What PMAX Is Actually Generating
After running Google Performance Max campaigns across dealer clients in Victoria and Sydney, a pattern has become hard to ignore. A large proportion of the inbound calls those campaigns generate are not sales enquiries.
They are service calls.
People searching for a specific dealership, clicking a Google ad, and calling straight through to book a repair or schedule a service. The campaign is working as intended. The problem starts when that call connects.
Scott Pharr, COO of P4 Automotive, put a number to it on Car Dealership Guy's Daily Dealer Live in May 2026: "The average hold time in service is nine minutes, which is insane. Every time I say it, people say that can't possibly be true. You look behind the curtains, it is true."
That data is from the US market. In our experience running inbound call tracking across AU dealer clients, the pattern holds.
For the customer on the other end, nine minutes on hold is long enough to hang up and call a competitor.
Micky, and What It Does
Podium launched Micky for the Australian market in 2026. It is an AI voice product built specifically for auto service businesses, separate from Jerry, which handles sales leads and test drive bookings on the Podium platform.
Micky answers inbound service calls immediately, handles booking requests, and integrates with existing dealer management platforms. One of those integrations is with Infomedia's Superservice, a data-driven service platform used by OEM-aligned dealers across Australia. When connected, customers receive real-time updates on their vehicle's progress through the workshop without needing to call in at all.
The practical outcome: a customer calls to book a service, gets booked in seconds rather than sitting on hold, and then receives automated updates throughout the day as their vehicle moves through the workshop. No missed calls. No callbacks. No "we'll get someone to call you back."
The Repair Order Problem
Service departments are measured on Repair Orders, the number of vehicles written up and through the workshop in a given period. The RO rate is directly tied to how efficiently bookings are captured and processed.
Every missed call is a missed RO opportunity.
Automotive repair and service campaigns on Google achieve conversion rates of around 12.96%, according to WordStream's 2024 Google Ads Benchmarks. That is the highest-converting subcategory on the platform. The signal rate is strong. The drop-off happens after the click, on the phone, before anyone picks up.
What We Are Testing
We are looking at rolling Micky out across several major dealer groups in Sydney over the coming months. The objective is straightforward: get to service enquiries faster, capture more bookings without adding headcount, and stop losing ROs to hold time.
This is part one. We will publish the results once we have data from a live deployment.
If your service department is running PMAX campaigns and you want to understand what your inbound call capture rate actually looks like, that is the conversation worth having first.