Commercial Appliance Repair · Google Ads / PPC Performance

The Challenge

Spend was high, cost per lead kept climbing, and most of the calls were homeowners looking for a fridge fix, not the commercial accounts the business actually wanted. Every wrong call cost money and tied up staff who should have been quoting restaurants and facilities. The owner was ready to quit Google Ads entirely.

We audited the account, and it was clear where the budget was going. A handful of structural problems were bleeding it dry:

• Broad match keywords with almost no negative keyword list
• Residential and commercial intent mixed together in one campaign
• No conversion tracking on phone calls, so bidding was flying blind
• Ads pointed to the homepage instead of a commercial page
• Roughly half the budget was buying clicks from the wrong customers

The negative keyword list that stopped the bleeding

Most of the wasted spend came from one thing: broad match with no negatives, so the account paid for every homeowner searching to fix a fridge at home. We built a deep negative keyword list and kept adding to it every week.

• Block residential intent: terms like home, apartment and DIY were added as negatives so homeowner searches stopped triggering the ads.
• Tighter match types: we moved off loose broad match so the account only bid on genuinely commercial queries.
• Weekly search-term review: we reviewed actual queries for new mismatches and useful commercial language, adding negatives carefully so relevant long-tail searches stayed eligible.
• Budget goes to the right buyers: with the wrong clicks filtered out, the same budget reached far more restaurants and facilities, which is how wasted spend fell 60%.

Conversion tracking so bidding stops guessing

Most of these leads come in as phone calls, and the account was not tracking a single one. We set up call and form tracking through CallRail and Google Tag Manager so Google could finally bid toward real qualified leads.

• Call tracking: CallRail added source data to covered calls, while lead dispositions separated qualified commercial requests from residential, vendor, spam, and other calls.
• Form tracking: form submissions fire as conversions too, giving a complete picture of what each dollar produced.
• Smarter bidding: with real conversions feeding the account, the bidding strategy could optimize toward qualified leads instead of raw clicks.
• Clear attribution: the owner could finally see cost per qualified lead by campaign, so decisions were based on data, not gut feel.