Anonymized Case Study
The $28,000-a-Month Question
What a window and insulation company’s ads were really doing. A home improvement company in California’s Central Valley, anonymized by design, because the point is the pattern, not the client.
By Aaron Husak · Published July 8, 2026
Engagement: Google Ads, Local Services Ads, Meta ads, co-op program management, and the weekly discipline of tying marketing to sales
Where they started
This company was not under-spending. Ad spend peaked above $28,000 a month across Google, Local Services Ads, and Meta in the early months of the engagement, and on paper the account looked like it was earning it. The reporting showed strong conversion numbers.
The first weeks inside the account told a different story. Our ads lead put it plainly in his takeover notes: the more he dug, the more he found. The headline problems:
- The conversion values in Google Ads were inflating themselves. Values were being passed into the account automatically in a way that overstated performance, so every report built on them flattered the ads. The dashboard was not measuring the business. It was grading its own homework.
- The account was optimizing toward low-intent actions. Google spends your budget chasing whatever you tell it counts as a win. What counted as a win here included actions that were not qualified calls and were not real project inquiries. So the machine got very good at buying the wrong thing.
- The Meta budget fed a chatbot funnel nobody could measure. Ad traffic for a county-program promotion landed in a chat flow with no interaction tracking behind it. Money went in. Nobody could say what came out.
None of this was visible from the owner’s seat. That is the point. It never is.
What we did
Measurement first, spend second. Before touching budgets, we rebuilt what counted as a conversion: qualified phone calls and real project inquiries for the window and insulation lines, nothing else. We corrected the inflated values being passed automatically, and we told the client the honest consequence up front: the reported numbers would look worse for a while, because for the first time they would be real.
Then the spend had something true to optimize against. Campaigns were restructured around the higher-intent searches, budgets were pulled off what the cleaned data showed was not producing, and monthly spend came down from its peak above $28,000 to about $7,500 by March while inquiries for window and insulation projects kept arriving.
Two more pieces did quiet, unglamorous work:
- A weekly sales and marketing meeting with the client’s office, comparing booked sales against the same month the prior year, so ad decisions answered to revenue instead of to a dashboard.
- The manufacturer co-op program, actually managed. Most contractors leave co-op money on the table because the paperwork is nobody’s job. We ran the program and accrued roughly $60,000 in co-op funds against the client’s advertising.
The honest part
When we corrected the tracking, the conversion totals dropped. If your agency’s numbers only ever go up, ask what happens to them when someone tells the truth. Cleaning this account meant reporting worse-looking numbers to the client on purpose, because the inflated ones were steering tens of thousands of dollars a month toward junk. That conversation takes ten minutes and a spine, and it is the single most valuable thing that happened in this engagement.
The Takeaway
Big ad budgets do not fail loudly.
They fail politely, behind dashboards that say everything is fine. If you are spending five figures a month and cannot name, in one sentence, exactly what counts as a conversion in your account, assume the machine is buying something you would not pay for on purpose. This company’s ads did not need more money. They needed the truth wired in first.
Spending five figures a month and not sure what it buys?
Figures from the company’s own ad account records, spend invoices, tracking-change documentation, and co-op accrual records, November 2025 through April 2026, rounded. Company anonymized by design.