No website in early August. 39 new leads in 30 days.

A real business with no presence online at all

The company does basement waterproofing, foundation repair and chimney repair across Fairfield County in Connecticut and Westchester and the lower Hudson Valley in New York. It was licensed and insured. Online it did not exist: no website, no logo, no job photos and no Google Ads history for the bidding system to learn from.

That matters for reading the result. An established account with two years of conversion data has a head start. This one had five days.

Chimney repair was the cheapest lead. Foundation had the least room left.

All three services converted between 16 and 18 percent of their clicks, which is the more interesting finding: the landing pages work about equally well, and the cost difference comes from what a click costs in each auction.

This table uses Google's own conversion count of 40, which includes the one repeat call, because Google does not split that out per campaign. Impression share is the portion of eligible searches the ads actually appeared for. Chimney repair at 52 percent means roughly half the available demand was never reached at this budget.

The Sunday it rained six inches: 12 of the 39 leads came in three days

On Sunday 13 September 2026 a flash flood hit the middle of this contractor's territory. Connecticut Public reported 6 to 7 inches of rain on the Norwalk to Westport stretch that morning, falling at 3 to 4 inches an hour, with the National Weather Service naming coastal Connecticut along I-95 and parts of Westchester County among the hardest-hit areas. The searches followed the water.

Two things made the storm count. The campaigns were already live with landing pages for each service, so there was nothing to build on a Sunday morning. And the budget had room: Google says a campaign might spend up to twice its average daily budget on a given day to catch a rise in traffic, which is what it did, spending $525 on the Sunday and $522 on the Monday, about three times an average day in the rest of the window. A campaign capped at its normal spend, or switched off for the weekend, would have missed most of it.

The searches that turned into leads

Ten of the converting search terms from the window. Notice how many end in near me, and that french drain and yard drainage searches booked through the waterproofing campaign, which tells you where the next campaign should come from.

Most of the volume is mobile, but desktop converted at a higher rate, which fits a purchase this size: people find you on a phone and come back on a computer. Tablets took $234 and produced nothing, which makes them the next thing to bid down.

Expensive clicks, converted more than twice as often

No published benchmark exists for waterproofing or foundation repair specifically, so these are the two nearest categories, and neither is a perfect match. WordStream's 2026 figures put Home and Home Improvement at an $8.33 click and a $90.92 lead across more than 13,000 campaigns. LocaliQ's 2025 figures put Construction and Contractors at a $5.31 click and a $165.67 lead across 3,211 campaigns, with home services converting 7.33 percent of clicks.

This account paid $25.00 a click, three to five times those averages, which is what exact match buying-intent traffic costs in Fairfield and Westchester. It still landed at $150 a lead, under the construction figure and over the home improvement one, because it turned 16.7% of clicks into new leads. When the click is that expensive the landing page is the only lever left, and it is the one most accounts never pull.

More on the trade: waterproofing and foundation repair marketing, the agency comparison for the trade, and chimney marketing, where there is no Local Services Ads category at all, which is why this account runs on Google Ads.