126 leads short of budget
January 2026 delivered 492 service-and-drain leads against a budget of 718, at an $817 average ticket.
Case Study · Plumbing & Drain · Tulsa, Oklahoma
From “what are we paying for?” to a 13% year-over-year August.
Williams Plumbing & Drain is a family-owned, 6,000-review Tulsa plumber that was 126 leads short of budget in January and could not get its agency to answer a question. Five months after switching to Elevated, August 2026 was its third-biggest month in a year.
“Oh, let me tell you. That’s absolutely unbelievable. My first year here, August and September were rather gloomy. So that’s huge.”
Tandi Wells, Marketing & Operations, Williams Plumbing & Drain · on August revenue up 13% year over year, September 2026
01 The situation
Great plumbers. No answers.
Williams had the crown for most five-star reviews in Tulsa and a CSR team that booked well. The problem was upstream: not enough leads, and no way to see what the marketing budget was buying.
An agency that would not answer
SEO was in the vendor’s name and in the contract, but four requests for a status went unanswered. The team had no access to its own data.
Paid built on Performance Max
PPC ran on PMax plus a branded campaign. The site’s biggest asset, its review count, appeared in none of it.
A slow, thin website
Mobile speed 45/100 with a 20.7-second largest contentful paint, roughly 85 ranking keywords, and only a fifth of service pages built.
“I’ve asked a question four times. I don’t mind paying a little bit more for better success, but I would like to know where we’re at, what you’re doing with what I’m paying you for. What are we paying for? And what are we getting?”
Clint Williams, Owner, Williams Plumbing & Drain · discovery call, March 2026
02 The approach
New site. New numbers. Nothing inherited.
Elevated started from zero on a fresh domain, rebuilt paid search around high-ticket services, and put every call and form in front of the client in real time.
New website on a new domain
Conversion-first build with a live review feed, tabbed services and priority pages for Broken Arrow, Owasso, Bixby, Jenks and Claremore. Hosting, domain and 170 referring domains migrated.
Google Ads rebuilt for search
PMax retired. Dedicated search campaigns for drain cleaning, slab leaks, water heaters and repipes, with bid schedules tuned to the mid-week call dip.
Local Services Ads management
Weekly lead disputes, category tuning and budget pacing against technician capacity.
SEO content and technical work
Four new pages a month, a rebuilt drain-cleaning page, technical fixes and backlink outreach. Page-one keywords roughly tripled in five months.
Attribution and call intelligence
ServiceTitan campaign cleanup, 74 unused tracking numbers retired, and Inbound Intel scoring every call so the team can see missed revenue by hour.
Reputation and retention
Review notifications to the CSR chat, a giveaway that now routes 50 requests a day to Google, and a $19.99 VIP membership plan built from the ground up.
“I actually look at it every day. That’s what I’m cheering on every day, that little bar going up.”
Tandi Wells, Marketing & Operations, Williams Plumbing & Drain · on the live reporting dashboard, August 2026
03 The results
Third-biggest month in a year, five months in.
Attribution runs from the April 2026 go-live. Sales are ServiceTitan closed jobs matched to the first marketing touch.
- Tracked closed sales
- $2.18M
- Quoted pipeline
- $8.9M
- New leads
- 3,246
- Close rate
- 50%
- Cost per job sold
- $133
- Ad spend
- Tracked closed sales
- Figures under each month = sales ÷ ad spend
Monthly figures
| Month | Ad spend | Tracked closed sales | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr ’26 | $41,162 | $395,972 | 10× |
| May ’26 | $37,865 | $391,785 | 10× |
| Jun ’26 | $42,955 | $469,631 | 11× |
| Jul ’26 | $46,652 | $517,665 | 11× |
| Aug ’26 | $46,909 | $401,268 | 9× |
Lead volume held above 560 a month from the first full month, against 492 in the January before the switch. July was the highest-revenue month in the client’s books ($455k company-wide), and August came in 13% ahead of the prior August while the CSR team was short-staffed.
04 Channel breakdown
Google Ads went from afterthought to best channel.
LSA still carries the volume. Rebuilt search campaigns now return more per dollar with the highest average job value in the account.
| Channel | Ad spend | Leads | Jobs sold | Close rate | Tracked sales | Return |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local Services Ads | $169,238 | 1,986 | 878 | 44% | $1.10M | 6.5× |
| Google Ads | $40,771 | 326 | 235 | 72% | $311k | 7.6× (9.7× in Aug) |
| Google Business Profile | None | 720 | 395 | 55% | $582k | Organic |
| SEO (website) | None | 152 | 102 | 67% | $181k | Organic |
| Total | $215,543 | 3,246 | 1,626 | 50% | $2.18M | 10.1× |
Organic visibility
| Measure | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search impressions (monthly) | 211,133 · Mar 2026 | 577,402 · Aug 2026 | +173% |
| Organic clicks (monthly) | 589 · Mar 2026 | 942 · Aug 2026 | +60% |
| Keyword footprint (top 100) | 1,825 · Jul 2026 | 2,500 · Sep 2026 | +37% |
| Keywords ranking top 3 | 94 · Jul 2026 | 280 · Sep 2026 | 3× |
| “Repiping Tulsa” / “Faucet repair Tulsa” | #5 / #6 | #1 / #1 | Page one, spot one |
| AI answers | Not cited | ChatGPT “best all-around pick in Tulsa”; #1 in Gemini | New channel |
Reviews kept pace: 61 new Google reviews in August alone on a base of roughly 6,000.
“Our coach did clearly say, you’ve been doing very good with Fuller, and they brag on you all the time, which is the reason I called.”
Clint Williams, Owner, Williams Plumbing & Drain · on why he called, March 2026
Tired of asking your agency the same question four times?
Elevated gives you a live dashboard the client team actually opens every day.
Data sources and methodology
- Spend: Google Ads, LSA and Meta actuals from the Elevated Engine KPI tracker. Program fees are excluded from the 10× figure; including them, the five-month return is 8.4×.
- Leads: Inbound Intel lead candidates (one person per 90 days, spam and existing-customer calls removed), attributed to first touch. The January 2026 figure of 492 is the client’s own ServiceTitan count for the service-and-drain department, quoted on the March discovery call.
- Sales: ServiceTitan closed-job value matched to the originating lead. Company-wide figures (July $455k, August +13% YoY, $8.1M trailing twelve months) are from the client’s ServiceTitan reporting as reviewed on the Aug 5, Aug 26 and Sep 2 strategy calls.
- Organic: Google Search Console for williamsplumbinganddrain.com. Keyword counts from the SEO rank tracker as reported on the Sep 2 and Sep 9 calls. AI-answer citations checked Sep 2, 2026.
- Website baseline: PageSpeed and keyword figures from the March 2 discovery audit.
- Quotes: verbatim from recorded client strategy calls, 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.