What $11,100 in Google Ads did for one concrete contractor

In June 2025 a concrete contractor hired me after two marketing agencies had taken more than $15,000 from him. By the end of September his Google Ads had cost $11,100 and brought him 42 leads. His sales for the year went from about $550,000 to about $850,000.

I am not going to tell you every one of those dollars came from the ads. His crew did the work, and some of it would have come his way anyway. But before June the phone was quiet, and by August it was not. Here is what we changed, in the order we changed it, including the six weeks when it did not work.

What he had already paid for

The first agency charged $5,500 for a website. Half the pages looked the same, with one driveway photo doing duty on the steps page, the patio page and the deck page. On a phone the site took about 20 seconds to load. Almost nobody waited.

The second agency charged $5,000 a month to fix the website and run Google Ads. Two months in, the contact form still did not work and the site had not changed. Their reports showed about 70 phone calls a month from the ads. He knew that was not true, because he was not getting 70 calls. Their tracking was counting bot clicks and accidental taps as calls.

So the problem was not "we need better ads." It was that nothing behind the ads worked. Fixing the ads first would have sent paid traffic into a site that lost it.

What I changed, in order

1. Rebuilt the website by hand

   I threw out the page-builder site and wrote a new one from scratch. No bloated plugins, nothing loading that the page did not need. It went from about 20 seconds to under 3 on a phone. The stock photos became photos of his own jobs. And the form sent, which I tested myself.

2. One page for each kind of work

   Stamped concrete patios, driveways, decorative concrete and steps each got their own page, with his work on it and the form at the top where a thumb lands. Someone searching for a stamped patio got a page about stamped patios, not a homepage about everything.

3. Tracking that counted real leads

   Every form and every call was counted and tied back to the search that produced it. That is the only way to know which keywords bring customers and which bring clicks.

4. Ads built around the work, not the trade

   A campaign for stamped patios, a campaign for driveways, and so on. Phrase and exact match only. A list of words we did not want to pay for, written on day one. Each ad sent people to its own page.

The six weeks it did not work

This is the part most case studies leave out. The website went live cleanly. The ads did not find their feet for about a month and a half. We paid for keywords that looked right and did not convert. Some pages got plenty of visits and very few forms.

His season is short. If the leads were not coming by August, the year was gone. Two changes turned it.

The form moved to the top of every page. It had been at the bottom. People on a phone who are ready to call do not scroll to find out how. The conversion rate jumped the day it moved.

The budget moved to stamped concrete. The data said stamped patio searches turned into leads at about three times the rate of general "concrete contractor" searches. We put most of the money there, even though it meant pausing campaigns that felt important. I had assumed driveways would be the winner because they were his most common job. The numbers said otherwise, and the numbers were right.

The numbers

This post first went up in October 2025 with the season's ad figures. I updated it in October 2026, once his year's sales were in.

About $264 a lead is more than the industry average. The 2025 benchmark for construction and contractor search ads was $165.67 a lead, and I have put the whole table in what contractor advertising costs. I would rather tell you that than pretend. His budget was small, and a stamped patio is worth thousands of dollars. The leads paid for themselves many times over, which is the only test that matters.

What I would tell any contractor from this

Fix the website before you buy traffic. Ads pointed at a slow site with a broken form are money set on fire, and no agency can optimize its way out of that.

Put the form where the thumb is. The top of the page, on every page, with as few fields as you can stand.

Follow the data, not the gut. You know your trade. The search data knows what homeowners type and what they do next. When they disagree, the data wins.

Give it six weeks, and watch it every day. Plenty of contractors quit on Google Ads in the first month or two, which is right about when it started working for him. The trick is not patience. It is changing something every day until the numbers move.

Check the reports against reality. Seventy calls on a dashboard and seven on your phone means the dashboard is wrong.

I now run the same kind of system at my own concrete company, with my own money, and its numbers are public too: 264 leads and $425,962 in signed work from its first day through September 30, and the first pour 16 days after the first lead. They are on the concrete page, which the box below goes to.