1,700+ leads at $4.74 each for a cleaning company, from $8,050 in ad spend

The situation

Cleaning is a crowded market on Google. Aggregators, directories and national franchises with deep pockets bid on the same searches, so clicks get expensive fast. The account had to do two things at once: keep the cost per click low enough to compete, and turn those clicks into real bookings at a rate that made the spend worthwhile.

Then there was scale. Most accounts start out efficient and get worse as the budget grows, because once the best searches are used up, Google starts pushing your money into weaker auctions. The goal was to keep growing without the cost per lead drifting up.

What I did

• Built the account around service-specific keywords that signal someone ready to book, not just someone researching.
• Kept aggressive negative keyword lists in place to strip out research traffic, job seekers and other clicks that would never turn into a booking.
• Structured the campaigns so the budget flowed to the highest-converting service types first.
• Wrote responsive search ads around what cleaning customers actually respond to: fast availability, clear pricing and reasons to trust the business.
• Sent traffic to a landing page built for one action only, capturing leads through phone calls and WhatsApp before people had time to go and compare quotes elsewhere.
• Tracked real booking enquiries as conversions, not page views or button clicks, so every optimisation decision was based on actual business results.

How I scaled it

Once the account was producing steady volume, I scaled it on purpose rather than just raising the budget. Bids went up on the keywords that were winning, budget moved toward the ad groups converting best, and anything underperforming was paused within days instead of being left to drain money.

What happened

Over the campaign period the account delivered 7,940 clicks and 65,400 impressions at an average cost of $1.01 per click. Total spend was $8,050, and it produced more than 1,700 conversions, which works out to about $4.74 per lead. Roughly one in five people who clicked went on to become a lead.

The number I'm proudest of is that the efficiency held as spend grew. The account kept its cost per lead under $5 across thousands of conversions, which turned Google Ads from a marketing experiment into a predictable lead source the business could plan around.

If you're in a similar spot

Scaling ads isn't just about spending more. It's about knowing exactly which searches, ads and pages produce your customers, and moving money toward them quickly. That only works if your tracking measures real enquiries. If it counts page views or button clicks, you're scaling on bad data.