Apex Landscaping: Google Ads

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 calls. Wrong numbers and spam are mostly filtered out or credited, but Google no longer credits a call from outside the service area. 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.