Modern Image Case Study
Case study · GoHighLevel infrastructure
Modern Image.
Full digital infrastructure for San Diego’s #1 luxury automotive protection shop — built from a generic template site, scaled to 12× organic traffic and $786K+ in tracked pipeline, still expanding.
Industry · Luxury automotive protection / Engagement · Since July 2024 / Status · Ongoing partnership
Organic traffic in 12 months
12x
CPC reduction (Google Ads rebuild)
84%
Ranking positions gained
17.5
Client Modern Image San Diego
Industry Luxury automotive protection
Engagement Full DFY digital infrastructure + ongoing marketing
Started 2024 · Still active
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How we built the full digital infrastructure for San Diego's #1 luxury automotive protection shop — from GHL and website to Voice AI, Google Ads, and an online shop that ships internationally — and what the data looks like nearly two years in.
Helping Modern Image build the digital presence their reputation deserved.
This case study outlines the full scope of our work with Modern Image San Diego and provides a complete overview of how we helped Enrico and his team build the backend infrastructure, digital presence, and marketing systems their business had long outgrown the need for.
Modern Image isn't a new business. Enrico Del Mar started from the ground up inside the company, learned the craft at every level, and eventually acquired the San Diego branch to build it into what it is today. The shop has been operating since 1991 — the San Diego location since 1999 — and under Enrico's leadership it became the leading luxury automotive protection shop in San Diego County.
Their client list says everything about the quality of their work. Modern Image has protected vehicles for the Fast & Furious franchise, Ferrari San Diego, Porsche San Diego, Marvel Comics, Volkswagen, Land Rover, and HRE Wheels. They hold over 200 five-star reviews across Google, Yelp, and Facebook. They are the exclusive San Diego fulfillment location for Icon Rocklear — a premium ceramic coating technology offering 75× stronger protection than standard ceramic, available through only a handful of shops nationwide.
This is a business built on real craft and 25 years of earned trust. When they came to us in 2024, the goal was to build a digital presence that finally matched it.
All data and statistics current as of April 2, 2026. All metrics sourced directly from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, GoHighLevel, and Google Ads.
The short version for skimmers.
Before we started.
When Enrico and Jada reached out in late 2024, the picture was clear: a premium brand running on a generic website with no lead capture infrastructure and no visibility into where their customers were coming from or what happened to them after first contact.
There was no CRM. No automated follow-up. The website was a template that didn't communicate the premium nature of the business — no transparent pricing, no SEO structure, no conversion tracking. Leads arrived and disappeared.
Before working together:
- No online shop, no conversion tracking, no owned Google Ads account.
- Generic template website with no pricing, no SEO, no CRM integration.
- 44 organic keywords ranking — virtually invisible on Google for service searches.
- 50,000 impressions generating only 234 clicks (0.47% CTR).
- No CRM — every lead disappeared after first contact.
- No phone compliance (A2P, SHAKEN/STIR, CNAM, Voice Integrity — none registered).
- No AI chat, no voice agent, no missed call follow-up.
The most sophisticated service page in San Diego's PPF market.
The San Diego Tesla PPF page alone represents a significant build. Rather than a single generic Tesla page, we built a fully interactive pricing system with model-by-model breakdowns across 7 different protection packages — all with transparent pricing, spec comparisons, and direct booking links into the GHL calendar.
What's on the Tesla page: 5 Tesla models (Model 3, Y, X, S, Cybertruck) × 7 packages each (Matte PPF, Colored PPF, Clear Full Car, Clear Full Front, Icon Rocklear Track, Avant Guard Track, Ceramic Track) = 35 individual pricing configurations with specs, film data sheets, warranty info, and direct booking CTAs for each. Prices range from $1,699 to $7,999 depending on model and package. Every CTA links directly to the GHL booking system with attribution reporting and call tracking.
The action plan.
The engagement developed across five distinct phases over nearly two years. We didn't arrive with a single project scope — we started with GHL and the website, then expanded as the relationship deepened and new needs emerged.
GHL foundation.
The first phase was building the complete GoHighLevel CRM from scratch — contact pipelines, source-attributed lead tracking, automations, team inbox, and booking calendar. This gave Modern Image something they'd never had: a single place where every lead was captured, attributed to its source, and followed up on automatically.
Website, shop & blog.
The website was a complete ground-up rebuild. Custom dark luxury design on WordPress with Elementor Pro, transparent pricing across all services, full SEO structure, and every form feeding directly into GHL. Service pages for PPF San Diego, ceramic coating, window tinting, Icon Rocklear, and Avant Guard.
The San Diego Tesla PPF page alone covers five models with seven protection packages each — all with transparent pricing published. The homepage leads with the real trust signals: Fast & Furious, Ferrari, Porsche, Marvel, Volkswagen, Land Rover.
GoHighLevel online shop (e-commerce).
Prior to working together, Modern Image didn't have a way to sell their custom Fast & Furious decal kits online and relied on manual inquiries from in-person visits or requests through emails, contact forms, and phone calls.
We initially built out the online shop using WooCommerce with WordPress, designing custom pages and setting up the checkout process through the WooCommerce + Stripe plugin. Unfortunately, we found this setup to lack effectiveness — we noticed failed purchases and customer issues with WooCommerce checkout.
We solved this problem by creating a custom online shop using the GoHighLevel Store feature, customizing the store templates to seamlessly match the new website branding and maintain a cohesive visual aesthetic across both platforms.
We also built the full e-commerce store inside GHL Stores — five complete pages, physical product fulfillment, and international shipping for the Fast & Furious decal kits. And migrated the entire blog archive over from the old site.
Within the first week of the new GHL store launch, Modern Image received 3 new online sales for their custom decal kit products averaging $2,000–$3,000 per kit.
Meta / Facebook ads.
Facebook and Instagram advertising infrastructure built from scratch: pixel configuration, audience setup, campaign structure, and GHL integration so Meta leads flow directly into the pipeline with correct source attribution.
We set up CAPI integrations with Meta and GoHighLevel to ensure custom events are tracked accurately from the moment a lead opts in all the way through the sales process to purchasing a service — feeding Meta the most relevant data with warm and hot leads so Modern Image can continue optimizing its retargeting campaigns.
Phone system + Voice AI.
All four carrier compliance registrations completed and approved: A2P Messaging (Brand + Campaign), SHAKEN/STIR Voice, CNAM, and Voice Integrity. This is infrastructure most local businesses don't have — and without it, automated texts get filtered as spam and outbound calls show as unknown numbers.
On top of the compliance work: Voice AI agent for missed calls (collects service interest, offers to book callbacks), missed call text-back automation, AI chat bot deployed to the website, and the full team integrated on the GHL mobile app.
The custom Voice AI agent is set up to capture all relevant lead information including the type of service they are interested in, the year/make/model of their vehicle, and their contact information — ensuring the lead that the team will be reaching back out shortly.
The automation from the AI Agent then notifies the internal staff and sends a transcript, updates the client notes, and adds relevant follow-up tasks. Finally, the AI bot has the ability to schedule inquiry calls with staff members through the custom GHL-built calendars.
Full marketing takeover.
When we took over full marketing management in December 2025, the first thing we did was rebuild the analytics infrastructure from scratch — Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager with full conversion event tracking, and Search Console. For the first time, Modern Image could see exactly what leads and calls were coming from which channels.
Important note: Modern Image had an old Analytics and Tag Manager setup that was misconfigured and not fully integrated with their assets. This required our team to rebuild their analytics and reporting tools to ensure all data passed through is accurate and tracked so nothing falls through the cracks.
From there: owned Google Ads account launched, campaigns structured and running. New custom website pages and sales pages added. Pipeline automations and follow-up sequences tightened. GBP review request automations configured.
What the data actually shows.
I've broken this into three windows: the 2024 baseline, the full 2025 year, and Q1 2026 — which is the cleanest view of the system running properly.
Organic search — full year 2024 vs 2025.
In 2024, Modern Image received 147 organic clicks for the entire year — fewer than three per week. In 2025, after the full site rebuild and content strategy launched, that number grew to 1,856.
Organic clicks grew +1,163% year over year. Impressions grew +218%. Click-through rate grew +297% (0.26% → 1.03%).
That's a 12× increase in one year. The impression growth tells you Google is now showing the site for service keywords and comparison searches — not just brand name queries. The CTR improvement shows the new titles and meta descriptions are actually compelling people to click.
Q1 2026 vs Q1 2025 — the cleanest comparison.
234 → 793
23,712 → 46,883
0.99% → 1.69%
Average ranking position: 38.7 → 21.2 — 17.5 positions gained in 12 months.
Position 38 is page four. Position 21 is page two. Page one gets roughly 10× more clicks than page two. As those positions continue climbing, the traffic growth accelerates sharply.
Every traffic channel grew simultaneously in Q1 2026: organic +127%, paid search +129%, paid social +320%, direct +61%. That's not one thing working. That's the whole system pulling in the same direction.
The engagement time jump from ~12 seconds to 33 seconds tells you the site is doing its job — people are reading pricing tables, comparing packages, and exploring service pages rather than landing and leaving.
Q1 2026 conversion events.
In just the first three months of 2026, the site generated 871 lead events and 555 tracked phone call events.
These aren't new leads — they're the leads that were always coming in, now properly measured for the first time. The original GA4 property recorded 1 form submission in all of 2025. That was a tracking failure, not a lead failure. The 2026 numbers show what was always happening; now it's properly tracked.
GHL call report — Q1 2026.
- 424 inbound calls in Q1 2026.
- 88.9% answer rate (377 of 424 answered).
- 292 first-time callers — 270 answered (92.5% first-time answer rate).
- Average call duration: 1m 22s.
- Total call time: 9 hours 17 minutes in one quarter.
One detail worth highlighting: calls from Google Organic averaged 4 minutes 28 seconds — nearly 3× the overall average. Better-informed visitors, who found the site through search, are having deeper, more qualified conversations when they call. That's the SEO strategy showing up in call quality, not just volume.
GHL pipeline — tracked opportunities.
213 active opportunities in the pipeline, representing over $786,000 in tracked pipeline value.
All attributed to source, all with assigned opportunity values ($2K–$4K per lead). Before this pipeline existed, none of this was visible. Every lead arrived and disappeared.
- Chat Widget — New Lead: 31 opps
- GBP Phone Call — New Lead: 58 opps
- Website Phone Call — New Lead: 84 opps
- Ads Phone Call — New Lead: 37 opps
- Yelp — New Lead: 3 opps
Top pages — Q1 2026.
Some of the standout page growth tells the story of the strategy working exactly as designed:
- Fast & Furious Kits: 747 views — +24,800% YoY. No other PPF installer in San Diego can build this page. Modern Image owns that search territory and it compounds over time.
- Tesla PPF San Diego: 675 views — new page, didn't exist in Q1 2025.
- Modern Image Shop: 596 views — +3,625% YoY.
- Icon Rocklear: 591 views — +2,855%.
- Homepage: 2,900 views — +477%.
Starting from scratch. Owning every piece of it.
When we got involved in Modern Image's marketing in December 2025, there was no owned Google Ads account. Campaigns had been running through a previous agency's account — meaning Modern Image owned nothing, had no access to historical data, and would have lost everything if the relationship ended. The CPCs were running 3–5× above market rate. And despite all of that spend, there was zero trackable paid traffic showing in Google Analytics.
We started over. Clean account. Their ownership. Proper conversion tracking connected from day one. And a clear goal: get the right people to the site at the right cost, generate phone calls, and build from data — not assumptions.
Google Ads — January through March 2026.
— Source: Google Ads account. Jan 1 – Mar 13, 2026The Google Ads story has two chapters. We started with a broader "PPF – Calls" campaign in January to gather data. Average CPC was $17.02. Cost per click ranged $8–$40. Total of 67 clicks.
The data showed clearly: Tesla-specific searches and PPF-focused terms had the highest purchase intent. We paused the original campaign in early February and rebuilt the strategy from scratch around that insight.
Combined Q1 totals: 627 clicks, 22,000+ impressions, 31 direct leads (10 calls from ads + 11 click-to-call + 10 lead form submissions) at a cost per lead of approximately $85. Tesla-specific keywords are the standout performers — "tesla wrap" hit an 8.33% CTR, "tesla paint protection" hit 4.98%.
Three things pointing in the same direction.
Three things are consistent across every metric and they all point in the same direction.
Rankings are climbing toward page one.
Average position improved from 38.7 to 21.2 in twelve months — 17.5 positions gained. As the service pages continue moving from page two toward page one, the organic traffic growth we saw in 2025 will accelerate further. The commercial keywords just entering the index in 2026 — PPF San Diego, ceramic coating San Diego, Avant Guard products — are the high-intent queries that convert to booked jobs.
The Fast & Furious content cluster is a genuine competitive moat.
"Modern image fast and furious" went from 1 click in Q1 2025 to 92 in Q1 2026. No other automotive protection shop in San Diego has this franchise relationship. The entire query cluster — decals, wraps, car graphics, livery — is essentially uncontested search territory, and it compounds.
The infrastructure is now tracking what was always happening.
With every lead flowing into GHL, every call tracked, the A2P system fully approved, and Google Ads running on clean data — the team can follow up consistently, measure conversion from lead to booked job, and make data-driven decisions about where to invest. That foundation didn't exist eighteen months ago.
Modern Image is an active, ongoing client. Current work includes expanding location-specific service pages (Carlsbad, Oceanside, La Jolla, Del Mar, Rancho Bernardo), optimizing Google Ads campaigns, tightening pipeline automations, growing the Fast & Furious content cluster, and continuing to develop the online shop.
No googling required
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