Case Studies
Anyone can sell you clicks. These four Chicagoland businesses are measured the way their owners count instead: a job booked, a customer who came back, an order worth more than last year’s, someone asking directions to the door.
Skeeter Beater
Revenue up 75% on 77% less ad spend
Mosquito and tick control, Lake County and the North Shore. Paid search, email, SEO.
Apex Landscaping
$20,800 in ads, roughly $300,000 in booked work
Landscaping design-build, maintenance and snow management, Chicagoland. Google Ads, Local Services, SEO, website.
Chicago Martial Arts
From a dormant account to 217 goal completions
Martial arts school, Chicago. Google Ads.
Fall Into Pumpkins
Revenue up 261%, average order up 130%
Premium fall porch displays, Chicagoland. Shopify store, landing pages, content.
Case Study
Skeeter Beater: Paid Search & Email
The problem
Most of the ad budget was going to one billboard. It was visible, it felt like advertising, and not one booking could be traced back to it. Meanwhile the customers who had already paid once were left alone between seasons, and quietly did not come back.
Skeeter Beater has been treating for mosquitoes and ticks across Lake County and the North Shore since 2003. The work was never the problem. It was that nothing in the marketing could say which spending had produced any of it.
Approach
- We recommended dropping the billboard. It was the biggest line in the budget and the hardest to argue with, because a billboard looks like advertising in a way a search campaign never does. What it could not do was name a single customer it had brought in. Moving that money into search meant trading something visible for something countable.
- Spend the freed-up budget on old customers before new ones. The obvious move when the ad bill drops is to chase more first-time bookings with what is left. The first campaigns went the other way, to people who had already paid Skeeter Beater once and had simply never been asked again, timed to the start of the treatment season.
- Write pages for the towns Skeeter Beater actually treats, and no others. The tempting version of local SEO is a page for every suburb within driving distance. Pages were built only for the communities the business genuinely serves, because a page that wins a search the company then has to turn down is worse than no page at all.
Results
Through 9 September 2026, with the treatment season still running
Revenue grew from $195,492 to $341,321 while advertising spend fell 77%.
Concentrating budget into measurable paid search
Return on ad spend went from 1.50x to 6.11x
Seasonal email to the existing customer base
Client retention rose from 47.6% to 73.9%
Repeat business from customers who came back
Revenue from returning clients grew from $34,891 to $122,425, and the total client base grew from 188 to 315.
Case Study
Apex Landscaping: Google Ads
The problem
When a job is worth $6,000 to $10,000 and takes time to close, the price of a click tells you nothing. The same cost per lead is either a bargain or a disaster depending on how many of those leads turn into signed work, and it is entirely possible to spend for years without ever finding out which.
Apex does design-build and maintenance landscaping across Chicagoland. In the whole of 2022, paid search brought the site four visits. The company was not advertising in any meaningful sense, and every lead it got came from people who already knew to look for it.
Approach
- Cover the whole service range, but only searches with intent behind them. Apex sells everything from a one-off design build to ongoing maintenance and snow management, and guessing in advance which of those would pay was not worth doing, so campaigns ran across all of it. What they never bought was general awareness. The money went to people already looking to have the work done, not to people reading about landscaping.
- Raise the budget only after the number came down, never before. Spend grew from a small starting base to roughly $1,600 a month, and every increase followed a drop in cost per lead rather than anticipating one. That is slower than committing a budget up front, and it is the reason the spend curve never ran ahead of the results.
- Add a channel that charges per phone call, not per click. Google Local Services bills when someone actually rings, and a lead that turns out to be a wrong number or the wrong county can be disputed. It is a second account to run and it competes with the search campaigns for the same searches, which is why plenty of accounts skip it. For a business selling one job at a time, the overlap was worth it.
- Judge the account by what a customer costs, not what a click costs. The account is read against Apex’s own close rate and job prices rather than against platform benchmarks. A lead price that would be alarming for a low-ticket business is cheap for work of this size, and there is no way to know which of those you are looking at without doing that arithmetic.
Results
Google Ads, February 2023 to September 2026
$20,800 of search advertising has produced roughly $300,000 in booked work.
What a won job actually costs to buy
$408 to win a job worth $6,000 to $10,000
September 2026, at the highest monthly spend yet
Cost per lead down to $59, from $114
Local Services Ads, in its first twelve months
267 charged leads at $54 each, roughly 75 more booked jobs.
Case Study · 2024
Chicago Martial Arts: Google Ads
The problem
If you have ever set up a Google Ads account, run it for a while and then let it go quiet, this is that story. Nobody cancels the account. It just sits there while the business goes back to hoping people find it on their own.
That was Chicago Martial Arts in 2023. Across the whole of that year it spent nothing and recorded no goal completions at all. The account was in working order. It was simply not being used.
Approach
- Restart at a size the school could afford to be wrong about. The first month back was $153. By December it was $1,701, and every raise in between followed a month where the goal numbers held. That kept the account below what it could have spent for most of the year, which was the point. An account that has been dark for a year has nothing recent to work from, and it is cheaper to learn that at February’s budget than at December’s.
- Advertise one program, not the whole school. The obvious approach is to promote everything a school teaches and let people sort themselves out. The budget went behind Little Ninjas instead. A narrow ad answers a specific search, and a school that clearly shows up for one thing beats a school that shows up vaguely for all of them.
- Run it all year instead of around enrollment. Martial arts schools have obvious sign-up moments, and the tempting move is to concentrate the budget there. Spend ran continuously from February through December instead. People decide to walk into a dojo when something in their own life prompts it, not when a term starts, and an account switched off half the year misses those people and loses its footing every time it restarts.
- Report against the school’s own definition of a lead. A directions request is easy to wave away as a soft metric. For a room with a door people have to physically walk through, someone pulling up the route is close to the real thing, and it is what the school counts. The account was judged on the goals the school cared about rather than the ones that would have looked best in a report.
Results
2024, the first year of active advertising, starting from a dormant account
217 goal completions on $9,570 of ad spend.
What each completed goal cost to generate
$44 per goal completion
The action people took most often
179 asked for directions to the school
The year before, for comparison
$0 spent, and not a single goal recorded. The account sat idle for twelve months.
Case Study
Fall Into Pumpkins: Ecommerce Growth
The problem
You build the premium version of your product, put it on the site next to the entry option, and watch customers pick the cheap one. The price list says one thing about the business. The order history says another.
Fall Into Pumpkins designs and installs fall porch displays, founded in 2024 and heading into its second season. It sold four packages, from delivery only up to a fully designed and installed display, and almost every order landed at the bottom of that range. The business was selling the cheapest version of its own work.
Approach
- Stop leading with the cheapest thing on the menu. The safe move for a young business is to put the lowest price in front, win the order and hope to upgrade people later. The store was rebuilt the other way, around the packages that include design and installation, with the add-ons presented as part of the display rather than as extras at checkout. The risk was real: move the entry tier out of the spotlight and you can lose the customers who were only ever going to buy it.
- A page for each of the 15 towns, not one page listing them all. The shortcut is a single service-area page with the suburb names in a list on it. Each community got its own page instead. It is a great deal more writing, and it is the only version that puts a page about someone’s own town in front of them.
- Open the channels that cost time instead of money. The reflex when orders are thin is to raise the ad budget. Paid spend was not the lever here. Social content ran through the booking window and email went to previous customers, two channels that were close to unused going into the season, and neither of them bills by the click.
Results
Comparing the same booking window, 1 July to 9 September, across both seasons
Revenue grew 261% and the average order more than doubled.
Social content through the booking window
Social visits up 245%
Local landing pages and content
Organic search visits up 57%
Email marketing, from a standing start
A channel that delivered almost nothing the previous season brought 533 visits into the booking window.
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