CASE STUDY · SERVPRO OF CHULA VISTA
from impressions to qualified jobs
we took over the Google Ads account for a family-owned restoration franchise and rebuilt it on the same monthly budget they were already spending.
CLIENT
Family-owned franchise · Emergency Fire & water restoration · Home & Commercial
01 / THE NUMBERS
thirty days after taking the account over
the budget, service area, and phone setup all stayed the same. what changed was how the account was managed.
3.5x
QUALIIFIED LEADS FROM GOOGLE
these are real, in-territory leads the team could actually dispatch on, produced without raising the budget.
$14.73 → $9.45
COST PER CLICK
cutting the wasted clicks pulled the average cost down by more than a third.
15% → 50%
SHARE OF ALL QUALIFIED LEADS
Google had been a minor source of good leads. it's now the single biggest one.
3.09%→8.69%
CLICK THROUGH RATE
tighter targeting meant most people seeing the ads were actually looking for emergency restoration.
02 / THE MOMENT
the account was being run for volume
the previous agency optimized for the numbers that look good in a monthly report: a high call count, a low cost per click, lots of impressions. on paper it looked like the account was doing fine.
unfortunately, very little of it turned into actual work. over one four-week stretch, a single campaign produced 1355 impressions, 154 of the calls came through Google, and only two were qualified.
the real problem was what the account was being told to chase. the budget was set up to generate impressions when it should have been generating qualified jobs. that's the part we rebuilt.
03 / WHAT WAS HAPPENING
five problems, all common in franchise accounts
on their own none of these would sink an account. stacked together, they're why the spend wasn't producing work.
01
targeting.
a chunk of the budget was reaching people outside the service area. some traffic came from across the border in Mexico and still got logged as a conversion, for a company that only works in San Diego County.
02
keywords.
most of the budget sat on branded and broad keywords, while the searches that actually signal an emergency, like water damage, fire, and flood, were barely running.
03
conversions.
most of the "conversions" on the report were button taps and clicks for directions, not actual phone calls.
04
channel.
a Performance Max campaign was set to optimize for "local visits," which counts foot traffic to a storefront. this business drives to the customer, so those visits were worth nothing to them.
05
visibility.
reporting came once a month as a static PDF. in between, the owner had no way to see whether the account was being touched at all.
04 / WHAT WE BUILT
the three things we rebuilt
01
targeting and keywords
we rebuilt the keyword set around the searches people actually run during an emergency, and reset the geographic targeting to match the real service territory. the branded filler and the out-of-area traffic that had been padding the old numbers came out.
02
conversion tracking
we set up real call tracking with a 60-second minimum, so a call only counts once someone stays on the line long enough to be a genuine inquiry. once Google was learning from real calls instead of stray taps, the automated bidding started chasing the right thing.
03
ongoing management
someone works the account every week now, pruning negative keywords, adjusting bids, and keeping a live reporting view the owner can open whenever they want, instead of waiting on a monthly PDF after the fact.
05 / THE TAKEAWAY
a call is only worth paying for if it can turn into a job.
call volume looks good on a report and is simple to inflate, which is exactly why so many accounts end up chasing it. we'd rather track the number that shows up in revenue: qualified leads.
