AdEasy (then Exchange Agency) began working with ADESA in 2018; the partnership ran through 2024. ADESA and OPENLANE are trademarks of their owners.
