Case study · 90-day engagement
A Phoenix HVAC owner had been spending $9,400 a month on Google Ads with the same agency for 13 months. The phone rang, sometimes. The cost per lead had crept up every quarter. He could not get a straight answer about why.
The challenge
The owner came in through our free audit. The bot scored the account at 61 and flagged search term hygiene as the top issue. He had been with a generalist agency that was running 22 other accounts. They had not opened a search term report in months.
We pulled the last 12 months of search terms. The damage:
The previous agency was charging $1,250 a month for management. The audit alone cost us six hours of work. The first quarter of changes paid for the next two years of our retainer.
The plan
The owner already had the licensing, the insurance, and the reviews. The application had been 80% finished for six months. We submitted it on Tuesday, the background check cleared Friday, and they were live in the LSA pack the following Monday. First booked job came in at 11:47 AM that day.
We pulled every search term that had ever served, scored it for commercial intent, and bulk-added 412 negatives. A lot of these were low-intent words ("cheap," "free," "diy," "training," "school"). Some were brand confusions (the city has a competitor with a similar name). Some were just noise. Spend dropped 23% the same week. Booked jobs went up.
GA4 had an empty events container. The phone-click event was firing on every page load instead of on click. The form was tracked twice (once via gtag, once via WordPress). We rebuilt the entire measurement layer from scratch. Within ten days the bid algorithms had real data to work with and the same daily budget started returning more booked jobs.
The headlines were running on the platform-suggested defaults. We wrote 18 unique headlines built around what an HVAC customer in Phoenix actually searches in summer ("AC down today," "house is 95 inside," "freon recharge near me"). CTR went from 2.1% to 4.7% over six weeks.
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 | LSA application finished and submitted, audit complete | LSA approved by day 7 |
| Week 2 | 412 negatives bulk-added, ad group restructure | Spend down 23%, booked jobs up 11% |
| Week 3 | Tracking rebuild: GA4 events + Google Ads import | Bid algorithm has real data again |
| Week 4 | 18 new headline variants live, RSAs rebuilt | CTR climbing toward 4.7% |
| Week 6 | First quote-aware landing pages shipped | Form-fill rate doubled |
| Week 8 | LSA bid + budget tuning after enough data | LSA cost per lead settles at $28 |
| Week 12 | Quarterly review, retainer continues | Run rate stable at $34 blended CPL |
The numbers
The $34 blended CPL breaks down to:
The previous agency had been charging $1,250 a month for 13 months. Total spend with them: $16,250. They had no after-the-fact plan to fix what they were doing wrong. Our 90-day engagement at $799/mo cost $2,397 and freed up $3,600 a month in wasted spend. The owner kept us on retainer.
I spent a year asking my last agency to explain the spike in CPL. The answer was always "Google is changing." Mark sent me a Loom video the same week we signed showing me which 412 keywords were the problem. I never got that out of the other guys.
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