The Only Number That Counts in This Category Is the Signed Contract.

The Problem

Good Guys Contracting installs siding and roofing on Long Island and holds James Hardie certification, which is a real credential in a category where the floor is very low.

Exterior home services is a high-consideration, high-ticket purchase bought a handful of times in a lifetime, which means most of the buyers have no idea what separates one quote from another until somebody tells them.

That same buying cycle is what makes the category hard to measure honestly. A homeowner researches for months, calls rather than fills out a form, gets quoted in a driveway, and signs weeks after that. Every advertising platform stops counting at the click, because the click is the last thing it can see.

On a book where the average job is seventy-nine thousand dollars, the distance between a cost per lead and a cost per signed contract is not a reporting preference. It is the entire basis for deciding what to spend next month.

Every media should know for sure how much revenue they generate for Good Guys Contracting.David Ferraro, owner

What We Changed

1. Build the search account around the credential

   Two campaigns, James Hardie branded search and general siding search, split eighty-twenty, across every zip code in Nassau, Suffolk and Brooklyn. An exterior-only contractor has no use for kitchen, bath or flooring traffic, so on this account the negative keyword list does as much work as the keyword list does.

2. Run paid social as a funnel, not a campaign

   Four layers working together: engagement to build the audience, prospecting to work it, then separate retargeting for the people who watched and the people who visited. The year delivered 1,771 leads at a blended forty-four dollars, a click-through rate near two per cent against a one per cent benchmark, and an eight per cent landing page conversion rate against a 5.2 per cent home improvement average.

3. Manage to cost per booked appointment

   Cost per lead is the easy number. The one that predicts revenue in this category is what it costs to put an estimator in a driveway, held at four hundred and fifty dollars with a hard ceiling at nine hundred, against a working ratio of roughly five leads to one appointment.

4. Watch the platform, not just the dashboard

   When Meta rolled out automatic audience expansion in October, cost per result improved while the leads quietly got worse, because the platform had started serving homeowners outside the service area. We found it in the lead detail rather than in the summary, reverted it, and performance returned to where it had been all year.

5. Reconcile every signed job against the client’s own books

   Each booked job carries a signed date and a confirmed contract value, checked line by line against the owner’s sales records, with canceled work removed rather than left in to flatter the total. That produces two years of sales history both sides can audit, and a return on ad spend nobody has to take on faith.

What Else Came Out of It

• Paid social budget raised from eight thousand to ten thousand a month on the client’s own initiative, because the return is one he can check himself.
• Cost per booked appointment replaced cost per lead as the number the account is managed to.
• Google Ads brought into scope at no increase in management fee.
• A James Hardie enhanced-warranty campaign built on the back of the client’s Elite Preferred Installer status, a credential most of the category cannot claim.