The Headline
$573K quoted. $223K sold. On $11K of ad spend.
Across a five-month window, paid search produced 171 tracked leads. 86 of them were worth quoting, generating $573,260 in written quotes and $222,990 in confirmed sold work — against $11,229.60 in media spend. Put plainly: it cost about five cents in advertising to book a dollar of revenue.
Background
High-Ticket Work, Thin Search Volume, Small Budget
Crawlspace and foundation work is a category where almost nobody browses. Homeowners search after something has already gone wrong — standing water under the house, a musty smell coming through the vents, a stair-step crack in the brick, a floor that has started to slope. Volume is low, seasonal, and spikes hard after heavy rain.
That makes the category unforgiving in both directions. Tickets run from a few thousand for encapsulation and a dehumidifier to five figures for piering and structural stabilization, so a single won job pays for months of advertising. But the same keywords also pull renters, DIYers, material shoppers and homeowners well outside the service area — traffic that costs exactly as much per click and is worth nothing.
The budget was kept deliberately small — roughly $2,300 a month — with a clear mandate: prove the channel on sold revenue before scaling it.
Industry
Crawlspace encapsulation, vapor barrier, moisture and mold remediation, dehumidification, sagging floor and joist repair, pier and beam, foundation settlement and wall stabilization.
Objective
Book quotable, in-territory inspections at a cost the ticket size can absorb — measured on sold jobs, not on form fills.
Revenue Performance
Quoted vs. Sold vs. Spend
Every lead graded, matched to its quote, and matched again to the sold job. Nothing below is a raw conversion count.
Quoted Pipeline
$573,260 86 quotable leads
Sold Revenue (Confirmed)
$222,990 38.9% of quoted
Total Ad Spend
$11,229.60 2.0% of quoted
Conversion Source Performance
How the 171 leads arrived — same period.
| Source |
Type |
Leads |
Share |
| Phone Call |
phone |
129 |
75.4% |
| Web Form |
form |
27 |
15.8% |
| Text Message |
message |
13 |
7.6% |
| Other |
other |
2 |
1.2% |
| Grand Total |
171 |
100% |
Lead Quality Grading
Every call and form reviewed and marked by an actual human.
| Status |
Leads |
Share |
Cost Each |
| Quotable |
86 |
50.3% |
$130.58 |
| Not Quotable |
84 |
49.1% |
$65.67 |
| Pending |
1 |
0.6% |
— |
| Grand Total |
171 |
100% |
$65.67 |
Campaign Efficiency
Key Metrics — Full Window
Total Leads
171
Calls, forms & texts
Quotable Leads
86
50.3% of all leads
Cost / Quotable Lead
$130.58
Against a $6,666 avg quote
Average Quote
$6,666
Per quotable lead
Quote-to-Sold Rate
38.9%
Measured in dollars, not jobs
Revenue / Lead
$1,304
Across all 171 leads
Results
What the Numbers Delivered
✓
19.9x return on sold work — every dollar of media spend returned $19.86 in confirmed, contractor-verified revenue.
✓
51x pipeline return — $573,260 in written quotes generated on $11,229.60 of spend, across 86 quotable leads.
✓
Better than half of all leads were quotable — 86 of 171, with only a single lead left unresolved across the entire five-month window.
✓
$65.67 cost per lead — in a trade where one piering or stabilization job can be worth more than an entire year of this budget.
✓
38.9% of quoted dollars closed — giving the contractor a reliable multiplier to forecast against as the budget scales.
Approach
How the Account Was Built
With a budget this small, there is no room for waste. Four decisions did most of the work.
Campaign Architecture
Moisture, structural and sagging-floor work split into separate campaigns. Encapsulation queries convert fast at a mid ticket; settlement and piering convert slowly at a high one. Blended together, the cheap conversions eat the budget and the expensive jobs never get bid on.
Built for the Phone
With three of every four leads arriving by phone, call assets were pushed to the front of the ad and bids weighted toward the hours the office actually answers. Calls were recorded and reviewed so the account learned from what was said, not just that a call happened.
Bidding & Budget
Quotable status and quote dollars were fed back into the account as the conversion signal. The system stopped chasing volume and started chasing the searches that turn into a truck in a driveway and a number on paper.
Geo & Negative Keywords
Radius targeting drawn around serviceable territory rather than metro-wide. Ongoing negative keyword work stripped out material shoppers, rental and tenant queries, DIY how-to searches and job seekers — the four groups that generate the most expensive nothing in this trade.
The Outcome
A 19.9X Return — With Half the Spend Still on the Table
Just under half of every lead in the window was graded not quotable — wrong county, renters, price-shopping on materials, or jobs outside what the crew takes on. At $65.67 a lead, that is roughly $5,500 of budget spent on calls that were never going to become a quote.
That is not a failure. It is the next gain. Cutting that waste in half without touching quotable volume would bring the cost of a quotable lead from $130.58 down to roughly $99 and free up budget to bid harder on the structural searches where the tickets are largest.
The account produced a 19.9x return while half the spend was still being wasted. For a contractor in this trade the math is simple: one encapsulation job pays for a month of advertising, and one foundation stabilization pays for the year. This is the argument for scaling the channel — not for calling it finished.
Method
Leads captured and graded through call tracking and web form tracking, then matched to the contractor’s quotes and sold jobs. Quoted and sold values are contractor-reported and attributed to paid search. Ad spend of $11,229.60 is media spend for the five-month window and excludes management fees. All percentages are calculated from the underlying counts and dollars shown above. Client name withheld at their request.
Google Ads
Crawlspace Encapsulation
Foundation Repair
PPC Management
Call Tracking
Revenue Attribution
Home Services
ROAS Optimization
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