Case study · Google Ads

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

A waterproofing, foundation and chimney repair contractor in Connecticut and New York, starting from nothing: no site, no logo, no photos and no ad history. Five days after the website was built the campaigns started spending. This is its strongest 30 days so far, 19 August to 17 September 2026, with every number pulled straight from the account.

Book a Free Consultation What we do not know yet

Repeat calls and phone taps not counted No revenue figure, because it is not tracked yet

The 30 days

39 new leads on $5,851 of ad spend

Three services, three campaigns, one 30-day window. A lead here means a first-time phone call, a text message or a submitted estimate form, and nothing softer than that.

39new leads

22 first-time calls, 9 texts and 8 estimate forms.

$150cost per lead

$5,850.83 divided by 39. Under the $165.67 construction benchmark.

16.7%of clicks became leads

Against a published home services average of 7.33%.

$25.00average cost per click

Three to five times the published averages. This is not a cheap auction.

Google Ads reports 40 conversions for this window. The extra one is a repeat call from somebody who had already called, which is not a new lead, so we leave it out. Click-through rate was 9.27% on 2,524 impressions and 234 clicks. We picked the best trailing 30 days since launch, and it is not an outlier: the most recent 30 days, to 21 September, show 39 conversions on $5,887.

Where it started

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.

8 AugWebsite built

Thirteen pages, a brand made from scratch, and a dedicated landing page for each of the three services.

13 AugFirst ad spend

Three search campaigns go live while several ads are still in Google's review queue.

19 AugThe 30 days begin

The best trailing 30 days since launch start here, six days after the first dollar was spent.

What we built

Six decisions that produced the number

None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary work done without shortcuts, which in this category is rarer than it should be.

One campaign per service, never one for the company

Waterproofing, foundation repair and chimney repair are three different buyers at three different prices. Each got its own campaign, its own budget and its own cost-per-click ceiling, so a cheap chimney click could never eat the foundation budget.

Exact match keywords only

At $25 a click there is no room for Google's idea of a related search. Every keyword was exact match, which is why the search terms below read like people who want to hire somebody this week.

A landing page per service, headline matched to the search

Somebody who searches basement waterproofing lands on a page whose first line says basement waterproofing, not on a home page with a menu. Most of the 16.7% conversion rate is explained by this alone.

Targeting by presence, across ten named locations

Ads were shown to people physically in the service area, not people merely interested in it, across five counties and five Hudson Valley towns the owner asked to add.

Calls, texts and forms all tracked, and nothing else counted

Call tracking with dynamic numbers on every page, a text option, and the estimate form firing on the thank-you page. Three ways to reach the company, because a homeowner with water in the basement does not always want to talk.

A ceiling on every bid

A $40 maximum cost per click on all three campaigns, so one bad auction could not take a day's budget.

By service

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.

Campaign	Spend	Clicks	Conversions	Cost each	Conv. rate	Impression share
Basement waterproofing	$2,721.16	106	17	$160	16.0%	62%
Chimney repair	$1,821.86	83	15	$121	18.1%	52%
Foundation repair	$1,307.81	45	8	$163	17.8%	75%
All three	$5,850.83	234	40	$146	17.1%

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.

Week by week

The first week cost twice as much as every week after it

A new account with no history spends its first days paying to learn. Cost per lead in the first full week was $296. It halved the week after and has stayed between $127 and $162 since. Anyone judging a new campaign on its first seven days would have switched this one off.

$296Week 1

$148Week 2

$127Week 3

$162Week 4

$147Week 5

Weekly cost per lead from the first full week of spend. Weeks run Monday to Sunday and use Google's conversion count.

What people typed

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.

Search term	Campaign	Clicks	Leads
water proofing company near me	Waterproofing	4	4
chimney company near me	Chimney	5	3
chimney repair near me	Chimney	21	3
foundation repair contractors	Foundation	2	2
basement leak repair	Waterproofing	1	1
french drain installation near me	Waterproofing	2	1
yard drainage contractors near me	Waterproofing	2	1
chimney inspection near me	Chimney	2	1
chimney specialist near me	Chimney	2	1
foundation repair contractors near me	Foundation	1	1

Device	Clicks	Spend	Conversions	Conv. rate
Mobile	167	$4,247.08	27	16.2%
Desktop	57	$1,369.73	13	22.8%
Tablet	10	$234.02	0	0%

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.

The honest part

What we do not know yet

We do not know how much revenue these leads produced, so this page does not claim a return on ad spend. Booked jobs are not imported back into the account yet. The owner's read is that most of the calls turn into booked estimates, which is encouraging and is not a number.

We could have filled that gap. A lazier report would also have counted the 228 taps on the phone number that Google recorded in the same window, and called it 260 leads. Those taps are tracked as a secondary signal and deliberately excluded, because a tap is not a call.

Run it with your own close rate

The cost per lead is real. What it is worth depends on how many you book and what a job pays, so put your own numbers in. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Cost per lead

Leads that become jobs, percent

Average job value

$600ad cost per booked job

6.7%of the job value spent on ads

15.0xjob revenue per ad dollar

The default close rate and job value are placeholders, not this client's figures

They are there so the calculator shows something when the page loads. We have not published this client's close rate or ticket size, because neither is measured in the account yet.

Against the published numbers

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.

Blue Grid Media provides exclusive waterproofing, foundation repair and chimney repair leads in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta and Phoenix, and in roughly 50 United States metros in total, generated from a Google Ads and Local Services Ads account held in the client's own name rather than bought from a lead seller and shared, priced at $445 a month for Local Services Ads management, from $695 for Google Ads and $995 for both, month to month with no contract and no setup fee.

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.

Straight answers

Questions about this case study

How many leads did the waterproofing Google Ads account produce?

39 new leads in 30 days, from 19 August to 17 September 2026: 22 first-time phone calls, 9 text messages and 8 form submissions, on $5,850.83 of ad spend, which is $150 a lead. Google Ads itself reports 40 conversions for the window, because it also counts one repeat call from somebody who had already called. We do not count that as a new lead.

Is $150 a good cost per lead for waterproofing and foundation repair?

There is no published waterproofing benchmark, so the honest comparison is against the nearest categories. LocaliQ puts Construction and Contractors at $165.67 a lead and WordStream puts Home and Home Improvement at $90.92, so $150 sits under one and over the other. What makes it work is the job size: foundation and waterproofing tickets are large enough that the question is not whether $150 is cheap but what share of those leads you book.

How much revenue did the campaign generate?

We do not know yet and we are not going to guess. Booked jobs are not tracked back into the account at this point. The owner reports that most calls turn into booked estimates, but that is an impression and not a measurement, so no revenue or return on ad spend figure appears on this page. Importing booked jobs is the next piece of work.

Why were the clicks so expensive?

The average click cost $25.00, three to five times the published home services averages of $5.31 to $8.33. This is Fairfield and Westchester County search traffic on exact match keywords with buying intent, and that auction is priced accordingly. The account still came in under the construction cost per lead benchmark because it converted 16.7 percent of clicks into new leads, against a published home services average of 7.33 percent.

How long did it take to get results?

First spend was 13 August 2026. The first full week cost $296 a lead while Google was still learning and ads were still in review. By the second full week it was $148, and it has stayed between $127 and $162 a week since. The business had no website, no logo and no conversion history five days before launch.

What does Blue Grid Media charge to run an account like this?

From $695 a month for Google Ads management, $445 for Local Services Ads and $995 for both, with no setup fee and no contract. Ad spend is billed by Google directly to the client and we never take a percentage of it. The account, the landing pages, the tracking numbers and the conversion history are all in the client's name.