See a Sample Report (PDF)Strategy & Advisory
A senior strategist looking at the whole business, not just one campaign.
Service
Search, Performance Max, remarketing and landing pages, managed by people who have run Long Island accounts for fifteen years.
Return on blended media
11x$1.11M signed against under $100,000 of media, most recent full yearCost per booked appointment
$450The number the account is managed to. Hard ceiling $900Booked revenue
$1.89M26 signed jobs over two years, reconciled against the client’s booksAverage signed job
$79,000Which is why cost per lead is the wrong number to manage toWhat is paid ad management?
Paid ad management is running your Google and Bing search advertising as a system rather than a set of keywords: campaign structure, bidding, negative keywords, landing pages and conversion tracking, all built backward from a booked job. We track calls, forms and the revenue behind them, then feed that back into bidding so Google learns what a real customer looks like in your business.
The economics
On a book where the average signed 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.
Source: Good Guys Contracting, published at /case-studies/good-guys/. Signed-job revenue is reconciled line by line against the client’s own sales records, with cancelled work removed rather than left in to flatter the total. These three figures are not multiplied together: the appointment cost is the target the account is managed to, the job value is the client’s own average contract, and the return is measured across a full year. Chaining any two of them would produce a number nobody measured. Good Guys Contracting runs paid social and Google Ads together, and Google Ads was brought into scope after the fact. These are account figures across both channels, not search-only figures. Its paid social numbers are on /services/paid-social/, where they belong.
Source: Good Guys Contracting, published at /case-studies/good-guys/. Signed-job revenue is reconciled line by line against the client’s own sales records, with cancelled work removed rather than left in to flatter the total. Good Guys Contracting runs paid social and Google Ads together, and Google Ads was brought into scope after the fact. These are account figures across both channels, not search-only figures. Its paid social numbers are on /services/paid-social/, where they belong.
The two rules we do not trade away
Neither of these is clever. Both of them are skipped constantly, and between them they have saved more money on this fleet than any bid strategy change.
Drawn, not captured, and not a client’s number. This is our own rule, applied the same way on every account we run. Search Partners stays off on every local clinic and local service campaign. No exceptions, no substitutes.
Drawn, not captured, and not a client’s number. This is our own rule, applied the same way on every account we run. Sixty seconds counts a lead in your reporting. A hundred and twenty is the bar to upload it to Google, because a bidding signal stays conservative.
What you actually see
Journey is our own portal. This is the page that answers whether the call pipeline itself is healthy, and it is as happy to tell you something is broken as it is to tell you it is fine.
Journey is our own client portal. Every client gets a login on day one, and every figure on it traces to their own records rather than to a platform dashboard. Captured from a live client view with the account name, the login email and the client’s own domain replaced before the screenshot was taken.
How we run it
Five things, in this order, on every search account we take over.
01 / 05
01
One definition of a qualified lead, applied everywhere. Inbound, answered, over sixty seconds, not a dialer burst.
Sixty seconds counts a lead. One hundred and twenty is the bar for upload
02
Search Partners stay off on local clinic and local service campaigns. The display network is opt-in, never a default.
This one rule has saved more money than any bid change
03
Emergency, research and brand are three different buyers with three different costs. They do not belong in one campaign.
04
Not borrowed from the website. One action, fast on a phone, with the tracking wired before launch.
05
Offline conversions from the CRM, so the platform learns which leads became jobs and bids toward those.
Where cost per booked job usually falls
What we watch
Neither carries a number we have not measured on a real account. The placeholders are placeholders on purpose.
The qualified call rule, as it is actually applied
INTERFACE| Direction | Duration | Status | Counts | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inbound | 2:14 | Answered | Yes | Qualified |
| Inbound | 0:06 | Completed | No | Rang out |
| Inbound | 1:41 | Answered | Yes | Qualified |
| Inbound | 0:00 | No answer | No | Missed |
| Outbound | 3:02 | Answered | No | Not a lead |
Where a lead is lost between the click and the job
Sample dataDIAGRAMEvery media should know for sure how much revenue they generate for Good Guys Contracting.David Ferraro, owner
That sentence is the brief. It is also the reason this account is managed to a cost per booked appointment rather than to a cost per lead, and the reason every signed job is checked against the owner’s own sales records before it counts.
Scope
Where the money goes wrong
If your conversion action counts a page view, a two-second ring-out and a real inquiry as the same event, the bidding algorithm will happily buy you more page views and more ring-outs. It is doing exactly what it was told.
So the first work on a paid account is almost never the ads. It is making the conversion signal mean something, then letting the bidding chase it.
Drawn, not captured. The structure is the claim: every ad platform stops counting at the click, so anything that happens after it is invisible unless something sends it back.
More services
A senior strategist looking at the whole business, not just one campaign.
Show up when Long Island customers search for what you do.
Own the map pack in the towns you actually serve.
Fast, conversion-focused sites that turn visitors into leads.
FAQ
Straight answers. If something is not here, ask us on the audit call.
Enough to generate the conversion volume the bidding needs to learn, which depends on your category and your geography. We will tell you the floor for your market on the audit call, and if your budget is below it we will say so rather than take it.
On local service and local clinic campaigns it buys traffic from sites that have nothing to do with the search, and it is invisible in the default reporting. We have seen it quietly consume a meaningful share of a budget. It stays off.
As a controlled scale test on a clean account with a real conversion signal, yes. As a default on a new account, no.
Only once the search account is clean and the conversion signal is real. PMax is very good at finding more of what you tell it is good. Tell it the wrong thing and it scales the wrong thing.
An inbound call over sixty seconds that a human answered, or a form with a real name and a real problem in it. Not a ring-out, not a robocall, not a click.
Yes, and we would prefer it. The history in that account is worth money, and starting fresh throws it away.
Let’s talk
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