Meridian Mechanical
Rebuilding a mechanical contractor's lead engine around the phone call, not the form
A 90-person commercial mechanical contractor was spending real money on search and measuring none of it. We rebuilt the account architecture, fixed the conversion plumbing, and pointed the budget at the work they actually wanted.
- Google Ads
- Local Services Ads
- Landing systems
- Call tracking
- Reporting
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Cost per qualified bid
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Booked revenue attributed
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Wasted spend eliminated
Metrics pending client approval.
The situation
Meridian ran commercial HVAC and plumbing service across three counties. They had been running Google Ads for four years through two different agencies. The account had 41 active campaigns, a single conversion action called “Contact,” and broad match keywords picking up residential window-unit queries at $18 a click.
Their operations manager could tell you exactly which technicians were profitable. Nobody could tell you which marketing dollar produced which job.
What we found
The problem was not the budget. It was that nothing in the account distinguished a $400 residential service call from a $240,000 retrofit bid. Both counted as one “Contact.” The algorithm optimized toward the cheap one, because that is what the algorithm was told to want.
Three specific failures:
- Conversion actions counted intent, not outcome. A form view fired the tag. So did a click on the phone number, whether or not the call connected.
- Campaign structure ignored the business. Residential and commercial shared budgets, so the higher-volume, lower-value side ate the spend.
- No offline conversion import. The CRM knew which leads became bids and which bids became jobs. Google never heard about it.
What we did
We rebuilt the account around the shape of the business rather than the shape of the keyword list. Separate campaign structures for emergency service, planned maintenance contracts, and capital project bids — each with its own budget, its own landing surface, and its own definition of success.
Then the unglamorous half: server-side tagging, call tracking with dynamic number insertion that preserved NAP consistency for local search, and a nightly offline conversion import pushing closed-won values from their CRM back into Google Ads.
The part worth stealing
We turned off a third of the account in week one and did not replace it. The instinct in this industry is to add — more campaigns, more keywords, more creative. Most underperforming accounts are suffering from surplus, not scarcity. Subtraction is faster, cheaper, and nobody sells it because nobody can bill for it.
The first month’s report was mostly a list of things we had stopped doing. That is a hard report to send and the right one.