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Water Treatment: $416 of Advertising Per System Sold, From a Standing Start
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They were running no advertising at all. Eight months later: 40 leads a month at $125 each, closing at 30%, for $416 of advertising per system sold. One campaign, built around whole-house water treatment systems specifically rather than around the company and everything it does. That narrowness is the reason it worked, and it's the opposite of how most service businesses set up paid search.
The $416 is the number that matters and it's the one almost nobody publishes. Cost per lead is an intermediate figure — it tells you what the advertising bought, not what the business got. Twelve leads at $125 is $1,500 spent to sell roughly four systems. That arithmetic is either comfortable or ruinous depending entirely on what a system is worth, which is why the ticket is the one figure still missing from this page.
Launched January 2026. Charlotte, North Carolina.
The company-versus-job problem
Most home services accounts advertise the business: one campaign, the company name, a spread of services, and ad copy general enough to cover all of them.
That produces ads that compete against everyone and speak to nobody. Someone searching for a whole-house filtration system doesn't want a plumbing company — they want that system, installed, with a price and an idea of what it involves.
| Broad campaign | Single service line | |
|---|---|---|
| Keywords | Everything the business does | One buying decision |
| Ad copy | Generic enough to cover all of it | Written for one specific search |
| Landing page | Homepage or a services list | The page about that exact thing |
| Bidding data | Blended across services that behave differently | Clean signal for one job type |
The last row does more work than people expect. Automated bidding blended across a $180 drain call and a $6,000 filtration system is optimising against an average that describes neither.
The situation
| At the start | |
|---|---|
| What they do | Water treatment systems |
| Service area | Charlotte, North Carolina |
| Marketing already running | None — no paid advertising of any kind |
| Launch | January 2026 |
| Budget | ≈$5,000/month |
Starting from zero is a different exercise from optimising an account, and it's worth saying which one a case study is. There was no baseline to beat here and no conversion history for the bidding to learn from, which is why the first weeks cost more per lead than the steady state did.
What we found
Why search was right here: whole-house water treatment is something people actively research. A homeowner with hard water, staining, taste problems or a failed test goes looking — which means the demand exists and needs capturing rather than creating.
That's the test we apply before choosing a channel: would a customer type this into Google in the next month? For this, yes.
What we did
The negative keyword list is likely the unglamorous hero here. Water treatment searches sit next to an enormous volume of adjacent, worthless queries — replacement filters, DIY testing, bottled water delivery, softener salt. Without aggressive negatives a campaign like this bleeds budget into people who will never buy a system.
What happened
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Cost per lead | $125 |
| Leads per month | 40 |
| Monthly spend | ≈$5,000 |
| Close rate | 30% |
| Cost per system sold | $416 |
Every row above closes against every other one, which is the point of printing them together: $5,000 ÷ 40 = $125, and $125 ÷ 30% = $416. A reader can check the arithmetic without taking anything on trust, and if one figure were wrong the others would give it away.
Whether $416 is a good number depends entirely on what a system is worth. It's excellent against a $6,000 installation and marginal against a $1,500 one. We'd rather you ran that arithmetic against your own ticket than take the word "profitable" from us.
Is your situation similar?
This fits a business with a high-ticket service line that people actively search for, and enough budget to fund a focused campaign properly.
The transferable idea isn't water treatment — it's narrowness. If you sell six things, six focused campaigns will almost always outperform one campaign about your company, provided the budget can support them. If it can't, run one service line properly rather than all six thinly. Same logic as choosing a channel.
It's the wrong approach for a service nobody searches for — that needs demand creation, not capture.
More on Google Ads and home services marketing · what we charge
Written by Jared DeValk, founder of Nashville Digital. Published with the client's permission. Last reviewed September 2026.