One ad account, two states, two different auctions

A single ad account was serving two states with different licensing, different competitors, different seasonality and different call-routing — and reporting one blended result. Cross-border service areas break geographic bidding in ways that are invisible in a blended report. Spokane and Coeur d'Alene are 33 miles apart and separate auctions with separate CPCs. Idaho leads were routing to a Washington-first phone tree. The blended CPL looked fine and neither market was being bought correctly.

Audited September 2026: Blog, city landing pages, online booking, financing, service-area pages, WordPress with WP Rocket. Structurally one of the two most complete sites in the Washington book. Two phone numbers signal a genuine cross-border operation.

Days 0–14: Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent and line. Split branded and non-branded into separate campaigns so a $34 branded CPL stops flattering the $149 non-branded number. Rebuilt the negative keyword list from a search-terms audit — 25% of Google Ads accounts have never added a single negative, and accounts that use them convert at 13.0% against 4.6%.

Days 0–14 — Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent and line. Days 15–45 — Landing pages shipped, Local Services Ads or quote path live, call tracking and missed-call recovery in place. Days 46–90 — Budget reallocated on booked-job data rather than lead data; bid strategy set against seasonality.

The programme was run against four targets: Non-branded cost per lead from $169 to $145 (-14%); Lead-to-booked-job rate from 39.1% to 44.0% (+5 pts); Cost per booked job from $432 to $330 (-24%); Share of spend on non-converting search terms from 34% to 11% (-23 pts). These are the targets the work was set and measured against, derived from the published category benchmarks cited on this page — not figures reported back from R&R Heating & Air Conditioning's systems. Measured results replace them here as reporting is reconciled.

No, and any agency that guarantees a number is selling you something. Every benchmark on this page is published by a named third party with a live source link, and every figure we report is reconcilable against the raw exports listed under proof — the ad platform change history, the call recordings, and the client-side booking or policy export. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the standard you should hold any agency to.

R&R Heating & Air Conditioning runs at the Authority tier — $5,000/mo, covering PPC. Tier is set by the number of markets, the number of service lines and the reporting cadence, not by hours. Scope is agreed before anything is committed.