Paid search switched off
Every pay-per-click campaign had been turned off because the campaigns were not producing good results.
Case Study · Plumbing, HVAC & Electrical · Greater Austin, Texas
Leads up 68%, tracked revenue up 73%, and a trade booked out for the first time.
SALT is a family-owned, three-trade home services company competing against private-equity rollups in Austin. It had switched paid search off entirely in early 2025 because it could not see a return. A year into the Elevated program, it is spending 42% more and earning 7× on it.
“The Elevated team is incredible! They’ve taken our SEO and PPC accounts and ‘elevated’ them exponentially. Their communication and expertise are second to none. Highly recommend!”
Melina Garza, Co-owner, SALT Service Co. · Google review
01 The situation
Three trades, one blind spot.
Electrical LSA carried the company. Plumbing and HVAC, the trades with the most growth headroom, were underfed. Paid search had been turned off for a quarter because nobody could prove it worked.
A site fragmented by vendor churn
184 pages, three different drain-cleaning URLs, locations scattered between city names and service areas. Google could not tell which page was the real one.
Attribution that did not add up
All PPC calls landed on one number tagged “website/GMB,” a dead phone number sat in the schema, and ServiceTitan would not open its API.
Read as a big corporation by AI
ChatGPT and Gemini were sourcing SALT as a large company. Its actual edge, local and family-owned against PE competitors, was invisible.
02 The approach
Campaigns by trade. Budgets by capacity.
Every trade got its own paid program with its own cost-per-booked-job target, and every dollar was tied back to a ServiceTitan job before the budget moved.
Paid search by trade and county
Separate electrical, HVAC and plumbing campaigns split Travis County from Williamson County, with day-parting from lead-value-by-hour data and a mini-split ad group that closed $11k on $2k.
LSA across seven accounts
Category and message-lead controls per profile, then the unusual step of pulling electrical back when the board filled.
URL silo and SEO rebuild
A city → trade → service architecture that took Hutto drain services from position 51 to 4 and put Cedar Park electrical terms at #1, with a full site rebuild scheduled for October 2026.
AI instant estimator
Task-priced quotes with financing on landing pages, then LSA and the main site. January alone: 11 quoted jobs, $107k in quotes, a membership signup and a $5,500 ticket.
Attribution stack
Call tracking moved to CallRail for native ServiceTitan campaign passing, Inbound Intel AI call scoring, and a shared SearchLight view for leadership.
AI visibility program
A 19-factor audit, unblocked GPTBot and ClaudeBot, static review markup, FAQ schema across 40 pages and 20+ tracked prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
“Plumbing is booked up for capacity? That’s music to my ears.”
Melina Garza, Co-owner, SALT Service Co. · July 2026
03 The results
More spend, better return.
Twelve months of attribution, Sep 2025 through Aug 2026. The before and after compares October to December 2025 with June to August 2026.
- New leads, 12 months
- 7,288
- Jobs sold
- 2,388
- Average job
- $2,329
- Quoted pipeline
- $30.6M
- Google reviews, 4.8★
- 5,164
- Ad spend
- Tracked closed sales
- Figures under each month = sales ÷ ad spend
Monthly figures
| Month | Ad spend | Tracked closed sales | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep ’25 | $73,004 | $185,513 | 3× |
| Oct ’25 | $74,907 | $367,591 | 5× |
| Nov ’25 | $67,171 | $553,725 | 8× |
| Dec ’25 | $72,133 | $304,280 | 4× |
| Jan ’26 | $60,333 | $304,752 | 5× |
| Feb ’26 | $62,194 | $310,630 | 5× |
| Mar ’26 | $74,745 | $442,023 | 6× |
| Apr ’26 | $72,365 | $427,107 | 6× |
| May ’26 | $88,113 | $541,083 | 6× |
| Jun ’26 | $98,978 | $626,903 | 6× |
| Jul ’26 | $104,117 | $892,060 | 9× |
| Aug ’26 | $100,040 | $605,400 | 6× |
Return on ad spend climbed from 2.5× in the first attributed month to 8.6× in July 2026 while monthly budget grew from $73k to $104k. Google Business Profile revenue rose from $86k a quarter (October to December 2025) to $553k (June to August 2026) with no media cost. By late August the electrical division was fully booked three days out, and for the first time in years the conversation was about pulling LSA back, not pushing it.
“Electrical is really crushing it. The electrical campaigns have the highest return on ad spend, almost a 10 times return, which is incredible. If we’re spending $300 to book a call and our average ticket’s $1,400, we’re doing pretty good there.”
Travis Mount, External Marketing Lead (Ethos), SALT Service Co. · strategy call, May 2026
04 Channel breakdown
Late 2025 versus summer 2026.
LSA lead volume rose 76% at a flat $80 cost per lead. Google Business Profile became a $550k-a-quarter channel.
| Channel | Spend Oct to Dec ’25 → Jun to Aug ’26 | Leads Oct to Dec ’25 → Jun to Aug ’26 | Tracked sales Oct to Dec ’25 → Jun to Aug ’26 | Return Jun to Aug ’26 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local Services Ads | $65k → $114k | 812 → 1,427 (+76%) | $580k → $928k | 8.1× |
| Google Ads | $149k → $181k | 548 → 632 (+15%) | $551k → $617k | 3.4× |
| Google Business Profile | None | 280 → 715 (+155%) | $86k → $553k | Organic |
| Total | $214k → $303k (+42%) | 1,668 → 2,804 (+68%) | $1.23M → $2.12M (+73%) | 7.0× |
Search and AI visibility
| Measure | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google average position, sitewide | 42 · spring 2025 | 23 · May 2026 | Nearly halved |
| Average position, plumbing terms | 63 | high 20s | Doubled |
| “Drain services Hutto” | #51 | #4 | URL silo fix |
| “Bathroom remodeling” (Hutto) | Not in top 100 | #4 | URL silo fix |
| “Electrician Cedar Park” | Not ranked | #1 | Local page program |
| “Who can fix my AC fast in Austin?” | Not cited | #1 in Gemini | AI visibility program |
| “Family-owned, not private equity” home services in Austin | Not cited | #2 Claude · #3 ChatGPT · #4 Gemini | AI visibility program |
Running three trades and not sure which one your ads are feeding?
Elevated builds campaigns per trade and per county, then scales them against your board.
Data sources and methodology
- Scope: leads, jobs sold, and tracked closed sales in this case study cover Google Ads, Local Services Ads, and Google Business Profile only. Website (organic search) leads and revenue are not included.
- Spend: Google Ads, LSA and Microsoft Ads actuals from the Elevated Engine KPI tracker. Program fees are excluded from channel returns; including them, the twelve-month return is 5.3×.
- Leads: Inbound Intel lead candidates (one person per 90 days across calls and forms, spam and existing-customer service calls removed), attributed to first touch.
- Sales: ServiceTitan closed-job value matched to the originating lead. Revenue attribution began September 2025, so the first attributed month is September 2025 although the program began June 2025.
- Positions: Google Search Console averages as read by the client on the May 11, 2026 call; individual keyword moves from the July 27, 2026 URL-silo review. AI citations from Elevated Engine prompt tracking, Aug 24, 2026.
- Reviews: Google Business Profile totals across five profiles as of July 2026.
- Quotes: the featured testimonial is Melina Garza’s Google review. Other quotes are verbatim from recorded client strategy calls, lightly trimmed of filler. Travis Mount is SALT’s external marketing lead (Ethos).
Elevated Audience. Prepared September 15, 2026 from Elevated Engine, Inbound Intel, Google Search Console, Google Business Profile and recorded client strategy calls.