Foundation repair traffic more than doubled in 90 days, and a $70K-a-year ad leak got closed

What the account was counting as a lead

In October to December 2025, before we touched the Ads account, it recorded 2,195 conversions, about 730 a month, on roughly $29,000 a month of spend. Read the list of what was being counted and the problem is obvious: 742 were visits to the schedule-now page, 625 were a contact_us event firing from Analytics, 315 were clicks on “Ask an Expert”, 237 were steps in the appointment process. None of those is a person asking for an inspection. The things that were: 69 phone leads through Google’s pay-per-lead ads, 22 contact forms, 18 calls from ads and 48 calendar bookings. Call it 157 real contacts in the quarter, around 51 a month, and an account that was optimising itself toward page views.

What it counts now, and what that did to the spend

From 1 June to 22 August 2026 the account recorded 177 conversions, about 64 a month: 125 pay-per-lead phone leads, 29 lead forms, 21 calls from ads and 2 bookings. On paper, conversions fell by more than 90%. In reality, the real ones went up by about a quarter while monthly spend came down to roughly $25,000. Cost per real lead went from about $570 to about $390.

Two campaigns explain most of the waste. A Performance Max retargeting campaign spent $18,000 in the last quarter of 2025 for 113 of the fake conversions and has spent nothing since at least the end of May 2026. A Smart campaign spent $12,960 between late May and late August 2026 for 29,531 clicks and zero conversions once the fake ones were removed; it was paused at the end of July, and the account’s click count fell from 13,000 a month to under a thousand in August with no loss of real leads. Those two campaigns together were running at well over $70,000 a year.