The challenge: paying full price for the wrong clicks
The account looked busy — spend going out, clicks coming in, leads arriving. The problem was underneath: loose match types let Google expand the ads onto searches that were near the business but not of it, and every one of those clicks cost the same real money as a qualified one. In home services, where a single job is worth thousands, it’s easy for an account like this to look "fine" while burning more than half its budget on searchers who were never going to hire anyone.
The approach: pay for intent, nothing else
The rebuild started with match-type discipline: campaigns restructured so the ads ran against the searches the business actually wanted to win, not Google’s loose interpretation of them. Alongside that, an aggressive negative-keyword program — built and expanded continuously from real search-term data — systematically walled off the DIY searches, the job seekers, the bargain hunters, and the adjacent services the contractor doesn’t offer.
The other half of cost per lead is what happens after the click, so the landing pages were matched to intent rather than pointing everything at one generic page. A searcher looking for a kitchen remodel landed on kitchens; a bathroom searcher landed on bathrooms — with the proof, the photos, and the ask matched to the job they were considering. Same traffic, meaningfully more of it converting.
The results: 61% cheaper leads, none lost
Cost per lead fell 61%. The volume of leads did not fall with it — because the spend that was eliminated had been producing clicks, not customers. The account ended up doing what a well-run local service account should do: turning the same budget into roughly two and a half times the efficiency, with search-term reports clean enough to audit at a glance.
The broader lesson for local service advertisers: before raising budgets, find out what fraction of current spend is buying intent. It’s usually less than anyone expects — and fixing it is the cheapest growth available.