Get 10 quotable foundation jobs in 30 days. Or you pay nothing.
Independent Google Ads operator for US foundation repair and basement waterproofing contractors. You pay when the quotable jobs land. Not before.
From the Robbins & Co account, first six weeks. Full numbers below.
Verified Google Ads results / real contractor accounts
Your account is not short of budget. It is short of the right traffic.
Your dashboard counts taps, not jobs
Google records a tap on your phone number, a click for driving directions and a completed quote request as the same kind of conversion. Smart Bidding then optimises toward whichever is cheapest to produce, which is the tap. If your dashboard says 70 conversions and your office counted 19 real enquiries, your bidding has spent the month training on the gap.
Performance Max is eating your search budget
Performance Max is not the problem. Performance Max with no guardrails, buying display banners and video views for a contractor who serves four counties, is. In the Robbins & Co account, two campaigns produced 2.6 million impressions in 39 days. One took 716 clicks in a single week and generated $5 of quoted work, while the search campaign that was producing quotes lost 43% of its available searches to a budget cap.
You are paying for your competitors' brand names
Every foundation repair market has four or five big names spending heavily on brand. If you are not blocking them, you are paying to appear for people who already decided to call somebody else. I found fourteen competitor brand names taking roughly $770 a month with not one lead to show for it. They had been blocked in one campaign, on exact match, so they never caught the real searches.
The account got smaller and made more money.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quoted work generated | $93,078 | $312,390 | up 236% |
| Quotable leads | 19 | 32 | up 68% |
| Cost per quotable lead | $836.68 | $552.01 | down 34% |
| Return in quoted work | 5.9x | 17.7x | 3x better |
| Impressions | 2,602,282 | 1,013,609 | down 61% |
| Ad spend | $15,896.84 | $17,664.46 | up 11% |
Impressions fell 61% and quoted work rose 236%. Those two facts in the same sentence are the whole case.
Robbins & Co report a close rate of about 18% and an average booked job of roughly $10,200. Against $312,390 of quoted work in six weeks, that points to somewhere near $56,000 in booked revenue on $17,664 of ad spend. The best single week came at the end of the period, at $331.30 per quotable lead.
Source: Google Ads API and WhatConverts call tracking, with quote values entered by the client's own sales team. Local Services Ads excluded from both windows, since it bills per lead on a separate model.
Measurement first. Budget second.
Fix what counts as a lead, before touching a budget
Phone taps and direction clicks come out of the bidding signal. Call tracking becomes the single source of truth, and your own team marks each lead quotable or not. From that point every number in every report means the same thing.
Cut the reach that never rings the phone
Performance Max gets reduced in stages rather than switched off in one move, so nothing trips a learning reset. The budget goes into the search campaigns that were capped.
Point every search at the page that answers it
Somebody searching for a french drain should not land on a page about wet basements. I rebuild ad groups around the services you actually sell and repoint the landing pages to match.
Block the traffic that was never going to buy
A competitor blocking list at phrase match, plus negatives for the wrong trades, out of area searches and people shopping for materials rather than a contractor.
One thing I do not do is rebuild your account from scratch. Three agencies had already done that to the Robbins & Co account. The structure was mostly sound. What it needed was honest measurement and the money pointed at the half that was working.
$0 today. Ten quotable jobs in 30 days, or you pay nothing.
What I do
Five things, in this order:
- 1. Audit the tracking and fix what counts as a lead.
- 2. Cut the reach that never rings the phone, in stages.
- 3. Move the budget into the searches that produce quotes.
- 4. Rebuild ad groups by service and repoint the landing pages.
- 5. Send you a short video every Monday showing what changed and why.
What you pay
A flat fee, never a percent of spend:
- Day 0: $0. You give me access. I start working.
- Day 30: I deliver 10 or more quotable jobs, or you pay nothing and keep everything I built.
- If I hit it: a flat monthly fee tiered by your ad spend. $1,000 from $5K to $10K, $1,500 from $10K to $25K, $2,000 from $25K to $50K, custom above that.
Total if I miss: $0. If I deliver, it is month to month after a 60 day minimum.
What counts as quotable
Agreed in writing before we start:
- ·Inside your service area, not three counties over.
- ·The trade you actually sell. Foundation, waterproofing, drainage, crawl space.
- ·A real person with contact details that work.
- ·A problem you would send an inspector out to look at.
- ·Marked quotable by your team, not by me. I do not grade my own homework.
It's just me.
I have run Google Ads for US businesses since 2017. Home services, manufacturers, DTC brands, medical practices. The foundation repair numbers on this page came out of Robbins & Co Foundation Systems, an account I still run. What stuck with me there was not the revenue. It was that I got the result by cutting 61% of the impressions the account was paying for.
I am not an agency. There is no team page to scroll through. You work directly with me, every account, every week. I do not report on impressions, clicks or conversions, because none of those pay for a crew. I report on quotable jobs and the work they get quoted at. If a campaign is not producing those, I kill it. If a keyword is not producing those, I pause it. Every dollar your account spends has to justify itself.
If we are a fit, you will know on the call.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions.
Let's see if I can fill your quote pipeline.
Five questions, sixty seconds. If your account is one I can help, I will send you a written teardown of it inside 48 hours, free.
Step 1 of 6
Where do most of your foundation jobs come from right now?
Fewer leads. More of them real.
That is usually the trade a foundation repair business actually wants, because every junk lead costs somebody in the office fifteen minutes.