Case study · 75-day engagement
A Seattle drywall company had 14 years of solid commercial work but their residential pipeline was dying. The owner blamed the rainy season. The actual problem: every time a homeowner had a water emergency at 11 PM, the company's Google Ads were paused, the office voicemail picked up, and a 24/7 competitor took the job. They were giving up the highest-margin work in the trade.
The challenge
The owner came in through a Yelp review thread where 4 different competitors were positioning as "24/7 water damage drywall repair." He wanted to know if it was real demand or just marketing. The bot scored his website at 58 and flagged "no after-hours conversion path" as the top issue.
We pulled his Google Ads call data + Google Trends:
The owner had thought his commercial work would always carry the residential side. He had not run residential ads after 5 PM in 7 years.
The plan
Turned the ads on around the clock with bid adjustments: -30% during business hours (less urgent intent), +70% from 6 PM to 1 AM (peak emergency demand), +40% on weekends. Same daily budget — the algorithm just spent it where intent was highest. Cost-per-emergency-call halved in week 1.
Set up a CallRail flow: any call after 5 PM or on weekends ringtones the owner's cell first (3 rings), then his foreman's cell, then his nephew (a college student looking for hours). Whoever picks up has a script to qualify, schedule a same-night assessment, and lock the job. Killed the voicemail entirely.
Submitted Local Services Ads application. License + insurance were already in place. Background check cleared in week 4, badge was live by week 5. First LSA call came in at 9:47 PM on a Saturday. Job booked the same night.
Built a single landing page at /water-damage-emergency with a phone number above the fold (tap-to-call, 60px tall on mobile), a "we are open right now" indicator pulled from CallRail availability, the 3 most common types of water damage with photos, and a callback form for people who needed help but did not want to talk.
AI tools we used
We do not pretend the work happens by hand. Three of our internal tools are the reason this engagement moved as fast as it did. Each of them replaces what used to be days of human time.
Custom AI we built that grades every search term on commercial intent, urgency, and local match in under a second. Replaces a half-day human audit.
Takes one bad search term and proposes the related variants we should also negate before they show up. Found 87 negatives nobody had thought of.
Crawls the site and fires every conversion event in a sandbox so you can see what is actually being recorded vs what should be. Caught the duplicate form fire in 4 minutes.
The execution
| Week | What we shipped | What moved |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Ad schedule expanded 24/7 with dayparted bids, callback form deployed | First after-hours emergency lead day 3 |
| Week 2 | CallRail after-hours routing live with cascading 3-person ring | After-hours pickup rate 22% → 87% |
| Week 3 | LSA application submitted, all docs gathered | Application accepted same week |
| Week 5 | LSA badge approved, first LSA leads start | $28 LSA CPL on emergency calls |
| Week 6 | Flooded-basement landing page launched, separate from main site | Form-fill conversion 8.4% on after-hours visits |
| Week 9 | Bid algorithms have 60 days of conversion data, Google Ads efficiency stabilizes | Search CPL settles at $54 |
| Week 10 | Quarterly review | Emergency lead run rate stable at 26/mo, retainer continues |
The numbers
The mix that produced the new run rate:
Average ticket on an emergency water damage job is $4,800. The +18 monthly emergency leads, even at the trade-standard 50% close rate, represents $43,000/mo in new gross revenue. The 75-day engagement at $799/mo cost less than one emergency repair.
I had been losing the after-hours work for 7 years. Mark looked at my ad schedule for 5 minutes and said: turn it on at night. The competitors I had been envious of were not better. They were just open.
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