Negative return on a big push
“Made a big push starting the very beginning of Q4 last year. Spent a lot of money. I think we spent more than we brought in in revenue, much less profit.”
Case Study · Plumbing & HVAC · Colorado Front Range
Ad spend cut 75%. Leads more than doubled.
Mountain Valley Plumbing was spending up to $40,000 a month with its prior agency, converting 9% of clicks and losing money on it. Five months after moving to Elevated, it spends a quarter as much and tracks $640k in closed sales against it.
“I’d take 3×, I’m not going to lie. Especially if the reporting’s clear and we’re very confident it’s 3, we keep putting money in it.”
John Beck, Owner, Mountain Valley Plumbing · discovery call, April 2026
Five months later: a 17.6× return on ad spend.
01 The situation
$40,000 a month. Nine percent conversion.
The owner did not need convincing that something was wrong. He had already gone into the account himself.
Nothing was tracked
Plumbing traffic went to the homepage while purpose-built landing pages sat idle, and the phone numbers on those pages were the front-desk line. No one could tell website leads from Google Business Profile calls.
A 9% conversion rate nobody flagged
The agency’s own dashboard showed it. “They didn’t think it was a problem.” Google Business Profile posts went out with stock photos and, once, the placeholder text “insert technician.”
Told PPC could not work in Denver
Every other vendor said to stop running paid search. The goal was $10M in revenue within a couple of years; the lead engine to get there did not exist.
“You’re the only person that said they could probably pull off pay-per-click, and it’s shown that they can do it.”
John Beck, Owner, Mountain Valley Plumbing · discovery call, April 2026
02 The approach
Stop the bleeding, then rebuild the funnel.
Paid search was cut to what tracking could justify, every call got a tracked number, and the organic channels that were already working got the attention the budget had been hiding.
Paid search reset
Spend dropped from ~$30k to under $5k a month while tracking was put in place, then rebuilt to ~$12k by July around water heaters, AC and boilers with tracked numbers on every landing page.
LSA management
Category and budget tuning per trade; LSA became the volume paid channel at a $104 cost per lead.
Website rebuild
Team-first homepage built around the 800-review, 4.9-star reputation, a Safe Clean Home guarantee, three location profiles in the footer and a “Hack the Handyman” campaign the owner also took to radio.
Google Business Profile program
Three profiles optimized and monitored. GBP became the single largest source, 471 leads and $300k in tracked sales in five months.
Call tracking and attribution
Every source on its own number, matched to ServiceTitan jobs through Inbound Intel so the owner sees closed revenue by channel, not clicks.
Local rank tracking
Weekly geo-grid scans on the service terms that matter; “heater repair” top-3 map share tripled from April to September.
03 The results
A quarter of the budget, more than twice the leads.
The before period is the five months of the prior agency’s push, Oct 2025 to Feb 2026. The after period is Apr to Aug 2026.
- Tracked leads, 5 months
- 784
- Tracked closed sales
- $640k
- Cost per lead
- $46
- Cost per job sold
- $206
- Return incl. program fees
- 11.2×
- Ad spend
- Tracked closed sales
- Figures under each month = sales ÷ ad spend
Monthly figures
| Month | Ad spend | Tracked closed sales | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct ’25 | $19,446 | $0 | 0× |
| Nov ’25 | $28,024 | $0 | 0× |
| Dec ’25 | $35,688 | $0 | 0× |
| Jan ’26 | $35,993 | $0 | 0× |
| Feb ’26 | $28,121 | $0 | 0× |
| Mar ’26 | $10,999 | $0 | 0× |
| Apr ’26 | $4,862 | $79,521 | 16× |
| May ’26 | $2,905 | $115,979 | 40× |
| Jun ’26 | $3,937 | $99,382 | 25× |
| Jul ’26 | $11,666 | $202,887 | 17× |
| Aug ’26 | $13,084 | $142,489 | 11× |
The chart is deliberately lopsided. Under the prior agency there was spend and no attributable revenue, because nothing was tracked. From April, the same business, with a quarter of the budget, shows $80k to $203k a month in closed sales tied back to a marketing source. Monthly tracked leads went from 73 in April to 212 in August.
04 Channel breakdown
Where the leads come from now.
Organic channels that the old budget was drowning out turned out to be the best ones.
| Channel | Ad spend | Leads | Jobs sold | Tracked sales | Return |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | None | 471 | 105 | $300k | Organic |
| Local Services Ads | $24,027 | 232 | 39 | $126k | 5.2× |
| SEO (website) | None | 57 | 26 | $120k | Organic · 46% close |
| Google Ads | $12,427 | 23 | 7 | $94k | 7.6× |
| Total | $36,454 | 784 | 177 | $640k | 17.6× |
Before and after
| Measure | Prior agency (Oct ’25 to Feb ’26) | Elevated (Apr to Aug ’26) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly ad spend | $29,454 | $7,291 |
| Google Ads share of spend | 80% | 34% |
| Tracked leads per month | 65 (LSA only; nothing else was tracked) | 157 across all channels |
| Landing-page conversion rate | 9% (agency dashboard) | Tracked to the call, not the click |
| Closed revenue tied to marketing | None recorded | $640k |
| Map-pack top-3 share, “heater repair” (11×11 grid) | 18% · Apr 2026 | 57% · Sep 2026 |
| Map-pack top-3 share, “plumber near me” | 50% · May 2026 | 60% · Aug 2026 |
Spending $30k a month and not sure what it buys?
Elevated will show you the number before you spend the next dollar.
Data sources and methodology
- Spend: Google Ads and LSA actuals from the Elevated Engine KPI tracker for both periods (the Google Ads account history predates Elevated). Program fees are excluded from the 17.6× figure; including them, the return is 11.2×.
- Before period: Oct 2025 to Feb 2026. Only LSA leads were tracked then (326 over five months); Google Ads leads and all revenue attribution are unavailable because landing pages carried the front-desk number. The 9% conversion rate, the ~$40k monthly peak and the negative return are the owner’s statements from the April 8, 2026 discovery call. March 2026 was the transition month and is excluded.
- After period: Apr to Aug 2026. Leads are Inbound Intel lead candidates (one person per 90 days, spam and existing-customer calls removed) attributed to first touch; sales are ServiceTitan closed-job value matched to the originating lead. The April Google Ads figure includes one $63.6k install.
- Map share: Elevated Engine geo-grid scans, 11×11 grid, percentage of points ranking top 3.
- Quotes: verbatim from the recorded April 2026 discovery call, before results, lightly trimmed of filler.
Elevated Audience. Prepared September 15, 2026 from Elevated Engine, Inbound Intel, Google Search Console, Google Business Profile and recorded client strategy calls.