Twenty-Nine Businesses

A quarter of organic work produced 56% more traffic, 33% more active users and 68% more page views.

Around 440 qualified leads a month, at a cost per lead that has fallen every year we have managed it. Eleven years of continuous management across some twenty state campaigns — and he still does business by phone and text rather than email, which after this long is its own kind of endorsement.

117 inquiries so far this year, and ten years of uninterrupted billing.

In early 2026 they moved the ad account to another agency. Five months later the owner asked us to audit it. We found a lot of mistakes — the account was spending significantly more and getting the same or worse results. He wrote: “Would love to get back to our previous spend (when you were in charge) as soon as possible without sacrificing quality.”

Ad spend down a third while lead quality rose for four consecutive periods — good-lead rate 15% to 27%, validated against two years of actual buyers.

They used to sell used ambulances. Over the years the business moved to remounting — taking a department's existing patient box and putting it on a new chassis — but the ad account was still built around the old inventory business, right down to a regional exclusion nobody could explain. We paused the entire old structure and rebuilt it around what they actually sell now, on the client's own read of the market: almost every remounter in the country is east of the Mississippi, so the West Coast is opportunity, not distance.

At an unchanged budget, cost per tracked conversion fell by about two thirds and has held there for three straight months. The account now buys half as many clicks as it did — and far better ones.

In October 2022 the client decided to try a different approach. They came back in April 2023, and we picked up where we left off.

A resale store has to win two audiences at once — people bringing clothes in and people buying them. Organic traffic to the pages aimed at sellers more than doubled in a month, and the store had more people than ever asking it to come collect items from their homes.

In mid-2022 they were busy enough with the leads they already had, so they asked to pause ad spend — and we paused management along with it rather than keep billing for an account that was standing still. Five months later we came back to them about platform changes the account needed. His reply: “Let's get you working on the changes. What do you need from me to start up again?” Same rate, no renegotiation.

On a small budget: cost per lead down about half year over year, so around 50% more leads for the same money. They're doubling the budget because the math finally works.

176 quote requests into the pipeline and 49 of them closed — plus the repeat business those customers have brought since, which is worth more than the original orders were.

One market's cost per booking fell 84% after a single negative-keyword pass. Moving the quote form onto their own site cut cost per conversion 17% and lifted conversions 24%.

153 tracked visits to the property in 30 days from the hyperlocal campaign, entirely from non-branded search, at roughly a third the cost per visit of the broader regional campaign.

It was an unbranded event space when we started advertising it. We suggested giving it a name and a Google Business Profile of its own so it would show up under wedding venues rather than under an adventure company — and once it had one, we built out the site, the tracking and the search presence behind it. It now runs the only campaign in the account that stays on through the winter, because couples book a venue months ahead.

Asked to cut spend without killing growth: budget down 44%, and the bookings that matter down only 27%. Started in one state, opened a second market with us.

Top-ten organic for “coffee catering” in both launch markets. We've since built the second brand's launch from the site up.

Thin margins, cold shipping and a small budget — a business where being wrong is expensive. The work that mattered most wasn't in the ad account: we found her analytics under-reporting real revenue by nearly 40% against what her store had actually recorded, and we told her to raise her prices to reach profitability. She has said this is the best marketing relationship she has had since her first day in business.

120 tracked calls against 76 the year before — on well under half the previous ad budget. We also cancelled a monthly tool they were effectively paying for twice.

Their quote form lived in a third-party iframe analytics couldn't see — months of leads invisible to the ad platform. We built a tracking bridge. After a landing-page change, cost per booking fell 50% in one market and 42% in the other.

Cost per sale down 43% year over year, on a budget held flat.

Purchases up 16.5% year over year at a falling cost per sale. Separately, ChatGPT is now their #4 purchase source — up 153% year over year, at zero ad cost, because we were measuring it.

The lead count looked fine; the leads did not. So we read a month of form submissions one at a time and traced each back to where the ad had actually run. Almost half the impressions were coming from two content-farm sites, and every lead carrying that fingerprint was junk. We also told them their monitoring software was blind to the real problem — its advice looked reasonable and was pointed at the wrong thing. High-ticket projects, a client-side marketing lead we share the reporting with, and one standing rule: we don't scale spend on numbers we don't trust.

Four to five commercial leads a week, winning two — which is tens of thousands of dollars of booked work every week. Around 90% of their leads say they found them through Google. One search produced the largest commercial job on their books that year.

A business that closes when the snow runs out, so the marketing has to breathe with it. Budgets ramp on scheduled dates ahead of each season rather than by hand, and the winter campaigns work two very different audiences at once — people in warm states planning a mountain trip, and locals within driving distance. The summer operation gets its own social campaigns. Along the way we contested two defamatory reviews and got one taken down, and caught that the phone number had gone missing from the site header — on a business that books by phone.

The rafting outfitter's owner, twenty-one months in: “I would love to also talk about you taking on our other business venture as well.” Separate business, separate account, same handshake.

Nearly doubled daily spend in a single week while holding cost per sale under their target. Got their advertiser certification approved in a restricted category along the way.

Their CRM used to label every lead “direct.” We engineered the true source through two layers of embedded forms so every ad-driven job says so — which is how a budget increase got approved, and took leads from 17 to 23 per two weeks.

Cost per sale down 58% at a 3.3x blended return, on about 65% less spend.

103 leads in a single month. Earlier, we found their form was re-firing on refreshes and over-reporting conversions by 75% — and deduplicated it, knowingly making our own numbers smaller.

18 of 19 attributed sales were people searching the company's own name — money spent winning customers they already had. We restructured to 10% brand, 90% new demand. Sales more than doubled year over year; return on ad spend went from 1.0x to 3.7x.

He came to us out of a bad agency experience — his words in the first email: “We had an agency 'running things' for us, and that was a tough lesson to learn.” We rebuilt the account with conservative, explained changes. Months later: “breaking records every month.”

Cost per lead down 45% on flat spend in the first two months, with leads up 83%. We also audited his website vendor and told him what he was actually paying for.

Three businesses under one owner, and not a dollar of ad spend yet — on purpose. We told her to create a Google Business Profile and now manage it, set up her analytics and conversion tracking, put heat mapping on the site and handed back a fix list, and advised her to cap what she spends on SEO and stay month to month rather than sign an agency agreement. We also went after her website builder over a charge she disputed. The ads go live when the foundation under them is right.