A service business fired their agency. We opened the accounts and found a year of neglect.
More Leads
Cost Per Lead
Leads at One Location
Service Business
Google Ads
8
more leads. 62% lower
cost per lead.
A service business with eight locations across multiple states fired their agency and asked us to take a look. Here’s what we found when we opened the accounts:
One location had spent $6,000 with zero tracked conversions.
Not zero leads. Zero tracking. Nobody set it up. The agency had been billing monthly for an account they couldn’t measure.
Every account was the same template with the city name changed.
Different markets, different office hours, different services, identical campaigns.
Performance Max campaigns running at a 1.3% conversion rate.
Thousands of impressions, almost no leads.
Campaigns targeting irrelevant services with zero clicks.
Not zero conversions. Zero clicks. Running for months.
Brand campaigns that had never served a single ad.
Built, billed for, never turned on.
No ad schedules anywhere.Ads running at 2am for offices that close at 5pm.
The accounts looked busy in a dashboard. Underneath, nobody had been paying attention.
Before we touched anything, we ran a full audit on every account. We went line by line through every campaign, every ad group, every keyword, and every dollar spent over the previous 12 months.
The goal was to understand exactly where the money had gone and why the results looked the way they did. Some of what we found was incompetence. Some of it was just neglect, campaigns that made sense once and hadn’t been revisited since.
The audit produced a prioritized rebuild plan for each location. Eight separate plans, because the problems at each location were different even if the previous agency had treated them like they were the same.
Nothing else mattered until we could measure what was happening. We built conversion tracking from scratch at every location: phone calls, form fills, appointment requests, each one attributed back to the campaign and keyword that drove it. At half the locations, this was the first time anyone had set it up. The previous agency had been reporting on clicks and impressions because that’s all they had.
Until you know which keywords produce leads and which ones just produce clicks, you can’t optimize. You can only guess.
Every account had campaigns that should have been paused months or years earlier. The PMax campaigns converting at 1.3%. The campaigns targeting irrelevant services with zero clicks. A remarketing campaign at one location burning $630 per conversion. Brand campaigns that had been built, presumably to justify a line item on a report, but never activated.
We cut all of it the same week. Every dollar in a dead campaign is a dollar not in a working one.
This is where the previous agency’s template approach did the most damage. A location in a competitive East Coast metro and a location in a mid-size Southern city don’t share a keyword landscape, a cost-per-click range, or a customer base. Building the same campaign for both guarantees that at least one of them is wrong. Usually both.
We built each location’s campaigns around its market. Local keyword research for each geography. Ad copy reflecting each office’s actual services, because not every location offers the same services, and advertising things you don’t provide is a fast way to burn budget on irrelevant clicks. Ad schedules matched to each location’s conversion data, not a blanket Monday-through-Friday template.
The previous agency had spread budget roughly evenly across all eight locations. That’s the easy way to do it. It’s also wrong. A location in a high-competition market with proven demand should get more budget than a location in a smaller market where $3,000 a month captures most of the available search volume.
We reallocated based on opportunity. Some locations got more budget than they’d had before. Some got less and produced the same number of leads for it. Location D went from $18,127 in spend to $7,173 and didn’t lose a single lead.
Service Business
Google Ads
8
more leads. 62% lower
cost per lead.
The accounts looked busy in a dashboard. Underneath, nobody had been paying attention.
| Location | Prior Spend | Prior Leads | BMD Spend | BMD Leads | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Location A | $24,858 | 155 leads | $26,970 | 331 leads | –49% CPL |
| Location B | $24,910 | 133 leads | $24,537 | 341 leads | –62% CPL |
| Location C | $5,889 | 0 leads | $7,514 | 66 leads | 0 → 66 |
| Location D | $18,127 | 79 leads | $7,173 | 80 leads | –61% CPL |
| Location E | $15,368 | 54 leads | $9,033 | 54 leads | –41% CPL |
Location B is the clearest comparison. Same location, same market, nearly identical budget. Their agency: 133 leads at $187 each. Us: 341 leads at $72 each. That’s 156% more leads and 62% less per lead. Same money. Different results.
Location D tells the other version of that story. Their agency spent $18,127 to generate 79 leads. We generated 80 leads for $7,173. Same output. Sixty percent less spend. That budget went back into the business.
Location C had spent $5,889 under the previous agency with zero tracked conversions. Not because the campaigns weren’t working, but because nobody built the tracking. After we rebuilt it: 66 leads per month.
more leads. 62% lower
cost per lead.
Their last agency billed them every month for a year. Never set up conversion tracking at half the locations. Never noticed that entire campaigns had zero clicks. Built brand campaigns that never served an ad. Ran remarketing at $630 a lead.
This isn’t rare. This is what most accounts look like when someone finally opens them up and checks. The difference between a managed account and a neglected one isn’t always obvious from a dashboard. It’s obvious from the results.
more leads. 62% lower
cost per lead.
We’ll open your account and show you what’s actually happening. If it’s clean, we’ll tell you. It usually isn’t.