Results
Plumbing: Cutting Wasted Spend Took Conversion Rate From 16% to 24%
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We didn't rewrite the ads or rebuild the landing pages. We stopped paying for clicks that were never going to convert, and the conversion rate went from 16% to 24%. That's the least glamorous kind of improvement and frequently the largest one available, because a conversion rate is a ratio — removing the traffic that was never going to convert raises it without touching the traffic that was.
Roughly a quarter of the media budget was going to clicks that could not become customers. Not because the ads were bad. Because of settings and search terms nobody had audited.
Then the client increased the budget from $22,000 to $25,000 a month, which is worth stating plainly rather than leaving out. It is tempting to present this as a pure efficiency story — same money, better results — and that isn't what happened. The waste came out first; the budget went up afterwards, because the account had become worth funding.
The situation
| At the start | |
|---|---|
| Monthly ad spend | $22,000 |
| Conversion rate | 16% |
| Share of spend not producing leads | ~24% |
A 16% conversion rate is not a broken account. It's a reasonable, functioning one — which is the useful part of this example. The waste wasn't visible in the headline numbers, and nobody looking at a 16% conversion rate would have assumed a quarter of the budget was dead.
What we found
- Search terms that were never going to convert — job seekers, DIY research, parts and manuals, warranty questions, competitor names
- Location targeting on "presence or interest", buying clicks from outside the service area
- Search partners and display expansion running on search campaigns, blending much weaker traffic into the same reporting
- Conversion actions counting things that weren't leads, which teaches automated bidding to buy more of the wrong traffic
- Ad schedule running when nobody could answer
The conversion-action one compounds. If a misdial or a page view is counted as a conversion, the bidding algorithm doesn't just misreport — it actively optimises toward finding more of it. Fixing the definition changes what the platform buys from that day forward.
What we did
About 24% of the budget — roughly $5,280 a month — was buying clicks that were never going to become customers. That's the figure worth remembering, and it's the reason the conversion rate moved without anything being added.
What happened
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversion rate | 16% | 24% | +50% |
| Monthly spend | $22,000 | $25,000 | +14%, client's decision |
The clicks row is the honest one and it probably went down. Say so. A conversion rate improvement driven partly by buying fewer, better clicks is a real result — and presenting it without that context invites a reader to assume more leads arrived than actually did.
The spend row is the other honest one. Budget rose 14% across the same period. That doesn't explain a conversion rate improvement — spending more on the same traffic mix would, if anything, push a conversion rate down as you bid further into weaker inventory. But it does mean this is not the clean same-budget story it would be tidier to tell, and a reader is entitled to know.
You can do most of this yourself
Genuinely. This is the case study we'd point a DIY reader at, because the highest-value part of it is an afternoon's work in your own account:
- Pull the search terms report for the last 90 days and actually read it. Negate the obvious categories in bulk
- Change location targeting to "presence" only
- Check what's marked as a primary conversion action — only real leads should be
- Set a call duration threshold so misdials stop counting
- Segment by network and see what search partners and display are actually producing
The full checklist is here, free, no email required.
We'd rather you did that and didn't need us than pay a retainer for six months to have someone do the same thing slowly.
What we'd do differently
Negative keyword work is not a project, it's a habit. A list built once decays, because search behaviour generates new irrelevant queries continuously. If there's one thing worth doing differently in most accounts, it's making that monthly rather than annual.
Is your situation similar?
This fits an account that's been running for a while without a proper audit — inherited from a previous agency, set up years ago, or built on defaults nobody revisited.
It's not the right reference if you're starting from zero, or if your problem is lead volume rather than lead quality. And if leads currently wait hours for a callback, fix that first — it's cheaper than anything on this page and it improves every channel at once.
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Written by Jared DeValk, founder of Nashville Digital. Published with the client's permission. Last reviewed September 2026.