A $125 wash and a $2,800 coating
are not the same customer.
We run a detailing company in Broward, so this one is not theory. The hardest thing about marketing detailing is that the ticket range is enormous — a maintenance wash and a multi-year ceramic coating differ by more than twenty times — and a blended cost per lead across both tells you nothing useful.
Measured together, cheap wash leads make the account look brilliant and the bank balance disagree. Measured separately, you can see that the coating enquiry costing four times more is the one actually worth buying.
The second thing is that coatings rarely sell cold. They sell to someone who already trusted you with a smaller job and saw the result. So the funnel is two-stage on purpose: acquire on the entry service, earn the upgrade afterward. Campaigns that go straight for the high ticket from a cold click mostly burn budget.
And detailing is geography-sensitive in the same way pool service is. Drive time is a real cost on a mobile operation, and a job forty minutes away at rush hour is worth less than one fifteen minutes away at the same price.
This page is about the trade. If you work in South Florida, the county version has the local numbers, the cities we shut off and what the competition actually looks like here: car detailing marketing in Broward County.
Full disclosure: these numbers come from LuxeWash, a mobile detailing company in Broward that Digital Anchor owns and runs. It is our testing ground, which is why we can publish the account data, including the cities that did not work.