78% of their conversions weren't conversions. That was just the beginning.
This Yorkshire-based company offers professional exterior cleaning — roofs, driveways, patios, gutters. The kind of work homeowners put off until something forces the issue, and then want done quickly by someone they trust. The account had been running for a year. Spend was relatively stable, CPA had been around £20 during the summer, but had crept up to £49 by the time they came to us.
The problem was that the account was measuring the wrong things and spending on the wrong searches. 78% of reported conversions were clicks to call or clicks to email — a tap on a phone number, a click on an email address. No call connected. No message sent. No job discussed. These were being counted identically to quote requests and callback forms, which meant the reported CPA of £70 in Search was masking a real CPA closer to £94.
Underneath that: smart bidding paying up to £35 per click on irrelevant searches, DIY-intent keywords absorbing hundreds of pounds with zero real conversions, and a best-performing keyword only showing on a quarter of available searches because its bid was too low. One ad running in every ad group, unchanged, with no keyword relevance and no CTA.
"Smart bidding without clean conversion data doesn't optimise. It guesses. And when it guesses with £35 clicks on searches that were never going to book a roof clean, the budget disappears before it can find the searches that would have."
Spend increased by only 20%. The CPC reduction reflects what happens when smart bidding is replaced with manual control grounded in real conversion data: Google stops paying £34 for clicks on competitors' names and starts finding the searches that actually book jobs.
The 57% reduction in cost per conversion is the compounded result of fixing tracking, removing wasted spend, and bidding more on what was working. Each change individually would have moved the number. Together they transformed it.
The account had the ingredients for good performance — the right services, real demand, a business that does the work properly. What it was missing was an honest read of what was actually converting, and bids that reflected that. Smart bidding without clean conversion data doesn't optimise. It guesses. And when it guesses with £35 clicks on searches that were never going to book a roof clean, the budget disappears before it can find the searches that would have. Three months of clean data changes what the account can do next.
20 minutes. Enough to spot the major issues, understand what you need, and give you a realistic idea of what we'd do and what it would cost.
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