When this tradesman got in touch, he was spending around $1,500 a month on Meta Ads and getting about fifty enquiries — close to $28 a lead. The cost itself was not the problem: it was that almost none of those enquiries turned into a job. Plenty of noise, very little signal.
We rebuilt it from the ground up. Here are the four changes that turned the campaign around.
01 We stopped targeting too broadly
The campaigns were running across all of Greater Montreal, all ages, unfiltered. The result: clicks from people outside the service area, or price-shopping with no real intent. We tightened to a 25 km radius around the workshop and excluded the neighbourhoods he did not travel to.
A budget concentrated on the right audience works ten times harder than the same budget spread across everyone.
Raw lead volume dropped at first. But the proportion of serious enquiries climbed immediately.
02 We changed what we were showing
The old ads showed generic photos and vague copy about "quality" and "craftsmanship". We replaced them with before-and-afters from real jobs, with a concrete hook: the type of project, the neighbourhood, the turnaround. People recognize themselves in a specific project, not in an abstract promise.
03 We fixed the landing page
The ads pointed at the site's home page, where the visitor had to hunt for how to request a quote. We built a single page dedicated to the campaign: a clear promise at the top, three photos, a short three-field form, and a clickable phone number. Nothing else to distract.
That change alone nearly doubled the click-to-enquiry conversion rate without touching the budget.
04 We sped up the response
Every submission now triggers an automatic confirmation text, and the lead lands directly on the tradesman's phone, not in a forgotten inbox. The call back happens within the hour during business hours.
The result after six weeks
Cost per lead down from $28 to $2.44, with a far higher rate of qualified enquiries. But the real number, the one that counts: his schedule filled up for two months, on the same monthly budget he started with. We did not spend more — we stopped wasting.
Noe of these four changes is rocket science. It is their accumulation, and the fact of measuring cost per actual customer rather than cost per click, that makes all the difference.
Google Ads remarketing — how to push cost per contact lower still, and from what traffic level.