Towing leads Melbourne at $19.22 each in a 12-day period

A tow gets bought in about ninety seconds

Picture the customer. Standing on a nature strip beside a car that will not move, somewhere they never planned to be, ringing whoever looks like they can get there soonest. There is no comparison shopping worth the name. Whoever answers with a time gets the job.

If you run trucks, you already know what that does to the advertising side. A tow is bounded work — one truck, one driver, a set distance, usually finished inside the hour — so the price is roughly known before anyone picks up the phone. Nothing waits at the end of it to rescue an expensive enquiry.

Why the clicks cost more than the job suggests

Every tow and recovery operator across Melbourne is bidding on the same handful of searches. So are roadside assistance resellers, accident management companies, and lead brokers whose whole business is buying the click, taking the call and selling that call on to two or three yards at once.

That last group is why click prices in towing sit above what the size of the job would suggest. They are not bidding against the value of a tow. They are bidding against the value of a phone number they can sell more than once, which is a different and much larger figure.

For an independent working to a modest monthly budget, that is a rough neighbourhood. A few wasted clicks a day is a visible slice of the day, and this trade throws up plenty: people wanting cash for a dead car rather than a tow, people researching insurance, people after a job driving a truck. Each one looks like towing demand and none of them is. Get that part right, though, and a towing account converts unusually well, because real towing intent is about as strong as intent gets.

What we took on

Any Car Towing runs tow and recovery work across greater Melbourne. The stretches reported here were selected out of the account and left undated on purpose. We ran it across two campaigns, and over the wider account the ads were served 5,472 times and drew 460 clicks at an 8.41% click-through rate.

Of those 460 clicks, 34.57% became a tracked enquiry — better than one in three, taken over the whole account.

Worth being straight about one thing: this account did not run continuously. It went in bursts. The days it spent live are scattered rather than laid down in a smooth line, which is why every figure below carries the length of its own stretch instead of a calendar month. Twelve days of trading is twelve days of budget. Calling that a whole month without saying so would flatter the number.

Small accounts need watching in a way big ones do not. When a month turns on a hundred-odd clicks, one bad week is the whole month. How that watching is done is not something we publish — the output is the point.

A 12-day period: the cheapest enquiries the account produced

One 12-day stretch was the low point for cost per enquiry. It produced 32 enquiries at $19.22 each, from 111 clicks, 5 of them arriving as tracked phone calls. Over those days, 28.83% of clicks became an enquiry and the ads were clicked 6.68% of the times they were shown.

What happened afterwards is on the charts.

Read it plainly. An enquiry cost $24.92 in one period and $20.72 in a later one, a 16.85% reduction. The size of the drop is not really the interesting part — it is that the drop happened while the account was getting bigger, which is the opposite of the usual trade-off.

Same movement, plotted period by period. That dashed segment is not decoration. It marks a month with too few live days to plot honestly, and we would rather show you the gap than run a confident line straight through it.

And here is the volume underneath. Forty-two enquiries in the earlier period, 85 in the later one — 127 tracked enquiries across the two stretches that ran long enough to count as months. The later one doubled the earlier one's volume in fewer days live, at a lower cost per enquiry.

The numbers, in one place

• $19.22 per enquiry, from 32 enquiries across a 12-day period in 2026
• 85 enquiries in a 14-day period in 2026 at $20.72 each, converting at 36.48% — the account's best month for both volume and conversion rate
• Cost per enquiry came down from $24.92 in an earlier period to $20.72 in a later one, a 16.85% drop, while volume went up
• Conversion rate rose from 28.83% in the 12-day period to 36.48% in the 14-day one, a 26.54% improvement
• Click-through rate rose from 6.68% to 9.97% between those same two stretches, a 49.19% improvement
• 159 enquiries and 25 tracked phone calls across the account's wider run
• Cost per enquiry taken over the whole account: $21.53

One period was 12 days in the account. The other was 14. Each number sits with its own stretch, and none of them is an average of everything the account has done.

What it changed for the business

Eighty-five enquiries in fourteen days is roughly six a day landing on the phone, in a trade where the job is dispatched and finished inside the hour. For an operator running trucks across greater Melbourne, that is the difference between waiting for the phone and planning a run. You can look at what is already booked, work out where the truck will be at two o'clock, and decide whether the next call is worth taking.

In towing, a call is the strongest signal there is. Twenty-five of the 159 enquiries came in that way. Nobody fills in a web form while their car is blocking a lane, so a call is the job happening now — work that gets dispatched today rather than quoted for next week.

Price is what holds it together at this budget. At around twenty dollars an enquiry, a towing business does not need a high strike rate from enquiry to job before the advertising pays for itself several times over. Direction matters as much as level: costs fell from one period to a later one while volume more than doubled to its highest point. An account that gets cheaper as it grows is one you can put more money into.

Key takeaways

• Towing demand is instant and unforgiving. The operator who answers first wins, and the account paying for the wrong clicks is funding the ones that do.
• Over the wider account: 159 enquiries and 25 tracked phone calls from 460 clicks, at $21.53 each.
• The strongest stretch was a 14-day one — 85 enquiries at $20.72 each, with 36.48% of clicks converting.
• Cost per enquiry fell 16.85% from an earlier period to a later one while volume rose.
• Every figure belongs to the stretch beside it. The account ran in bursts, so we count the days it was actually live.

Frequently asked questions

What does a towing lead cost in Melbourne?

In this account, $21.53 taken over the whole account rather than one period. The cheapest stretch came in at $19.22 and the strongest at $20.72. That is one Melbourne towing account on a small monthly budget, not a market rate.

Is a small monthly budget enough for a towing business?

It was here — 85 enquiries in a single 14-day period. Small budgets are less forgiving rather than unworkable. There is no room for clicks that were never going to become a tow.

How many of the enquiries were phone calls?

25 out of 159 over the wider account, including 5 in the 12-day period and 7 in the 14-day one. Calls matter disproportionately in towing, because they are almost always the job happening right now.

Does the account have to run every day?

This one did not. It ran in bursts rather than continuously, and every result above comes from the days it was live.

If your trucks have gaps in the day

Urgent-demand trades suit paid advertising better than almost anything else, which is also why they are so often set up badly. The intent is strong enough that even a poor account produces something, and that something hides the waste. If you tow or recover around Melbourne, we will open your account and tell you what it produces per dollar. No forecast, just a straight read.