Results
Custom Builder: $8.79 Per Lead After Fixing Geography
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They were advertising across the entire United States and could only build in a handful of counties across three states. Most of the budget was buying clicks from people who could never become customers — not because the ads were bad, but because of a targeting setting nobody had revisited since launch.
Cost per lead for custom barndominium builds came down to $8.79.
The situation
| At the start | |
|---|---|
| What they build | Custom barndominiums |
| Where the ads were running | The entire United States |
| Monthly spend | $6,000 |
What we found
The audit finding was geography, and it was the whole account.
A national campaign for a business with a regional service area produces leads that look fine in the platform and are worthless on the phone. Someone in Oregon filling in a form about a barndominium is a conversion in Google Ads and a wasted call for the builder — and because the platform counts it as success, automated bidding keeps buying more of it.
About $1,800 a month — roughly 30% of a $6,000 budget — was buying clicks outside the service area. Close to a third of the media budget, going to people the business could not legally or practically build for.
Two settings do this, and both are on by default:
- The targeted locations themselves — often set broadly at launch and never narrowed
- "Presence or interest" targeting, which includes people merely interested in a location rather than in it — the default, and wrong for almost every regional business
What we did
| Phase | What |
|---|---|
| Geographic targeting rebuilt | Narrowed to the counties actually served, presence-only |
Fixing targeting without fixing the conversion data leaves half the problem in place. The bidding algorithm had been trained on months of unqualified conversions; narrowing geography changes what it can buy, but the historical signal still points the wrong way.
What happened
A lead here means a website form submission or a website chat started by a real person — spam excluded, and nothing else counted. Stating that matters at this cost per lead: $8.79 is only meaningful once you know what was being bought for $8.79.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead | — | $8.79 |
| Leads per month | — | ~682, averaged |
| Spend outside the service area | ~$1,800/month (≈30%) | — |
| Monthly budget | $6,000 | $6,000 |
Note the likely shape: total lead volume may well have fallen while usable lead volume rose. A builder who previously fielded calls from four time zones will recognise the trade immediately, and presenting it as pure growth would be less believable, not more.
You can check this yourself in two minutes
Open Google Ads. Look at your campaign's location settings. Two things:
- Are the targeted locations the places you can actually serve? Not aspirationally — actually
- Is targeting set to "Presence" or to "Presence or interest"? The second is the default and it means you're paying for people who merely searched about your area
Then pull the geographic report and look at where clicks genuinely came from. It's frequently a surprise.
The full settings checklist is here — free, no email. If this is your problem, you don't need us to fix it.
Is your situation similar?
This fits any business with a defined service area running ads that were set up once and never audited — inherited from another agency, built at launch, or configured by someone following a template.
The niche detail doesn't matter. A custom builder in three states, a plumber in one county and a law firm in one metro all have the same failure available to them, and it's the most common one we find in an inherited account.
More on Google Ads · why service area is a strategic decision · what we charge
Written by Jared DeValk, founder of Nashville Digital. Published with the client's permission. Last reviewed September 2026.