A Clearwater electrical contractor: cost per lead down 62%, ten times the tracked leads

The starting point

The client is an owner-operated electrical contractor serving Clearwater and the surrounding Pinellas County area. When JERVO took over the Google Ads account in June 2026, it had nine active campaigns. Eight of them were small Performance Max campaigns split by service, each on ten to fifteen dollars a day, too little to learn anything. Search impression share sat at 17 percent, so the account was invisible on most of the searches it wanted.

The bigger problem was measurement. The conversion action tied to the phone number on the site was inactive, so the account was optimizing toward form fills while most real customers were calling. In the 101 days before the rebuild, Google Ads recorded 15 conversions at $345 each.

What changed

Tracking came first. Call tracking was rebuilt so every call from an ad is captured and pushed back into Google Ads as a conversion. You cannot scale what you cannot see, and until that was fixed every other decision was a guess.

Then the account was consolidated. The eight service-level Performance Max campaigns were replaced by one Performance Max campaign on a target cost per lead, with enough budget to learn. Non-brand search was rebuilt around Clearwater, and brand search was split into its own campaign so it stopped inflating the numbers. Microsoft Advertising was added alongside Google for cheaper incremental reach. Budget went up meaningfully, because a rebuilt account with working tracking earns the right to spend.

From there it was weekly work: search terms, negatives, budget pacing, and a bid strategy test on the search campaign to see whether a bigger share of Clearwater electrician searches pays.

The results

Comparing the first 101 days of the rebuild, June 1 to September 9, 2026, against the 101 days before it: tracked leads went from 15 to 150. Cost per lead fell from $345 to $132, down 62 percent. Search impression share rose from 17 percent to 31 percent. Click-through rate went from 0.52 percent to 2.26 percent. Spend went up about 3.8 times, and leads went up 10 times.

One honest note. Part of the jump is measurement. The old setup was not counting calls, so the 15 understates what the account was really producing. That is exactly why fixing tracking came first, and it is why the cost per lead number is the one to look at. It fell by more than half while spend nearly quadrupled.

What's next

Microsoft Advertising keeps running alongside Google, the search campaign is testing an impression share strategy, and Local Services Ads is on the table as the next channel once call volume justifies it.